People want to know why I signed a Council of Canadians letter asking our NAFTA negotiators to keep culture off the table in their current trade talks with the U.S. and Mexico. Doesn’t the internet make culture irrelevant? Or, why bother worrying about culture in a small country like Canada, they chide.
Not so fast. Why should we roll over like nice Canadians and give away the store? We can do what countries like France do – insist on our right to determine what we read and watch.
Europe is pushing back against the monopolies of internet giants like Google and Facebook. The European Union has a regulation in place that requires each member country to insist on (gasp) a quota of European content in their broadcasting via the internet or through cable.
The internet offers each of us a mass online audience. However, we connect to the internet through a company and that company can be regulated if we have the political will.
But before I go there, let me tell you two tales about the bad old days of Canadian publishing.
In the early 80s, after I published my first novel about a Canadian giantess who exhibited with P.T. Barnum, my agent began selling international rights. An offer came from UK publisher Black Swan but they insisted I give them the right to sell my novel in the Canadian market as well.
My Canadian publisher begged me to say no. Canadian indies were fighting back then to stop foreign publishers from distributing Canadian books here as if Canada was a region in their own country. It was a hard decision. Black Swan was prestigious so it would have been a boost to my literary career if I went with them.
In the end, I said no. It wasn’t going to help me in the long run if foreign publishers ran the show. As author Elaine Dewar said recently, you can’t have a country without a national literature – and profit-seeking foreign publishers owe no allegiance to another culture. Why should they?
As it turned out, I accepted an offer from another British publisher that didn’t insist on the rights here.
The experience taught me something: our culture belongs to us.
We can do business with other countries, co-operate with them on television and film productions, buy their products and sell ours, but we need to stay masters chez nous.
Okay, tale two from the bad old days….
I once gave a talk to Canadian booksellers and suggested they stop selling American and British books at the front of their stores under the heading “bestsellers” while relegating Canadian books to the back under “Canadiana,” a section title that suggests manuals about stripping pine furniture.
The Canadian booksellers were indignant. This is the best way to sell Canadian books, because they don’t sell much, they told me.
Eventually, they began putting Canadian books at the front of the store, and guess what, they sold a ton.
The marketplace fatalism of our times is just as laughable as the practice of hiding Canadian books.
The emphasis on the bottom line to the exclusion of everything else ignores the fact that culture is a good unlike any other we produce. Our books and our films, our theatre and our non-fiction stories – in print, or online – shape and define us and contribute to our sense of who we are.
What would happen if culture went on the table? Limits on foreign ownership and quotas for Canadian content would vanish. And Canada is the poster child for the effectiveness of content quotas.
We have a vibrant literature and music industry thanks to these regulations, as well as a world-class audiovisual infrastructure for film and television. Hollywood producers use it often, particularly when the Canadian dollar is low. We also own a good share of our television market audiences like our programs and we have huge export sales because the CRTC maintains minimum content quotas on television broadcasters.
But only three per cent of the screen time in our cinemas is devoted to English-language Canadian movies. Some say that historical average is even lower now. Unfortunately, we have never had quotas for Canadian films, so American distribution firms have tied up most of our screens with American blockbusters. You have to move fast if you want to catch a good Canadian film like Natasha based on a David Bezmozgis short story. It’s literally here today, gone tomorrow.
If culture were on the table, the foreign multinationals in publishing would dominate even more than they do now.
According to Statistics Canada, these companies publish less than 25 per cent of Canadian books but make 44 per cent of the revenues. In effect, the companies that publish less Canadian books get almost half the revenue.
Don’t get me wrong. I’ve been well published by Canadian multinationals, and many of the people who work there support Canadian books. But the owners of these corporations live elsewhere and have no obligation to Canadian literature.
For instance, there’s pressure now from some of the multinationals to impose American royalty standards on Canadian publishing contracts. We don’t have a huge mass audience like the U.S. so lower royalty rates don’t make sense for our writers who are already struggling to make a living.
As for film, the Motion Picture Association of America has been lobbying for years to change our laws on foreign ownership so they can buy up remaining distributors like Entertainment One and Mongrel Media. Is the digital version of the bad old days coming back? Let’s hope not. Anyway, that’s why I signed the Council’s letter. You should, too.
Susan Swan is a Toronto-based novelist.
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