Disappearing Our Culture... by Sandra Battaglini

"As an agricultural and industrial nation Canada ranks high in the world. But as a cultured nation exploring the human mind and soul she ranks low. She has excused herself because of the size of her population, her youth and the battle she has had to wage wresting the country from nature. Those last two excuses are valid no longer, the first one never was." - The Massey Report 1951

Canadian Prime Minister Louis St. Laurent

When Prime Minister Louis St. Laurent officially appointed a Royal Commission on the National Development in the Arts, Letters and Sciences in 1949, it was in response to a growing concern in Canada over the ‘anemic state of Canadian culture and the pervasive influence of American culture in Canada.’ Sound eerily familiar?

In the post-war era, Canada’s increasing military and economic ties to the United States fuelled fears over continentalism – a doctrine that Canada and the U.S. should merge into one North American nation. I would argue we did when Brian Mulroney without referendum signed NAFTA and more recently Justin Trudeau, the USMCA. Both deals have submerged us deeper into a tangled web of American dominance and near total monopoly over so many aspects of our Canadian life. The most stunning – our Culture.

It does feel a lot like this rich Canadian experience is under threat and we are once again in a state of ‘anemia’. Maybe we never got over this iron deficiency as our stories are rarely reflected on the big screen or on TV. Some people will argue oh it’s our small population. Nonsense. Just take a look at Australia. They have less population and ten times the industry. And as the excerpt from the Massey Report suggests ‘those excuses are no longer valid’. Let me be clear. I’m just speaking here about English Canada. French Canada has an enviable film and TV industry and their comedians are celebrated like rock stars. Some, like Martin Matte sold more than 400,000 tickets on his last tour. He is in millionaire territory. How many English speaking comedians have that that kind of draw? With no industry to support us and no arts funding to bolster us, we have no money to promote us. We remain in the shadows.

Quebecois standup comics are the province’s real rock stars - Montreal Gazette

Others point to the fact that we ‘sound’ the same as the U.S. So what? Does that mean our history and lived experience are not worthy of sharing with the world? That we still utter these same excuses sixty-eight years after the Massey Report was first published points to our collective denial and laziness. We’ve become a nation of borrowers, not innovators. A people more focussed on American politics and culture than our own. Who can blame us? We are quite literally bombarded every second of every day by the biggest and most powerful media cyclops on the planet. Not to mention the fact that America has always put massive pressure on Canada to buy their content and exhibit their culture around the clock on every radio dial and broadcast signal.

I’ve been reading a book called 100 Years of Canadian Cinema, which sounds like a yawn I know but it should be required reading for anyone who wants to get into the biz. Since the early 1900s America has been lobbying us to ensure their pre-eminence in our media landscape, pushing us to the periphery of our own culture where we’ve existed ever since. And the stakeholders who who have been given the privilege to manage our cultural terrain have been eating all the steaks, leaving the rest of us to chew on the bones.

The disregard the ‘industry’ displays towards us is sometimes cruel and unusual. When we pitch TV shows to our broadcasters, we are often told, ‘great idea, but you should sell it to the U.S. because it’s cheaper for us to buy American content.’ Does this make any sense to anyone on the planet? How can we sell a Canadian show to the United States? Why would they buy it? When we let our stories vanish, what will we have to show for it? Sorry for the pun but seriously what will we have on record? Every time a broadcaster utters these words to a creator, it silences a voice. It erases our history. It disappears our culture.

When our biggest private broadcasters spend a significant amount of their budgets on foreign content (Bell Media, Rogers) and our own Comedy Network (owned by Bell Media) broadcasts almost entirely American content how is this not a betrayal of Canada’s artists and creators? Check out the Comedy Network’s latest line-ups and it’ll literally hurt your soul. To be fair they are making some comedy but if you take a look at Rogers and Corus, they currently make no comedy at all. The only broadcaster making comedy in a meaningful way right now is the CBC. We are a comedy nation. We always like to brag about it but what are we doing about it?

Sorry to be so extreme but I can find no other way of describing what’s going on in our country. When I first wrote a letter to the Prime Minister two years ago about the state of Canadian comedy, I would never have dreamed I would uncover such a broken state of affairs. What a mishigas! The business and bureaucracy of art and entertainment in Canada is absolutely absurd and dysfunctional. These past two years have been like finding out someone cheated on you and discovering all the ways in which they have.

The most chilling example of this is when I discovered one of the federal government’s findings in a study they conducted called Let’s Talk TV: A Conversation with Canadians.

38. …In general, many English-speaking Canadians choose to watch U.S. programming, with certain exceptions, such as sports and news. It is less expensive to acquire American programming (which has already covered its costs in its domestic market) than to produce Canadian programming. Moreover, Canadian programming is less profitable for Canadian broadcasters than U.S. programming. Without regulatory intervention, market forces thus tend to focus English-language private broadcasters in Canada on the acquisition and exhibition of American programming. This programming also benefits from Hollywood’s promotional power and its well-established star system-by comparison, both relatively lacking in English-language Canada.

So you see, it’s less ‘profitable’ for our Canadian broadcasters to create Canadian programming. Outrageous! Less profitable for them. Impoverishing for us. Why the hell then do we have Canadian broadcasters if all they’re going to do is buy American content? What’s the point? And to add insult to injury, the CRTC has all but abandoned a quota system in favour of encouraging ‘quality programming’. Quota systems are the hallmark of many industrialized nations, which is why countries like Australia and the United Kingdom have such robust industries. They are mandated to do so.

We are in the midst of a monumental crisis in our culture and identity. If our own regulatory body is disappearing quotas then what chance do we have at preserving our stories and sharing our unique perspectives to the world?

42. For decades, the Canadian broadcasting system was a relatively closed system in which it was possible to limit the supply of foreign programming in an effort to create a demand for Canadian programming through exhibition quotas. Today, with the emergence of new broadband platforms, the supply of foreign programming is seemingly limitless. This situation has rendered it difficult to sustain a quota-based approach to creating domestic demand for Canadian programming. Moreover, domestic demand is no longer sufficient for the production industry to continue to thrive when it is faced with content offerings from around the world. In order to adapt to this new configuration of supply and demand, Canadian programming must seek out and develop international audiences. Let’s Talk TV: A Conversation with Canadians.

If we’re not legislating minimum CanCon quotas then what content will we have to share with the world? When I spoke to the CRTC a couple of weeks back I was told this; American TV costs $10 million/hour, Canadian TV costs $1 million/hour. So Canadian broadcasters say, ‘Well we just can’t compete with those economies of scale. Instead we’ll take that $1 million and buy American shows like Seinfeld, Big Bang Theory, Mike and Molly, und so weiter. Just think about all the millions of dollars our broadcasters spend to purchase ready made content from our neighbours that they could be granting to our comedy creators. I’ll take a poll right now and ask my comedy pals what they would do with $1 million. Yup. Just got the poll results back. They’re passing out from the possibilities.

This is why our artists and especially our comedians are all leaving Canada. We are experiencing a mass exodus unlike anything this country has ever seen. It is oddly similar to what the Massey Report described when it reported its findings and recommended the creation of the Canada Council for the Arts because:

No novelist, poet, short story writer, historian, biographer, or other writer of non-technical books can make even a modestly comfortable living by selling his work in Canada. No composer of music can live at all on what Canada pays him for his compositions. Apart from radio drama, no playwright, and only a few actors and producers, can live by working in the theatre in Canada." Gifted Canadians "must be content with a precarious an unrewarding life in Canada, or go abroad where their talents are in demand." - The Massey Report

Perhaps our curse is bordering this Leviathan. An unrelenting beast that is the envy of everyone. Instead of being inspired by America’s unwavering commitment to tell their stories, Canada gave up.

40. Rather than closing off Canadians from the content of another country and using technology to build a closed Canadian broadcasting system, the Commission responded in another way: it developed regulations so that Canadians could enjoy foreign content while building the domestic industry to ensure a space for Canadian creativity, storytelling and perspectives... This approach has created a system that is the envy of the world - Let’s Talk TV: A Conversation with Canadians.

It’s very nice of them to to leave us a ‘space.’ Whose envious of this? Corporate big wigs? For Canadian creators, it’s a death knell.

It’s hard to point the finger at where this all went wrong but from what I’m learning, it’s complex and shrouded in history. In the early 1900s Hollywood and France were the leaders in cinematic technological innovation. Then Hollywood emerged as the global power, literally blowing everyone out of the water. Around the same time cinema in Canada looked like this. French Canada was making films mythologizing the Roman Catholic Church and English Canada was making films to get people to immigrate here. “While Quebec was ideologically reflective, hierarchical and inward looking, English Canada was expansionist, financially motivated and interested in film as an adjunct to nation building.” -(100 Years of Canadian Cinema by George Melnyk)

Fast forward to the Dirty 30s as it is affectionately called or the British Quota era which was a reaction around the world to Hollywood dominance. Countries like Britain and Australia set quotas for domestic creation but Canada did not. “The state felt it had no interest to protect by bringing in quotas since there was no indigenous feature film industry in Canada and using quotas to create opportunity for indigenous film production was too far sighted even to be considered.” (100 Years of Canadian Cinema by George Melnyk) The head of the Canadian Motion Picture Bureau at the time, Ray Peck, bluntly stated that ‘Canada will not and should not compete with Hollywood.’ From the early days we were leaving the door wide open for cultural occupation!

Like everything else that America lays its gaze on, they assumed hegemony over us with no regard to whom we are as a people. It’s the greatest invasion never told. A silent one that didn’t need guns or bombs to achieve its goal. The worst part is we colluded with them to make it happen.

Our culture has been raided and invaded – displaced and belated. Some days I find it incredibly difficult to continue advocating for a space for our community. It seems like the cards are stacked so heavily against us. I quite literally receive bad news every day from every part of the country. Comedians not getting paid, being harassed by club owners, passed over by festivals, turned down by broadcasters. We’ve achieved a second class status in our own country and internalized this subservience into a loathing for one another. We have a sickness in Canada where instead of raising each other up, we put each other down. It’s convenient for the power brokers, crippling to us.

Our Canadian content is being obliterated everywhere we turn. Let’s not forget how one of the only places where 100% Canadian comedy content was being broadcast almost got taken away from us this year. The devastation it created in our collective psyche is still there. The PTSD lingers. While we literally averted a disaster, I would like to offer up some context. All SiriusXM and Just for Laughs did was give us back what they took away. While the community was overjoyed with the outcome, the truth is it’s like your best friend stealing your bike from your backyard and then returning it cause they felt bad. This isn’t good enough. I am calling for major commitments from every corner of our industry and government to nurture our comedy talent and stop the movement of this precious resource out of the country. To comedians I urge you not to be idle. This is not the time to hide. Instead, speak up for injustice. Stand-up for your brothers and sisters. These are your rights. This is your humanity. We bought into the lie that if we stayed quiet and kept our head down there would be work for us. Look where that got us. We are being disappeared.

The advocacy work I’ve been doing with CASC (The Canadian Association of Stand-up Comedians) is centralized around the idea of building an infrastructure around the economy of comedy. We don’t want to focus solely on the system that exists because truthfully it has failed us. We are working on widening the landscape of opportunity.

There are reasons to be hopeful, especially if we turn to the music industry as a model. We’ve received a lot of support and inspiration from them and are embarking on what they started over 20 years ago. Music in Canada garners the majority of public/private funds and it’s working out brilliantly for them. It’s no coincidence we’re turning out mega stars like Drake, Alessia Cara, The Weeknd, Justin Bieber, and Shawn Mendes. These artists are the beneficiaries of a system that strove to build talent and promote it. Fast Company coined it as Canada’s Philanthropic Pop Industrial Complex and how it’s taking over the world. Read it here and weep!

If we ever want to achieve a semblance of this collective Canadian soul that we can showcase to the world then we need to keep our artists near and dear. We owe it to them. We owe it our history.

Canada became a national entity because of certain habits of mind and convictions which its people shared and would not surrender. Our country was sustained through difficult times by the power of this spiritual legacy. It will flourish in the future in proportion as we believe in ourselves. It is the intangibles which give a nation not only its essential character but its vitality as well. What may seem unimportant or even irrelevant under the pressure of daily life may well be the thing which endures, which may give a community its power to survive. - The Massey Report

Sandra Battaglini - @SandraBatt