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I feel bad for
Sheila Copps. Getting stuck with the federal cabinet’s Heritage portfolio
looks like a rotten assignment. Maybe she asked for it; perhaps she’s the
kind of go-getter who identified the job nobody wanted and volunteered for
it. Her strategy now that she’s ensconced, though, suggests she’s eager to
get shifted to something more politically advantageous. How else to explain
Bill C-55, the legislation meant to restore our nutty cultural protectionism
after the World Trade Organization told us our efforts to block split runs
of American magazines were ill-conceived, anti-democratic and just plain
wrong?
C-55 aims to
prevent a “crime” that nobody is committing. It’s like outlawing the
practice of hovering a meter above the sidewalk. Nobody’s capable of doing
such a thing, nor are they trying to. But now there’s a law saying they
can’t. And it’s got no political downside. Anybody asks you what you’ve done
for cultural sovereignty, proudly point to C-55. The law’s explicit
exemptions for the only two existing split-run publications would only be
confusing. (The Canadian editors of Time and Reader’s Digest
are both politely overlooked. Incidentally, the “threat” that started all
this — the putative Canadian Sports Illustrated — must have seemed
entirely reasonable to Time Warner; it’s doing fine with Time Canada
and nobody seems to mind.) Bill C-55 is the classic definition of neurosis:
doing the same stupid thing repeatedly and expecting a different result each
time.
The government
already has a better model for dealing with this magazine conundrum,
although it hasn’t thought to apply it yet: the rules that determine what
counts as “Canadian content” in the music business. Céline Dion’s
inescapable anthem about a British ocean liner that sunk in the North Atlantic
counts; Shania Twain lives in Upstate New York, most of her material is
written and produced by her husband, Mutt Lange. (British? American? Both? I
don’t know.) All that matters is that it’s Canadian content. Why not apply
the same twisted reasoning to magazines?
Graydon Carter
edits Vanity Fair, which ought to make it especially Canadian given
Carter’s having been reared in our nation’s capital. Bonnie Fuller’s editing
Glamour these days, having moved on from Cosmopolitan. She
used to work at Flare. Now, she’s left Cosmo, it’s American
again. See how this works?
If it’s okay for
newspapers to run American wire service copy and reprints from U.S.
newspapers, then why not allow magazines employing Canadians to count as
Canadian? That would make them an acceptable — maybe even laudable — venue
for the clients of Canadian media buyers. Why punish advertisers or buyers
with some witless tax just because they know where to find their target
audience?
We can foresee a
problem with this, though: declaring a publication Canadian just because its
editor was born here offers an unfair advantage to certain books. And it’s
sure to generate complaint from others. We can level the field by including
contributors in our calculations.
Let’s take The
New Yorker as an example: the Feb. 15 issue includes a book review by
Malcolm Gladwell, who’s Canadian. That’s one chunk of Canuckitude. The same
issue also contains an Adam Gopnik article about France; that makes it twice
as Canadian. And if, as often happens, you get an issue boasting a Gladwell
story, a Gopnik feature and artwork by Barry Blitt, well, then the
government would be paying advertisers to buy lineage, or at least giving
them a hefty tax break for selflessly underwriting Canadian cultural effort.
The same rules
could apply to editions of Newsweek containing stories by Rick Marin,
issues of Harper’s that offer work by Paul William Roberts or any
GQ containing writing by Guy Lawson, Mordecai Richler or Jake Richler.
The current issue of Rolling Stone has a piece in it by John R. Quain
(Ottawa-bred, like VF’s Carter), so that’d count as well. Add to that
list Details from a couple of months ago, which had a short
disquisition by Barenaked Ladies drummer Tyler Stewart on how to amuse
oneself in Toronto. Of course, if any U.S. publication covers a Canadian
subject, place or person, it would automatically count.
As long as The
Globe and Mail continues to try to claim Calvin Trillin as de
facto Canadian in its literary quizzes by virtue of his owning a summer
place on the East Coast, we can include him too. His presence thus opens up
monthly media-consumer guide Brill’s Content, for which Trillin
writes a column.
I haven’t worked
out the mathematical formula for determining all the finer points of
“relative Canadianness” in this plan. But I’m sure there’s some bright
little spark in the Heritage Ministry just itching to devise one. And
however this finally works out, you know it’ll make more sense than showing
up in front of some WTO tribunal with a bonehead law that’s supposed to make
a culture appear out of thin air by bureaucratic fiat, just so they can tell
us again that it can’t. |
