Reborn Canada needs to reclaim its soft power
Congratulations, you have a bouncing baby country! All nations had a beginning, and the story of how they have presented themselves to the world throughout their history is a thick complex thing.
The U.S. uses hard power, building military bases worldwide and bombing other countries almost out of instinct now, unable to question the failure of bombing as a military tactic. Its soft power is popular culture, a slurry of cartoonish violence and sentiment but still a considerable global force.
Britain’s soft power is as extraordinary as its hard power has become minor since the death of Empire. It has massive worldwide cultural influence in literature, music, comedy and design, its confident voice not flagging even after postwar world-rescuing exhaustion.
I say this now that two paintings by Quebec artist Alfred Pellan, commissioned in 1944, have been re-hung in the Global Affairs building lobby in Ottawa after the Conservatives put them aside in 2011 for a huge blow-up photo of the Queen.
What kind of country casts shade on its own? A shy self-loathing one that fails to fund, display and encourage artists, hacks at the CBC budget to the point of destruction and elected Stephen Harper who resented what he thought of as a literate elite, among other cultural criminals. We don’t have a national portrait gallery, although a perfect building sits empty in Ottawa, or even a museum of Toronto history, although Old City Hall would be just right.
I’m watching The Romeo Section, a delicate new CBC spy drama by the great Chris Haddock who created Intelligence, the ultimate Canadian TV drama. Thanks to Haddock, I know Vancouver better than I know Toronto. I can spot from a camera angle, an accent and a sardonic look that it’s filmed in Vancouver. This drama shows its landscape, waters, mountains, crappy little cafés, campuses, city clothes and ratty intersections.
How did the drive for Canadian culture and self-knowledge fade so rapidly? It wasn’t that Harper preferred American culture or Britain’s 1950s-in-aspic, it’s that he had no sense of place at all. Why did he worship our military power, so risible and unaffordable, when peacemaking was part of our best nature?
The Economist recently explained Britain’s “happy relationship with its past” and its massively successful entertainment tropes and traditions — the country house, class war, boarding school, bookishness, music hall and seaside pier comedy, as journalist Dominic Sandbrook has described them. The Brits are still confident in themselves. The Americans — thank you for rock ‘n’ roll by the way — aren’t hugely happy about Disney-fying, McDonalding and Transformering the world but, hey, it sells.
I hated the damp sponge the Harper years put on culture, even to the minor point of defunding novelists’ readings overseas or shoving “royal” back into military labels. Canada is not a nation that rewards interesting people, so when they pop up again, I’ll be elated. I want Canadian film and TV restored, cultural nationalism repaired and I want the juicy bits of living in this huge county celebrated.
“Britain’s cultural success illuminates an alternative to being a bigger Netherlands, a richer Turkey, a colder Singapore,” writes the Economist. Canada’s lack of cultural success shows our need to be more than a colder Australia or a busier Iceland. I want Canada to snap back into place post-Harper and be its authentic self, which is urban and sardonic.
Take Tuesday’s Scotiabank Giller Prize, which failed to shortlist Confidence, by Russell Smith, a short story collection of sexual suffering at a Ruth Rendell level of weird. The current shortlist is admirable but if you need an example of how faded and timid is the CanLit world, I offer Giller judges’ descriptions of the five shortlisted works.
“Perceptive prose interspersed with playful poetry.” “Just like life: a tender, sometimes terrifying, mystery unfolding before our eyes.” “A bittersweet story of personal confrontations such as asking do I always want what others — even my mother — want for me.”
I don’t know who wrote this — have the courage to put your hand up — but I do judge the judge, who was clearly shaking the last drops of maple syrup out of the jug.
It’s the prose equivalent of a photo of the Queen or eventually her dull son and his shaggy wife, it’s room temperature wine instead of the icewine we do so well, it’s bad words, it’s boring. I want Canada to be better than this. I want sharpness and courage in the arts, I want boldness, I want my actual Canada back.