CBC chief stands up to U.S. cultural swamping
All hail CBC president and CEO Catherine Tait for fearlessly standing up for Canada at a parlous time when the American elephant thrashes and trumpets at the rest of the world. Go stomp on someone else was her message, and we should be proud.
Tait, who has spent her life in the Canadian broadcasting industry, had the nerve, the sheer audacity, to say out loud at an Ottawa television conference on Thursday that American cultural imperialism should not overwhelm us.
She singled out Netflix, a U.S. company telling American stories — some magnificent and some pure slurp — while saying that Canadians need to see their own drama, too. For that is Tait’s mandate: “to continue to offer Canadians a broad spectrum of high-quality programming that informs, enlightens and entertains, and that is created by, for and about Canadians.”
Stéphane Cardin, Netflix’s director of public policy for Canada, was on the panel and said Netflix spent hundreds of millions of dollars on production in Canada, missing Tait’s point that they’re spent on American stories while Canadian ones are almost invisible. Americans have long used Canada as a faux American backdrop to save money.
For Americans, it’s always about the money. But it isn’t for us. It’s more than that.
Critics, invariably male, jumped on Tait’s remarks, irate that the glorious Netflix avalanche they worship was even being compared to made-on-the-cheap CBC dramas.
These critics, admittedly mostly on Twitter, land of professional offence-takers, worried that Tait might have offended Netflix. How timid have we become?
Tait said the Americanization of our culture is as colonialist in its way as were the British in India or the French in African colonies. She’s right. And critics attacked her for that, too, not realizing that they were proving the case against themselves by taking the American approach: loudly condemning someone for extrapolations made only by themselves.
Tait did not call Netflix CEO Reed Hastings a viceroy. Nor did she say that Netflix had subjected hundreds of millions of Canadians to a monthly Amritsar massacre of new content, or even forcing them to speak archaic Victorian English. Nor has Netflix redrawn borders and split the nation between fans of The Ballad of Buster Scruggs versus Orange is the New Black. (The true winner, of course, is Roma. Are we clear on that?)
She merely objected to Canadians always seeing themselves through American eyes.
Well, here’s what the American gaze is like. Abi Curtis has written about the 19th-century astronomer Percival Lowell who announced his discovery of water canals on Mars. As it turned out, his telescope apparatus was actually reflecting his own eyeball, the canals of Mars being the network of blood vessels in Lowell’s own personal eye.
Americans think they’re seeing the world, but instead, they’re looking at themselves. They don’t do foreign well. Generally passportless, they laugh at foreigners’ funny ways, abhor hearing other languages on their own soil and refuse to learn even the basics when they visit another country.
This is the American way. Tait should have no truck with it. Indigenous programmers don’t want to present the world through white settler eyes. Like CanLit, Indian literature is only now speaking to the world in its own voice after centuries of a British Empire demotic. Translation is expanding. The Canadian authorial voice is of interest to itself and the planet.
We’re not good at defending ourselves. The Art Gallery of Ontario has an American director with an embarrassingly poor resumé, as does the Royal Ontario Museum. Amazon’s rules block the promotion of Canadian books on its platform, dealing a huge blow to Canadian writers whose sales had been relatively good.
Whenever I see a Canadian drama, even for a moment, I recognize the pavements, the architecture, even the cast of light. I know the accents, the attitude, the mode of dress. This is us.
I tire of The National leading with American news, of CBC.ca running American clickbait, of newspapers using New York Times filler.
Inevitably, Americans will swarm us one day, probably for our water. In the meantime, tell me about Canada as seen through Canadian eyes. Thank you, Catherine Tait.