Why I believe in Canadian content

Canadian content rules produce the occasional puzzling anomaly – Why is Handmaid’s Tale, a TV series shot in Canada and based on a celebrated Canadian novel, not considered Canadian content?George Kraychyk/Courtesy of manufacturer

Canada’s broadcast regulator faces a daunting to-do list these days. In April, the federal government passed its Online Streaming Act, updating the Broadcasting Act so that it applies to foreign streaming services, and in June it handed the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission its specific instructions. The CRTC is to support Canadian creators, Indigenous voices and equity-seeking groups as well as independent, local and community media, while also implementing discoverability requirements for Canadian programming and creating an equitable, adaptable and flexible regulatory environment. Most tricky of all, however, is the requirement to redefine Canadian programs.

In the past, Canadian content has been defined as content that is made by Canadian creators, namely actors, writers, directors and producers. The difficulty is that producers usually retain the copyright on their projects and the foreign streamers will want to control that themselves.

The CRTC may let the streamers keep the IP but also consider adding points for identifiably Canadian themes or locations, to discourage them from creating the kind of pan-national content that used to be known as Euro pudding. This will take us into difficult territory. Unlike the British system, which not only measures creators’ citizenship but also awards points for identifiably British characters and demonstrations of British creativity, heritage or diversity, Canada has always avoided any editorial requirements. It’s a system that produces the occasional puzzling anomaly – Why is Handmaid’s Tale, a TV series shot in Canada and based on a celebrated Canadian novel, not considered Canadian content, while Paw Patrol: The Movie is? – but avoids having bureaucrats vet scripts.

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So, expect “redefining Canadian programs” to trigger some lively debate. What you are unlikely to hear, however, is much discussion of why we need Canadian content in the first place. While conservative commentators often mock Canadian content regulation, supporters seem to take its necessity as given, and seldom offer much philosophical underpinning for the rules beyond that tired saw: telling Canadian stories to Canadians. And so, to celebrate the Online Streaming Act on Canada Day, here is an explanation of how I came to believe that Canadian content matters.

They say the theatre is a three-legged stool; a play is a collaboration between a writer, a director and an actor. When a theatre stages a new script, the playwright will sit in on rehearsals, explaining the text to the cast or rewriting it as needed. If your writer is Anton Chekhov or Neil Simon, a dramaturge may fill that role, but if you want a living theatre, at some point you are going to need a living writer in the rehearsal hall.

That was a conclusion I reached early in my career, when I served as the Globe’s theatre critic in the late 1990s and early 2000s. In those years, the largest theatres on my beat produced few or no Canadian plays. The Stratford Festival did not stage the work of living playwrights; Canadian Stage in Toronto mainly relied on hits from Broadway and London’s West End, and the commercial producers of the so-called mega musicals made perfect replicas of boffo foreign productions.

While I appreciated the performance of the classics or enjoyed a well-staged Broadway musical, I smelt cultural stagnation on that theatre scene. To feel you were in the presence of total creation rather than mere performance, you had to go to the independent sector, to the established players like the Tarragon Theatre and Theatre Passe Muraille, or the newcomers always popping up in smaller spaces.

I began to be identified as a champion of Canadian theatre, but not because I was delighted by a play that would expose Sir John A. MacDonald as a master manipulator or explain the Italian immigrant experience in Montreal. It was because I was looking for a theatre that lived. I did not need canoes and beavers; I was not seeking plays that “contribute to shared national consciousness and identity,” to borrow a phrase that appears in the CBC’s mandate as set out in the 1991 Broadcasting Act (which the Online Streaming Act now belatedly updates.) Rather, I wanted something more tangible, more present than William Shakespeare or Andrew Lloyd Webber.

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It seems to me this is a matter of self-respect. When I left the theatre beat and broadened my focus to look at the cultural sector as a whole, I cringed at the so-called upfronts, the annual season launches where Canadian broadcasters would boast to potential advertisers about the preponderance of simulcast U.S. TV shows on their lineups. Of course, this was how they made their money, through a deal with the devil by which Canadian networks could drop their local ads into Law & Order or The Big Bang Theory if they aired them in the same time slot as the originating American networks. Simultaneous substitution protected the territorial rights the Canadian networks had purchased but it also guaranteed the prime time schedule was predetermined in Los Angeles, pushing Canadian shows out to the margins.

The business model of Canadian television since the 1970s, now overcome by streaming, was to buy U.S. content and sell it to Canadian audiences. In return, the broadcasters were asked to air a certain amount of Canadian programming, whether they made money on it or not. Perhaps there was some satisfaction to be had in our clever territorial workaround but I found it bizarre that one would take pride in riding on someone else’s coattails. It made Canadians look like street urchins salivating over the pastries in America’s shop window.

Critics of Canadian content regulation often suggest there is something weak about the practice, as though the need for protection and subsidy was a judgment on the quality of Canadian film and television. It’s a position that is willfully ignorant of the economic realities of the entertainment industries both globally and in Canada. Simply put, it takes less money to buy Canadian rights to an American show than it does to make a new Canadian one, and streaming hasn’t changed that. The economics are stacked against Canadian programming: Subsidy and regulation are a matter of fairness.

A certain Canadian confidence, an insistence we do it ourselves, should not be mistaken for parochialism; cosmopolitanism is a powerful force in cultural production but so too is community. When it comes to screen content, Canadians have vast and well-served tastes; the point of cultural regulation is to ensure some presence for the local amidst the global.

Today, the system that has attempted to maintain that balance in Canada since the 1970s has been busted open by streaming. Foreign based services such as Netflix or Disney+ do not face the Canadian content requirements of domestic broadcasters nor do they contribute to the Canadian Media Fund that helps underwrite domestic programming. Meanwhile, conventional broadcasting is going broke – Bell laid off 1,300 employees in June – and the Canadian broadcasters are already petitioning for relief from Canadian content obligations, perhaps figuring a lower benchmark would appeal to the foreign streaming services too. It’s late in the day as Canadian broadcasters struggle financially while the streamers’ expansionary period seems to be drawing to a close, but at heart, the Online Streaming Act is a pay-to-play proposition: You make revenue here, you contribute to local production.

You will notice in all this I have had said little about Canadian identity. As I became increasingly enmeshed in these issues, I wanted to understand cultural policy better: In 2009-2010, I was awarded the Atkinson Fellowship in Canadian public policy journalism to study how Canada could update its cultural supports for the digital age. It was already clear, 13 years ago, that the so-called “walled garden” of Canadian content provided by terrestrial and cable broadcasters could not be maintained in the face of internet programming.

(Remarkably, in the last decade, many countries are finding ways to ensure their national content survives the supposedly borderless world of the internet: The European Union now requires that a third of a streaming service’s catalogue be devoted to European content. The results include such popular Netflix shows as Lupin, Cable Girls and Babylon Berlin.)

Studying the issue, I became convinced that the idea that television or film could build a Canadian identity, whatever that might be, wasn’t useful. The relationship between cultural or national identity and media is much debated and certainly not direct. There is no doubt that linguistic diversity has been a victim of American TV and that regulation can help protect Canada’s French and Indigenous linguistic identities. Quebec cultural groups, alarmed that young Quebeckers watch more and more English-language content on streaming services, were supportive of the new act because it will ensure there is original made-in-Canada French-language content on the services rather than just a handful of shows from France. In English Canada, on the other hand, a wide mix of cultural identities seem unlikely to be much affected by a preference for the CBC over Apple TV.

My project then turned away from identity issues to stress the centrality of the arts to all societies since Neanderthals painted on the cave walls or fashioned flutes from bones. It’s a fascinating area where evolutionary biologists and cultural critics research what culture does for an individual or a society, the way novels teach empathy, storytelling transmits values or theatre outsources social risk to dedicated performers. For a cultural journalist, it was an area of research that became particularly pertinent during the pandemic when suddenly we were cut off from many art forms.

Of course, we could still watch our screens. We can always watch our screens. Today they are the medium where most storytelling takes place, but in Canada they will offer precious little domestic programming if we don’t insist on it. The arts are at the very root of what makes us human; not having access to a living culture is like not having access to hospitals or a local food supply. Somewhere in our media diet we need programming that tells us, in ways subtle or unsubtle, that there is a here here.