Ryan Edwardson - Canadian Content: Culture and the Quest for Nationhood

Ryan Edwardson

Canadian Content: Culture and the Quest for Nationhood

Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008

viii + 360; paperback; ISBN978-0-8020-9519-0

Ryan Edwardson has written a substantial and impressive book on the evolution of Canada's official policies to support a national culture as a means of strengthening national identity ─ and the author draws a firm distinction between these two concepts. Edwardson discerns three overlapping stages in the process. The first, which he calls 'Masseyism', belongs to the two past-war decades and takes its name from Vincent Massey, the gentlemanly millionaire who headed the 1949 Royal Commission on the Arts in Canada. Edwardson see this phase as part of the country's 'colony-to-nation' transition, which defined independence in terms of parity with Britain and expressed itself in a preference for 'high culture', such as the Shakespeare Festival at Stratford, Ontario. The great achievement of this phase was the establishment of the Canada Council in 1957, lubricated by windfall death duties that Ottawa received when two Canadian millionaires died in the same tax year. One member of the literary community ungraciously termed the Canada Council the cultural equivalent of Meals on Wheels. But by the nineteen-sixties, the pace was being set by the 'new nationalism', which was more concerned with mass entertainment and particularly the onslaught of American pop music and television programmes. This, in turn, led to the 'cultural industrialism' of the Trudeau years, in which the government assured taxpayers that by investing in Canadian culture they were creating jobs and prosperity. The Americans were still seen as a threat, a point that complicated 1980s negotiations for free trade, with Washington finding it hard to understand why this aspect of employment and prosperity should be exempted from continental integration. But the new menace that required a bonding Canadian culture was the rise of separatism in Quebec. Edwardson's tripartite categorisation of the drive to politicise cultural activity in Canada represents a major contribution to understanding of the country's history, and will surely be incorporated in the textbooks.
At the core of Edwardson's second and third phases lay the contested phrase that forms the title of his book: Canadian content. What made a song or a broadcast Canadian? As one questing official report put it, the presence of a Canadian television crew did not necessarily bring any distinctively Canadian values to a programme. The result was a system of scoring Canadian-ness that made European Union widget regulations seem positively straightforward. Canadian content was not popular in the industry, which simply wanted to pipe in as much American programming as possible and pocket the advertising cash: television stations found that they had to sell commercials at cheaper rates during Canadian programmes, since viewers found them less compelling. Naturally, attempts were made to circumvent or even defy the controls: a television station in Hamilton Ontario claimed that its testcard as Canadian content. In 1991, Canadian rock-star Bryan Adams was outraged when his new album was classified as non-Canadian, because of the involvement of British lyricists and American technicians. Using copulatory terminology, Adams angrily urged the bureaucrats to back off, only to have the president of the Canadian Independent Record Production Association mobilise the vocabulary of urination to dismiss his complaint. Canadian content had definitely moved away from the realm of high culture.
There were undoubtedly elements of muddle underlying the whole righteous attitude to Canadian culture. Nationalists understandably felt aggrieved over the Reader's Digest affair. The Pearson government aimed to remove tax breaks on advertising revenue raised in Canada by American periodicals, which were undercutting local publications on the news-stands thanks to their continental economies of scale. The Reader's Digest and Time demanded the exemption of their Canadian editions, even though Reader's Digest specifically admitted that its wrap-around northern edition had little to say about Canada. Washington weighed in, and the subsidiaries kept their tax breaks. On the other hand, a Canadian edition of Sesame Street was prized as an exercise in national bonding, if of a stereotypical kind ─ Native child from the prairies, fisherman's kid from the Maritimes, and so on.
This is a large and well-researched book, so it would be churlish to criticise omissions, some of them necessary to hone the framework. Edwardson rejects any notion of a distinct French-Canadian nationalism, that is, a cultural view in relation to Canada as distinct from separatist sentiment aimed at an independent Quebec. As a result, he says very little about francophone Canada, largely by-passing any issue of the shared basis of cultural identity. Georges-Henri Lévesque, co-chair of the Massey Commission, is barely mentioned, and space might have been found to discuss the views on culture of such influential figures as André Laurendeau and Claude Ryan ─ or, indeed, to explore more deeply the Montreal roots of Pierre Trudeau's ideas. The emphasis upon government programmes also inadvertently downplays the continuing importance of private patronage in the world of Canadian culture. For instance, the Group of Seven remain a key movement in defining themes in Canadian art. Anyone wishing to become immersed in their painting would be directed to four very pleasant locations: the National Gallery in Ottawa, the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto, the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts and the McMichael at Kleinburg. Three of these institutions operate independently of government, even if with the support of public programmes. Similarly, Canada's orchestras and the Royal Winnipeg Ballet receive only passing mention. If we step back and survey the larger cultural landscape of Canada, it may be that Ottawa does not have everything its own way. Similarly, one important feature of Canadian culture in recent decades has been the global recognition of a number of the country's writers, with Margaret Atwood famously challenging Shakespeare on undergraduate syllabuses around the world. This phenomenon cannot simply be regarded as a by-product of the domestic drive to protect and privilege Canadian content.
Although this book shows traces of its origin in a doctoral dissertation, Edwardson writes well, but is occasionally led by his flamboyance into over-statement. Take the flourish that tells us that Manitoba was created 'over Louis Riel's dead body' (p. 9). Riel led two western uprisings. The first, in 1869-70, was resolved by the creation of Manitoba. The second, in 1885, occurred further west and was punished by his execution for treason. It is a disappointing glitch because the original sentiment was an unnecessary aside. Similarly, the 1949 Massey Commission is hailed as 'an upholding of the Dominion of Canada' (p. 12), although the country had formally abandoned that style and title two years earlier. Generally, as is to be expected of the University of Toronto Press, the book is handsomely presented, although I confess to particular pleasure at a rare misprint, the omission of the letter C from the word 'faculty', used as a collective noun for academics. It is no condemnation to say this is hardly a book which the general reader will seek out, but it does provide a valuable discussion of the issues involved in protecting cultural expression on the national stage as we drown in globalisation.