We all know the mantra: without content quotas, and similar regulations designed to protect Canada’s “cultural sovereignty,” Canada would be swamped with foreign cultural products. Regulations are required to make “space” for Canadian content, to ensure Canadians can “tell ourselves our own stories.”
It all sounds terribly persuasive, if you don’t stop to unpack all the assumptions hidden inside: among others, that it is possible to define with any coherence what is “Canadian” and what is “foreign” content; that American culture is imposed upon Canadians, rather than something they freely choose; that there exist great differences between the two countries, that watching American TV will erode these, that there would be terrible consequences if it did, and that there is some public purpose in preventing it.
But in fact none of it is true. For all the seeming objectivity of the CRTC’s complex formulae for determining if a program is Canadian, they are based on a series of arbitrary judgments and valuations: how many of which sorts of creative personnel are Canadian, what proportion of production costs are incurred in Canada, and so on. Even as simple a matter as the rule that the producer must be Canadian is fraught with difficulty. Canadian based on residence, citizenship, or both? Suppose a corporation is involved. Is the nationality of the owners what counts? Or the location of the head office? What if that corporation is a subsidiary of another corporation? If it sounds like I’m splitting hairs, recall that it was exactly this process that resulted in Universal Studios being classed as a Canadian corporation because it was owned by (New York-based) Seagram, and because Seagram was controlled by the Bronfman family.
Even if we could find our way through any of this, we come up against the reality that much of what counts as CanCon amounts to repackaging foreign programs (Canadian Idol) or commenting on foreign celebrities (all those interchangeable entertainment “news” programs) or performing in a foreign idiom (Country Music Television, for example). Or else it is produced for export to the U.S.—Flashpoint, Stargate SG-1, it’s a long list—and consciously tailored to erase any distinctly “Canadian” features. How does this count as “telling ourselves our own stories”? For that matter, much of the “foreign” programming from which we are to be protected is produced, written or acted by Canadians working abroad. Aren’t they telling Canadian stories?
It is true that they have left Canada to work in New York, or Hollywood, and perhaps that’s a shame. But it’s just as true of artists from Alabama, or Nebraska. Are the people who live in these states not just as “swamped” as Canada? Indeed, the cultural differences within each country are at least as great as those between them. Research by the Pew Center, for example, has found broad agreement on social values between English Canadians and people in much of the United States. The really sharp dissents from that continental consensus are to be found in the two outliers: Quebec and the South.
Suppose, over time, those differences were to fade. Would that be a tragedy? The point of protecting Canadians (as opposed to Canadian television producers) from being flooded with imported programming is presumably that such programming, being alien to our way of life, cannot speak to us with the same resonance. But were our differences to disappear, that objection would surely disappear with it. Assimilation is in this regard its own defence.
If that sounds harsh, consider that this is what happens all the time—as immigrants bring change, and are changed by the receiving population; as new generations replace the old; with each technological revolution. Or consider a more fundamental paradox: a big part of the Canadian identity we are supposed to protect from the influx of American television was and is formed by . . . American television. That’s who we are—the people who watch another people’s television.
Cultures are not hermetically sealed boxes, or frozen in time: they are perpetually heaving seas, mongrel mixes, combining and commingling with promiscuous disregard for political projects like nationalism. Canadian TV producers who adopt the language of economics, talking of the necessity of protectionism because of the smallness of our market, overlook one thing: what is “our” market? Canada? Or, as our burgeoning export trade suggests, the world?
Or suppose we accept their point: that national markets, and national differences, are what count. Does that not still undercut their complaint—that American producers, by virtue of the economies of scale they enjoy, enjoy a prohibitive price advantage? For it is only useful to compare the prices of things that are essentially interchangeable, substitutes for one another. And the whole premise of the exercise is that Canadian and American programs are not substitutes, but profoundly different—apples and oranges, culturally speaking.
To put the matter another way: some forms of cultural expression, like news, are specific, of interest only to the people in a particular place and time—and as such have no foreign competition. Others, like art or drama, speak to the universal, to people in all places and times—and as such are at no disadvantage to their foreign competitors. In neither case is protection necessary.
CanCon, in short, never had much point to it. For a long while, it was something the broadcasters could put up with, even if it meant the rest of us had to suffer through The Trouble With Tracy and similar outrages. But now it is a cost they cannot bear. It is time this show was cancelled.
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