Culture, communication, and national identity: the case of Canadian television 9780802027337, 9780802067722, 9781442673670

Table of contents :
Frontmatter
PREFACE: THE MARTIAN VIEW (page ix)
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS (page xix)
1 Introduction (page 3)
2 Structure and Historical Development of Canadian Television (page 42)
3 1968 and After: The Public Sector and the Market from the Broadcasting Act to Caplan/Sauvageau (page 66)
4 Nationalism (page 105)
5 Maximization of Satisfaction: The Market Paradigm (page 141)
6 Dependency Theory and Television in Canada (page 160)
7 The Intellectuals, Television, and the Two Solitudes (page 190)
8 The Television Audience (page 228)
9 National Culture; or, Where Is Here? (page 250)
10 The Single Dramas: Le misère canadienne (page 277)
11 The Continental Culture and Canadian Television Drama: The Mini Series (page 298)
12 Conclusion (page 327)
REFERENCES (page 345)
INDEX (page 359)

Citation preview

Culture, Communication, and National Identity: The Case of Canadian Television ‘There can be no political sovereignty without cultural sovereignty.’ So

argued the csc in 1985 in its evidence to the Caplan/Sauvageau Task Force on Broadcasting Policy. Richard Collins challenges this assumption. He argues in this study of nationalism and Canadian television

policy that Canada’s political sovereignty depends much less on Canadian content in television than has generally been accepted. His analysis focuses on television drama, at the centre of television policy in the 1980s.

Collins questions the conventional image of Canada as a weak national entity undermined by its population’s predilection for foreign television. Rather, he argues, Canada is held together, not by a shared

repertoire of symbols, a national culture, but by other social forces, notably political institutions. Collins maintains that important advantages actually and potentially flow from Canada’s weak national symbolic culture. Rethinking the relationships between television and society in Canada may yield a more successful broadcasting policy, more popular television programming, and a better understanding of the links between culture and the body politic.

As the European Community moves closer to political unity, the Canadian case may become more relevant to Europe, which, Collins suggests, already fears the ‘Canadianization’ of its television. He maintains that a European multilingual society, without a shared culture or common European audio-visual sphere and with viewers watching foreign television, can survive successfully as a political entity — just as Canada has.

RICHARD COLLINS is a member of the Department of Communication Studies at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology. He is the

author of several books on television, including Satellite Television in Western Europe; Television, Policy and Culture; and, with Nicholas Garnham and Gareth Locksley, The Economics of Television: The UK Case.

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Culture, Communication, and National Identity: The Case of Canadian Television

RICHARD COLLINS

UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS Toronto Buffalo London

www.utppublishing.com © Richard Collins 1990

University of Toronto Press Toronto Buffalo London

Printed in the United States ISBN 0-8020-2733-4 (cloth) ISBN 0-8020-6772-7 (paper)

Printed on acid-free paper

Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data Collins, Richard, 1946Culture, communication, and national identity ISBN 0-8020-2733-4 (bound). — IsBN 0-8020-6772-7 (pbk.)

1. Television broadcasting — Social aspects —

Canada. 2. Television and politics - Canada. 3. Nationalism — Canada. I. Title.

PN1992.3.C3C64 1990 791.45 0971 ©90-093682-7

This book has been published with the help of a grant from Hollinger Inc.

To Matt, Luke, and Joe, who lightened the writing, and to those, like them, on whom the future of nations depends.

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Contents

PREFACE: THE MARTIAN VIEW ix ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Xix

1 Introduction 3 2 Structure and Historical Development of Canadian Television 42 3 1968 and After: The Public Sector and the Market from the Broadcasting Act to Caplan/Sauvageau 66

4 Nationalism 105 5 Maximization of Satisfaction: The Market Paradigm 141 6 Dependency Theory and Television in Canada 160 7 The Intellectuals, Television, and the Two Solitudes 190 8 The Television Audience 228 g National Culture; or, Where Is Here? 250 10 The Single Dramas: La misére canadienne 277 11 The Continental Culture and Canadian Television Drama: The Mini Series 298 12 Conclusion 327 REFERENCES 345 INDEX 359

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Preface: The Martian View

As directors in England we had an advantage bringing an outside, an almost Martian point of view to English society. (Ted Kotcheff, interviewed in Cinema Canada 20 [1975]: 161)

Why Canada? The usual answer, and one that I used to give (Collins 1982), to those who question the relevance of a study of Canadian television is that Canada’s experience of cross-border spill over of American television is becoming a global one. More and more European

studies use the metaphor of ‘Canadianization’ to designate the anticipated changes that will follow new broadcasting technologies. Satellite television, and its potential to rupture national communication sovereignty, are often considered likely to replicate in Western Europe the effects of American television in Canada, namely damage to polity and culture, destabilizing one and debasing the other. The Canadian case is indubitably an interesting focus for a study of television’s role in shaping cultural identity and the relation of culture to political identity and citizenship. The battle between the transnational-

izing forces of the market and the countervailing nationalist political forces of the Canadian state poses a central question for broadcasting policy (and cultural and political theory): what should be the role of the state in relation to the market? That general question has several specific

forms when applied to the Canadian case. Are administered or market allocations more sensitive to the demands of citizens and consumers? How is a commoditization of information (and the consequential growth in importance of the cultural industries as generators of wealth and jobs) to be reconciled with citizens’ needs to receive and to communicate

X Preface information so that informed political choices may be made and political

institutions may genuinely express and embody the popular will? The central building block of the global political order, and of the

political theory that informs the study of international relations, is the concept of the nation-state, a ‘natural’ institution that rests on the congruence of three forces: political, cultural/ideological, and economic.

To each of these, the mass media, of which television is the most important branch, are perceived to be crucial, particularly so at present,

when television is changing rapidly and is a source of potentially destabilizing political, social, and economic shifts. In the economic sphere the ‘post-industrial’ society is one in which the commoditization of information becomes more general and where, as is true of other productive activities, a division of labour takes place on an

increasingly international scale. Information production and trading become both more and more important economically and less and less national. In the political sphere, it is widely believed that political actions, such

as voting behaviour, are shaped by television. Even if television is influential only at the margin, the changes it brings can be very important in first-past-the-post electoral systems, such as those of Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States. If the institutions of television (and the other mass media) are not symmetrical with those of the nation-state’s political system, then, it is assumed, television will

transmit inappropriate signals to viewers, signals that do not fit the political system and, as viewers act politically, are in turn transmitted to and inappropriately reproduced in politics. In the cultural sphere, television is often seen as a debasing force. If

television is to lead viewers up the cultural pyramid (to use the metaphor of a former director general of the Bsc) and maintain the integrity of the national cultural patrimony, then it must be directed by guardians of cultural excellence in order to resist an alien tide of kitsch in the interests of the national community and Kultur. Within each of the economic, political, and cultural spheres, there are

powerful forces that are hostile to the national: in the economy, the efficiencies actually and potentially available through specialization, an

international division of labour, and integrated global markets are increasingly too tempting to remain unrealized; in politics, ideas of democracy and egalitarianism can only imperfectly be realized within a national framework; in culture, international high culture has long been sanctified.

Preface xi The capitalist market is a transnationalizing force that destabilizes national political institutions as its operations more and more escape the grasp of those institutions, which were created for the ‘good old days’ of more or less economically autarchic states. As an international division

of labour takes place, states become more and more interdependent, and, thus, their ability to control their own destinies declines. Adam Smith’s notion of capitalism, based on the free movement of key factors of production and on free trade, is a powerful solvent of political boundaries and national political institutions. The efficiencies promoted by integrated markets are real; however, few now share Smith’s faith in the ability of the invisible hand to engineer a perfect symmetry of private with public interests. Smith’s ‘system of natural liberty’ was pre-eminently concerned with the right of an individual to an unimpeded sphere (a level playing-field, in the contemporary idiom) for the exercise of her or, more usually, his economic activity. But such notions of the individual are unsustainable, presociological, and the questions posed by Smith’s universal-solvent system and its dissolution

of sociality, affiliation, and community are now seen to concern trade-offs. What is the balance desired between freedom and equality? efficiency and democracy? mobility of labour and affiliation and community? How far are markets and political systems effective vehicles for the expression and realization of individual and collective wills?

Within both the national political and the market spheres, there are interests that neither the system of the market nor the system of the national community adequately represents. The market model of atomized individuals fits ill the evident sociality of human beings and their affiliations and grouping into communities bound together by language, social class, or geographical proximity. The notion of national community fits equally poorly the reality of stratified societies in which

power and resources are unequally distributed and the growing global experience of international economic, cultural, and social relations. In Canadian television, such contradictions have been articulated

particularly sharply. Canada, characterized by some as a European society marooned on the North American continent, has both Europeantype public-sector and public-service broadcasting and American-type

commercial broadcasting. The public and private beat as rival hearts within an single breast. But Canada also has a powerful presence within its broadcasting order that is not under Canadian political control: American television. Geographical proximity to the United States has

meant that Canada, before the (anticipated) global dissolution of

xii Preface national communication sovereignty by satellite technology, experienced willy-nilly the impact of the internationalizing capitalist market on its broadcasting system. In other spheres Canada’s political institutions were able, more or less successfully, to resist such pressures. Not so in broadcasting. Canadian broadcasting is usually seen to exemplify particularly sharply a global problem of threatened communication, and hence political sovereignty, and the general pertinence of the Canadian case is customarily argued in these terms. But these are views seen through the optic of nationalism, an ideology more and more under pressure and less and less corresponding to the unities —- economic, cultural, and, even, political — in which people live their lives. It is unsurprising that Canadian television does not fit the central stipulative precept of the nationalist vision: congruence between the political, cultural, and economic. For Canada is not a nation-state. And here is the authentically exemplary character of the Canadian case. Canada (and its broadcasting system) is not best understood as an imperfect version of a nation-state

of the good old-fashioned kind, albeit frustrated in the achievement of its manifest destiny whether by its own debilitating character traits or by the machiavellian operations of the capitalist market and the United States (which, in nationalist demonologies, are usually made equiva-

lent). Rather, Canada is better understood as a pre-echo of a postnational condition, one that is becoming increasingly generalized as the

formerly congruent economic, cultural, and political domains in a nation-state cease to complement each other and, if they remain congruent, become parasitic and debilitating, inhibiting realization of economic efficiency, cultural pluralism, and political equality.

Canada is a ‘new society,’ multilingual, multi-ethnic, and multicultural, bound into an international economy and culture with robust and distinctive political institutions and political stability. But this stable North American state lacks the ‘social glue’ of a shared symbolic culture, which nationalist theory insists is a sine qua non of political stability and legitimate political institutions.

This study shares a starting-point with both Canadian broadcastingpolicy discourse and the academic theory of media imperialism (which customarily take Canada as an exemplary case). In Canada, polity and culture are not congruent. But, rather than arguing from the premise

that such incongruence threatens the Canadian polity, I argue that, because the Canadian polity appears robust in spite of this notionally debilitating incongruence, the Canadian case — indeed, an exemplary one

Preface Xili — challenges the assumption, central to nationalist theory and to the media-

imperialism thesis, that polity and culture are strongly interdependent. The case of Canadian television challenges both classic notions of

nationalism that argue for a fit between polity and culture and communication theories that posit a strong influence of television on the identities and behaviour of viewers. The answer to the ‘Why Canada?’

question is that a study of Canadian television shows that established communication and political theories require revision in the light of the Canadian case. Canada is, indeed, an important site for the study of television and television’s role in shaping political and cultural identities. But such a study leads to conclusions rather different from those usually drawn. Nationalist theory and a notion of television’s strong effect fundamentally misrecognize the Canadian case, although both kinds of theory have been important forces in shaping the Canadian experience and Canada’s television. Doubtless the flaws in the lens through which I have peered and the peculiarities of my point of view will be more evident to the reader than they are to me. But, in mitigation, I plead that my point of view is not wholly un-Canadian. There is a thread of Canadian political theory that challenges the precepts of classic nationalism and decouples culture from politics, and from the vantage point of which both the palpable presence of nationalist ideologies in Canada and Canada’s remarkably

non-national culture can be understood. Ramsay Cook’s brilliant epigram — Canada is not a nation-state but a nationalist state — is the best

starting-point from which to follow this thread, which, like Ariadne’s clue, leads through some labyrinthine passages to a hazardous conclusion. That conclusion has an immediate pertinence for Europeans. European political agencies are becoming alarmed (as are, and long have been, their Canadian equivalents) at the absence of congruence between polity and culture in their domains. The Commission of the European Communities and the Council of Europe are moving towards stimulation of an integrated European culture in order to match the

nascent integrated (Western) European economy and the evolving transnational political institutions associated with it. Essentially this is nationalism grossed up, seeking to produce on the scale of a European nation the congruence between polity and culture that has existed (give or take inconvenient submerged nations, such as Wales and Occitania, and massive immigration of Gédstarbeiter in Germany, New Commonwealth Citizens in the United Kingdom, and North Africans in France) in the core Western European nation-states. The ‘Canadian’ contradic-

XIV Preface tions are becoming European, but in a different way from that generally

assumed. Rather than Canada’s exemplifying the dangers of transnational television and the disadvantages of a decoupled polity and culture, I now believe it exemplifies quite the reverse. Without the Canadian decoupling of cultural identity and political citizenship, we in

Europe can look forward to ‘top-down’ impositions of ‘European’ culture that ill match popular demand, to political policies that encour-

age cultural uniformity and inhibit difference and are intolerant of minority cultural tastes and practices. Canada’s political stability, its successful integration of the ‘third force,’ its social peace and decency, have, J believe, followed not from a strong national culture, but froma weak one.

This study has an unusual structure. It attempts to bridge what has become ‘two solitudes’ in the study of mass communications — that of textual analysis, which essays an immanent analysis of cultural produc-

tions, and that of political economy, which is concerned with the conditions of existence of cultural production and consumption. There is yet another solitude that requires to be brought into relation with the two mentioned above — the tradition of consumption analysis, research

on the effects of broadcasting and audience study, dominant in the United States but receiving (except in national formations strongly marked by the United States, such as West Germany and Israel) relatively little attention elsewhere. The project of turning a bridge intoa three-legged stool is not one that [ have attempted — though J have tried

in the chapter ‘The Television Audience’ (chapter 8) to review and interpret information already in the public domain (Canada/Québec 1985; Hothi 1981; Goldfarb Consultants 1983; Harrison, Young, Pesonen, and Newell 1986).

Bridging the political-economic and textual-analysis traditions of communication studies is, I hope, more than an exercise in authorial hubris. Each analytical paradigm is inadequate when it stands alone: textual analysis that remains an immanent analysis of the text(s) can offer neither a claim for the pertinence of attention to its object for study

nor an account of meaning. For meaning is produced in the social negotiation and attribution of referents to signs. Refusal of this necessary social and historical dimension of textual analysis necessitates

simply formalistic description and/or helplessness in the face of the polysemic potential of signs and their combinations. It is only through analysis of the conditions of existence of cultural production and

Preface XV consumption that the importance of the object of study can be established and the plurality of possible meanings of a combination of signs be circumscribed and comprehended. Political-economic analysis

alone, in contrast, may offer a reductive account of the import and effectiveness of a complex system of signs. Each of these heuristic paradigms would answer a question about the Canadian-ness of Canadian media differently — political economy, by looking at the relationships of control and ownership of producers of programming, and textual analysis, by looking at the presence or absence of distinctive combinations of signs that are deemed to be characteristically Canadian. One tradition of analysis will claim Atlantic City and ‘The Littlest Hobo’ as Canadian; the other will refuse this analysis and assert contradictory values, offering paradoxical but compelling judgments, such as that The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz is ‘the best American film made in Canada’ (Harcourt 1977b, 157).

Addressing such issues as the role of television in maintaining national culture and identity, the nature of media imperialism, and the

place of ideas in the formation of cultural communities requires integration of both paradigms. That is why this study has taken the form it has; nationalism is an ideology that manifests itself pervasively and unevenly in political, economic, and cultural formations. Nowhere can that be more clearly seen than in Canadian television, where political

injunctions and legal framework are unambiguously national, but economic forces are hostile to the national enterprise. Consumption and effects are highly contradictory. Television programming in this study is represented by only one of Canadian television’s program forms, drama. For it is in drama that the tendencies of audiences to prefer non-Canadian programming are most

evident, the economic advantages of foreign producers most pronounced, and the efforts in regulation and subsidy made recently by the

Canadian state most concerted. |

Analysis of programming suggests that national content is often of an indirect and subordinate kind and that programs explicitly addressing the national question may not find favour with audiences. For one of the distinguishing characteristics of Canadian culture (Atwood 1972; Houle 1980; et al.) is ‘misérabilism.’ Yet audiences, while customarily declining to watch Canadian television drama (Harrison, Young, Pesonen, and Newell 1986), affirm (see Goldfarb Consul-

tants 1983) the importance of state support for national cultural production. There is something of the ‘not in my backyard’ syndrome

xvi Preface here. Just as there is general assent to more investment in a national infrastructure, few individuals or communities do other than obstruct the improvement of the infrastructure when this improvement takes the form of, say, a motorway being built in their neighbourhood. It may be that more Canadian content is regarded as being a good thing, but good for other people, and the csc,while generally supported by Canadians,

is not much consumed by those individuals who prefer foreign television programming. My discussion focuses on a series of Canadian single dramas — a form unusual in contemporary North America — in particular, on cBc’s ‘For the Record’ series — the only anthology drama series in North America —

and on three Canadian mini series that are representative of a popular program form developed in the United States. Though this sample of programs is small, I believe it offers a good basis for understanding some of the cultural forces at work in contemporary television drama viewed

in Canada and, in particular, the dislocation (more marked in English than in French Canada) between the consumption habits of the audience and the Canadian programming offer. That this dislocation remains largely unresolved is the result, I argue, not only of the Canadian experience — a peculiarly intense one, given the country’s geographical and

cultural proximity to the United States — of an international taste for

American television, but also of the separation between Canadian cultural nationalist élites (who generally deplore popular taste and its preference for American television) and the mass audience. The chasm between nationalist élites’ intense insistence on cultural production (whether for television or not) that exhibits no ‘American’ characteristics and popular taste for ‘American’ programming denies those television producers in Canada who are attempting to develop a

dramatic repertoire that is both Canadian and popular, a mediating stratum of intellectuals to perform a brokerage role in a ‘two-step flow’ between audiences and producers. The absence (in English Canada, in particular) of critics who share popular taste inhibits development of an informed audience and an educated public taste and denies producers feedback in terms other than those of the ratings. This complex field of cultural production and consumption, shaped

by distinctive international and national forces, is the object of my study. To state that the Canadian experience is one of more than merely Canadian interest may imply that Canada and its culture and communi-

cations order have no claims on the attention of non-Canadians (or Canadianists); such is far from being the case.

Preface XVii There are obvious incompetencies that a non-Canadian brings to the study of Canada. I hope, though, that what follows realizes sufficiently the potential advantages that an outsider — a Martian, as Kotcheff puts it — brings to the study of an experience and history in which he does not have a part to compensate for the inadequacies and inevitable mis-

judgments that come as part of the foreigner’s baggage. My sincere thanks go to those who have talked me out of some of my wilder notions; they may, alas, think that too many remain.

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Acknowledgments

I owe many thanks to many people for their help and advice during

the research, preparation, and writing of this study. The British Association of Canadian Studies and the Foundation for Canadian Studies in the United Kingdom assisted me in travelling to Canada, as _ did the Canadian High Commission and the Délégation Générale du

Québec in London. Without their support this book would not have been written. Michael Hellyer and Marc Boucher of Canada House and Quebec House, respectively, in London were particularly helpful and supportive. The late Alex Toogood not only made it possible for me to spend a very productive year in Philadelphia (where, thanks to Temple Univer-

sity’s library and the university’s generous award of a Centenary Visiting Fellowship, much of the thinking and some early drafts for this

study were done) but shared his own knowledge of Canadian broadcasting with me. This book stands as a small memorial to Alex’s scholarship, which too often was manifested in helping and supporting the work of others. Several journeys from Philadelphia to Montreal, occasioned by my temporary residence in Penn’s Woods, changed my ideas about the relative importance of politics and geography. Flying from a frozen Dorval to blooming azaleas in Philadelphia made me think again about the importance of climate in economic development. I have made many friends in Canada through my work on Canadian

broadcasting. That work has tested, as this book will, many of these friendships severely. Alison Beale, Peter Harcourt, and Kealy Wilkinson have been particularly sorely tried by the presumptions of a friend with whom they often disagreed. When they knew better, as often they

XX Acknowledgments did, their knowledge was offered as generously as was their unfailing hospitality.

I owe a particular debt to the anonymous referees whom the University of Toronto Press used to advise it on my manuscript. Transatlantic sleuthing enabled me to identify my readers and to thank

them for their wise words. | particularly appreciate the comments of Reader A who could have written this book better than I. To have shown me so often where I was on thin ice and to have written a report that was so comprehensive and so helpful was an act of extraordinary generosity on his part. Reader A will note with melancholy that I have not always taken his advice but he will know better than anyone how much IJ have

profited from the guidance so generously offered. Thank you, readers

both; this book has been immeasurably strengthened by your comments. The mistakes, of course, are all mine. Enormous thanks go to those who saw me through some very dark times while I was working on this study. I owe particular debts to Farrell Burnett, John Caughie, Christine Gledhill, and Bill Melody.

It is invidious to mention below those whose friendship has been as constant, whose advice has been as good, and whose material assistance has been no less vital than that of those whom I have mentioned above. My thanks to the following for their help and support is no less sincere

than that extended to those who were acknowledged first: Florabel Campbell-Atkinson; cBc/Radio Canada in London, Montreal, Ottawa, and Toronto, and in particular Mark Blandford, Ida Entwhistle, Sam

Levene, and Margaret Lyons; the Canadian High Commission in London and the staff of its library in particular; the library of the Cinémathéque Québécois; Jean-Pierre Desaulniers; Virgil Duff; Beverley Endersby; Colin Hoskins; Ian Jarvie; Peter Lyon; Colin MacCabe; Jill

McGreal; Robin Mansell; John Meisel; Mary-Jane Miller; Pru and Stephen Muecke; Brenda Parsons; Margaret Philips; Deidre Pribram; Andrew Roman; Mel and Ruth Silver; Paul Rutherford; Tony Smith; George and Kit Szanto; Michael Tiger; and John Tulloch. ] owe important debts to many others who have been generous with

help, advice, and friendship, and, in particular, to the Canadian broadcasters, regulators, and academics who submitted to being interviewed and who remained helpful despite my wacky ideas. Because you are not acknowledged here by name, please do not think I have forgotten. Parts of this study draw on or incorporate already published writings. Those who have read any of the following will have a sense of déja lu: my

Acknowledgments xxi article on Innis in the Canadian Journal of Communication 12, no. 1; my review of Brimelow in Philosophy of the Social Sciences 18, no. 2; my article

on broadcasting and national culture in the British Journal of Canadian

Studies 3, no. 1; and the chapters on Canadian broadcasting that I contributed to The Politics of Broadcasting, edited by R. Kuhn (London: Croom Helm 1985), and New Communication Technologies and the Public Interest, edited by M. Ferguson (London: Sage 1986).

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Culture, Communication, and National Identity:

The Case of Canadian Television |

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Introduction

Canada has long recognized the importance of exclusively Canadian transportation and communication systems - from a transcontinental railway in 1883 to a trans-Canada radio network in 1927, a transCanada telephone network in 1932, a domestic geostationary communications satellite in 1972 and the first nationwide digital data system in 1973.

(Science Council of Canada 1982, 14-15)

This study reviews television policy in Canada, in particular the purport and consequences of its central objective: the strengthening of Canadian national identity. It focuses on a twenty-year period, from the passage of

the Broadcasting Act of 1968, which represented a high point in the definition of nationalist goals for Canadian broadcasters, to the late 1980s, when the death of the proposed 1988 Broadcasting Act (Bill C-136)

and successive federal-government cuts in the budget for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (csBc) signalled reassessment and revision of

the government's goals for broadcasting in Canada. A new role for Canadian broadcasting has yet to be explicitly defined by government but it is clear that important policy transitions took place during the two decades from 1968 to 1988. These emphasized the economic rather than

the cultural (and political) importance of broadcasting and espoused markets rather than administered systems as the means of achieving desired policy goals. Both emphases have resulted in a diminution of

the status of the csc relative to that of other forces in Canadian broadcasting. However, in spite of the policy shifts, some important continuities

4 Culture, Communication, and National Identity have been maintained. Though relatively less important, state and parastatal agencies are still major actors in Canadian broadcasting. And

national communication and cultural sovereignty, the goal that has informed broadcasting policy in Canada from the birth of radio, is still

ceded at least rhetorical priority in federal-government utterances, National communication sovereignty is becoming an increasingly important focus for governments. As international trade grows and an international division of labour increases, the economic and cultural unities in which people live out their lives are less and less those of the

nation. The institution of the nation-state, through which national collectivities have defined their unity and pursued their interests, is more and more an exclusively political unity. It precariously asserts its

authority over transnational economic institutions and relationships that increasingly escape its power and resists, less assertively, the consumption of exogenous culture by its nationals. Although the nation-state is assumed to be the normative political unit of the global order, many states and peoples have not shared the confident experience of symmetry between national identity and political power enjoyed

by, for example, France, Russia, England, and the United States. However, the core developed nation-states, which exemplify the assumed norm, are experiencing forces of internationalization in which national ‘language and culture are coming under increasing pressure’

(Jurgens 1982, 3). The decoupling of polity and culture, though customarily perceived as aberrant, is becoming a new international norm. Although internationalization often takes the form of ‘Americani-

zation,’ it is important to recognize that internationalization is an American experience too. It stimulates protectionist reflexes in the United States similar to those exercised by other states. But Jurgens (formerly chairman of the Dutch public-broadcasting organization NOs)

is right to identify the United States as the dominant force in the internationalization of culture. Though the membranes of international

cultural exchange are permeable, they are usually permeable in one direction only. International trade in audio-visual works (for an extensive discussion of this question, see Collins, Garnham, and Locksley 1988, 50-84) follows the general direction of international cultural flows:

from the United States to the rest of the world. The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) estimates that almost

half of ozcp production of audio-visual works is accounted for by the United States and world audio-visual trade, even more so (OECD 1986). As Jurgens states: ‘Financially we are not capable ... of pitting ourselves

Introduction 5 against the American serials with high international ratings. The Americans are pushing the smaller cultural communities aside with their dominating programming NOT because they are based ona policy,

but because they have the money, the poorer a country the more American productions’ (1982, 2, 3).

Nowhere are these international tendencies more apparent than in Canadian television. Recent European alarm at the ‘Canadianization’ of its television (e.g., Juneau 1984; Gerlach 1988) has directed attention

to the central nationalist preoccupation of Canadian communication policy: to create institutions and policies that will maintain, foster, and create national identity and preserve national unity. New distribution technologies are making possible an international information market-place that can only imperfectly be controlled by individual states. The reduction in the costs of distributing information

and potential for evasion of political controls presented by new technologies (such as communication satellites and integrated telecommunication networks) have removed barriers that formerly inhibited the globalization of information and communication markets. It is easy to exaggerate the changes that communication satellites and the Integrated

Services Digital Network (IspN) will bring but there is no doubt that technological change has alarmed many interests that perceive themselves to be threatened by a new communication order. The strengths of U.s. communication and information industries have focused international concern on the United States, and, consequently, on Canada’s experience as its neighbour; since the inception of broadcasting, Canada has experienced extensive cross-border spill over of American broadcast

signals and the integration of its population’s leisure activities into a continental, transnational culture. Resistance to centrifugal forces in Canada and the ‘continentalist’

forces in North America have been consistent themes in Canadian history and public policy. Both communications and the state have been

central to Canada’s continuing process of nation-building and selfassertion. The construction of the Intercolonial Railway (opened 1876) between the Atlantic provinces and central Canada was part of the confederation agreement; British Columbia's accession to the Canadian confederation was conditional on construction of an east—west trans-

continental railway to link it to central Canada. Alignment of the railways was determined by military and economic assessments of the

threat to Canadian interests from the United States as well as by geography. In the judgment of Sir John A. Macdonald — the first prime

6 Culture, Communication, and National Identity TABLE 1 Federal budgetary estimates 1984—5 ($ millions)

Arts and Culture program 90.4

Canada Council 69.6 Canadian Arts Centre 14.8 Canadian Broadcasting Corporation 895.7

CRTC 25.9 National Film Board 62.5

croc (Telefilm Canada) 54.8

National Library 29.8 National Museums 69.5 Public Archives 39.4 Social Sciences and Humanities

Research Council 56.9

TOTAL 1,409.4 SOURCE: Cinema Canada 126 (Jan. 1986): 9

minister of the Dominion of Canada — Canada’s existence was conditional

on assertion of east-west transcontinental links and the construction of a communication infrastructure to realize them. Since confederation, efficient communications (created largely through state agencies and

state sponsorship) have consistently been regarded as essential to Canada’s continued existence. Whether concern has been with physical communication — the Canadian Pacific and Canadian National railways, the Trans-Canada Highway, the development of Trans-Canada Airlines (later Air Canada) — or with symbolic communication ~ regulation of the telephone and telegraph systems and the establishment of the National Film Board of Canada and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation — Canada has defined communication as a matter of great importance on the public-policy agenda (see Beattie 1967).

Canada continues to support cultural production with extensive subventions in order to sustain a national communications presence and national identity (see table 1). The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation—

Radio Canada, the largest single beneficiary (64 per cent) of these policies, is the flagship of Canada’s communication and cultural policy.

The csc is also the largest single institution within Canada’s audiovisual sector. In 1982 the audio-visual production sector totalled $1,007 million (see table 2), of which cac—Radio Canada accounted for a little

Introduction 7 TABLE 2 Audio-visual production in Canada 1982 ($ millions)

CFDC 4 Feature films 20 Film production

NEB (global production expenditures) 37 Private sector (production revenues)

Television films 36

Other 2 Canada Council 3

Commercials 53 Educational and industrial 43

TOTAL Private 154 Audio-visual production by television broadcasters

cpc—Radio Canada programming 400

Other rv network programming 320

Educational Tv programming 51 Cable television programming 38

GRAND TOTAL 1,007 SOURCE: Cinema Canada 126 (Jan. 1986): 8

less than 40 per cent ($400 million) and the public sector as a whole a little

more than 49 per cent. cBc-Tv, therefore, represents close to 80 per cent of the public-sector presence in the audio-visual sector.

Although the federal government has reduced expenditure on the cultural sector during the 1980s (see table 3), its financial commitment to the audio-visual and broadcasting sector remains substantial, as table 3 shows. Canada’s preoccupation with communications is becoming general-

ized globally. Not only is the restratification of information markets remaking cultural unities, but information and’ communication are becoming more important economically. Not only is any society based on the division of labour dependent on communications for its efficient operation but communications are believed to be not simply a pre-

8 Culture, Communication, and National Identity TABLE 3

Cultural-agencies funding in constant 1984 dollars ($ thousands)

1984/5 1985/6 1986/7 1987/8 1988/9 CBC

Appropriations 904,927 824,321 789,871 784,969 772,074

Revenue 228,463 230,776 245,994 251,768 265,370

TOTAL 1,133,390 1,055,097 1,035,865 1,036,737 1,037,444 croc (Telefilm)

Appropriations 45,572 73,004 79,413 102,341 86,357

Revenue 4,412 3,717 8,557 5,/92 6,412

TOTAL 49 984 76,721 87,970 108,093 92,769 crtc Appropriations 25,251 24,066 = 24,006 «= «24,543 24,827 NFB

Appropriations 61,487 62,568 56,552 57,330 56,547

Revenue 12,749 13,049 9,596 6,018 5,958

TOTAL 74,236 79,617 66,148 63,348 62,505 SOURCE: House of Commons 1988, 354

condition of successful national and economic organization but, following Bell’s (1976) thesis of transition to a post-industrial or information society, to be themselves one of the main raisons d’étre of later-twentiethcentury economic life. Here, too, a distinctively Canadian emphasis has pre-echoed global preoccupations and exemplified a general contradiction — that between the political and ideological forces of nationalism and the forces exerted by modern mass communications.

The International Information Market

The potential growth in productive efficiency that follows both a division of labour on the basis of comparative advantage and the organization of production to serve large markets (so as to realize most fully benefits from possible economies of specialization and scale may most fully be achieved in an international context. The consequential

growth in international trade has led to increased economic interde-

Introduction 9 pendence between states. But political institutions have only imperfectly been adapted and transformed to regulate and control such transnational

economic relationships. The communications and information indus-

tries that we know as the mass média owe their existence to the

economies that different technologies of reproduction and distribution have brought to the production and marketing of information. They are a particularly early instance of internationalization. To realize potential economies, markets must be extended in time or space, or preferably both. Gutenberg’s development of printing with movable types rapidly conjured into existence a European market for printed books stretching across political boundaries, from Riga to Naples and beyond. Information has economic characteristics that amplify the tendencies towards transnational markets evident in other products. Information is imperishable and inexhaustible through consumption; it has low weight

and high value, and the marginal costs of its production are low. Internationalization of information markets for printed works has been slowed by factors of language and literacy but the internationalization of markets for audio-visual works has been less inhibited by such factors. Although linguistic and cultural competence is required to understand film and television, such competence is more easily acquired than that necessary for reading print. Consequently the ‘cultural screens’ pre-

sented by language and literacy are less important in the shaping of audio-visual markets than they are in respect of print markets — hence the global concern with the baleful influence of ‘wall-to-wall “Dallas.”’

Governments have found it relatively easy to control information when it is circulated in material form (although the past sovereignty of states over information and communication should not be overestimated;

both the Roman Catholic church and the Communist International offered potent challenges to the authority of states, and, as the u.k. government has experienced with Spycatcher, frontiers remain perme-

able to printed works) but have found it very difficult to control the propagation of radio waves over frontiers. New electronic distribution technologies make possible large transnational publics for information and culture and an international market-place that can only weakly be controlled by nation-states. Technological change is, at least potentially, globalizing the Canadian condition. Canadians have, since the inception of broadcasting, consumed U.s. radio and television voraciously. The availability of American services

has denied Canadian commercial broadcasters revenue and raised audience expectations so that Canadian programming must now offer

10 Culture, Communication, and National Identity gratifications comparable to those of u.s. productions, which are funded by a revenue pool many times larger than that in Canada. The Canadian

pool is, in any case, divided between francophone and anglophone producers; therefore, anglophone producers, those most vulnerable to competition from the United States, draw on a potential revenue base of an audience of approximately 18 million viewers (francophones, on 6 million), U.s. producers on an audience of about 240 million. The effect of this transnational competition for the attention of audiences has been

thought to de-Canadianize the imagination, as a cBc commentator put

it: ‘our historical folk heroes are not Champlain, Louis Riel, Pierre Radisson or Simon Fraser but Davy Crockett, Annie Oakley, Sitting Bull or Benjamin Franklin’ (csc 1980, 7). The appeal of u.s. television in Canada (and here the Canadian case is

internationally representative) has been particularly marked in respect of drama. Only 2 per cent of anglophone-Canadian viewing of television drama is of Canadian drama (out of a Canadian drama offer that is 2 per

cent of the total drama offer), whereas 20 per cent of francophoneCanadian drama-viewing time is of Canadian drama (out of a Canadian drama offer that is 10 per cent of the total drama offer). However, there is

a reasonably strong tendency among Canadian television viewers to consume the Canadian material offered (especially to francophones), and broadcasting policy has recently aimed to increase the Canadian

drama offer (though, as I argue later, supply and demand are not particularly closely linked) — whether through use of the stick, requiring

Canadian commercial-television broadcasters to offer more Canadian drama as a condition of licence, or the carrot, offering Telefilm Canada subsidies to producers of television drama. The Canadian experience, of the formidable qualities of attraction of American programming, is

replicated elsewhere. In the Netherlands, for example, the recent growth in the broadcasting system has been in the broadcasting societies (TRos and Veronica) that have offered audiences American

entertainment. When vara (the socialist broadcasting society that developed from the Dutch Workers’ Radio Movement) screened a day (26 April 1980) of American programming to test viewer response, 50 per cent of viewers were in favour of this twelve-hour stretch of ‘American

quizzes, serials and entertainment programmes ... televised completely [sic] with advertising spots’ (Nos 1980, 12). Integrated international markets permit the realization of potential

economies of scope and scale. But the benefits realized through production for large markets are not necessarily distributed equally or

Introduction 11 equitably. In order to redress such inequalities and inequities in the distribution of benefits, communities and individuals create political institutions — most importantly, states — to control and sometimes obstruct the development of integrated international markets, and to reallocate the fruits of production, whether they be economic or cultural/political, according to the ways of a free market. The untrammelled operation of the free market may disadvantage particular interests through an unequal or inequitable distribution of benefits. Political authorities thus assess whether the welfare of those whom such authorities serve can best be maximized either by allowing the ‘invisible hand’ of the market to maximize overall welfare but, perhaps, distribute

the welfare realized in such an arrangement unequally, or by guiding (and perhaps obstructing) the movements of the ‘invisible hand’ in order to maximize benefits for a particular location or group, even when such a policy will result in an overall diminution of welfare. Canada has long had a tradition of state intervention in markets and resistance to the full integration of its economy into a global free market. Such intervention has been realized through a variety of instruments: in particular, by

state enterprises (such as the crown corporations, of which the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation is a striking example) and by regulation, whether by statute, regulatory commission, or subsidies and incentives. Canada has been called, hyperbolically, a ‘public enterprise economy’ (Hardin 1974).

Nationalism is a belief system or ideology that asserts that the interests of acommunity, a nation, are best served through resistance to

transnationalization, and that it is only in (relatively) autonomous, economically self-sufficient and culturally homogeneous political units that individuals can protect their interests and feel at home. Canada’s

broadcasting policy is designed to realize benefits for Canadians that

they would be denied through the untrammelled operation of an international broadcasting market. It enjoys a similar rationale to that which informed Canada’s nineteenth-century National Policy, namely, to resist ‘dependency’ and subordination in integrated world markets in the belief that the welfare of Canadians can best be maximized in a Canadian economic (or broadcasting) sphere, rather than in an integrated international sphere. However, in spite of strenuous efforts to

maintain national autonomy, Canada’s broadcasting is effectively integrated in a North American — if not a global — market.

American television programming is predominant in Canada. Its presence stems from two interrelated factors: the attractiveness of

12 Culture, Communication, and National Identity American programming to Canadian audiences and the economic benefits that accrue to Canadian broadcasters and cable operators from the scheduling of American rather than Canadian programming. Canadian commercial broadcasters obtained in 1975 an average margin per

half-hour of $21,000 from scheduling foreign (i.e., u.s.) programs compared with $55 from scheduling Canadian programs (Hoskins and McFadyen 1982, 49). The financial disincentives to broadcasters scheduling Canadian programs are evident. Hoskins and McFadyen estimate that a mere fifty extra minutes of Canadian content in prime time would

reduce the average price-cost margin to zero: that is, Canadian television broadcasters would cease to make a profit. Program-makers experience a similar contradiction. A condition of international sales and a ‘track record state-side’ is international acceptability of product; thus, there are few openings for dramas that are distinctively Canadian. To be sure, there are exceptional Canadian television dramas that have achieved a significant international circulation, such as ‘Beachcombers’ (1972 onwards), ‘Empire Inc.’ (1982), and ‘Anne of Green Gables’ (1986) — csc English Services’ most successful drama, which secured audiences of 4.9 and 5.2 million Canadian viewers

for its two episodes — but even these most successful programs are unlikely to have realized a competitive return on the resources invested in them. And each of the above-mentioned examples was produced by csc with public funding (‘Anne of Green Gables’ in co-production with Kevin Sullivan Productions and with a Telefilm Canada subsidy). The

project of creating a national television drama that engages with Canadian life and experience, and proceeds from a Canadian agenda and set of national priorities, conflicts with that of creating an economically viable Canadian television-drama industry. The most commercially successful of Canada’s recent television dramas, ‘Nightheat’ (1984), co-produced with the vu.s. network css, displayed no identifiably Canadian elements in its dramatic world. Producers of the Winnipeg commercial Tv station CKND’s drama (remarkable in that it represents a substantial commitment by a Canadian commercial broadcaster to drama production) comment: ‘unless you get a track record stateside in producing a quality product you really can’t make any profit. Nothing we’ve produced and very little anybody

else has produced in Canada has made money’ (CKND president Don Brinton; cited in Moir 1983). Brinton’s views are echoed by the CKND Drama Project producer, Stan Thomas: “To break even in terms of costs

Introduction 13 in Canada is a major achievement — for profit to accrue you have to obtain international sales’ (cited in ‘Winnipeg's Filmaking Community’ in Mid Canada Commerce June 1984). There are few examples of ‘amphib-

ious’ Canadian television dramas, those that have both commercial and cultural validity. Even ‘Empire Inc.,’ which had an unprecedented success, is unlikely to realize a real commercial return on investment. An economically rational policy for Canadian television-program producers would be specialization in a program type undersupplied on the international market in which Canadians have demonstrated competence (for example, in live-action and animated children’s programming). Yet, specialization in such a form would necessitate importation of programs to fill other parts of the schedule (including drama). For cultural-nationalist reasons — one of the ensemble of non-profit-maximizing criteria that economists reductively designate as ‘externalities’ - Canada has been reluctant to follow such a policy of specialization. Instead, a major commitment in broadcasting policy in the 1980s has been to compete in a very high-cost section of the international market — drama — against producers in the United States

who have demonstrated over a long historical period their capability and competitive advantages. The Canadian commitment to increasing Canadian viewing of Canadian television drama rests on an assumption that viewing American television drama threatens Canada’s continued existence as a separate

and independent state. The csc’s evidence to the most recent of Canadian government enquiries into broadcasting policy, the Caplan/ Sauvageau Task Force on Broadcasting Policy, cogently represents this

pervasive assumption: ‘For every hour of Canadian drama on our English Tv screens there are 45 hours of American drama. No wonder we are being culturally swamped’ (cBc 1985, 11); and: ‘At the very heart of our sovereignty is our culture. There can be no political sovereignty without cultural sovereignty’ (p. 9). The csc’s judgment is supported by Canada’s Department of Communications, which stated, ‘Culture is the very essence of our national identity’ (1987, 5). The belief that cultural sovereignty and political sovereignty are mutually dependent is the core assumption on which Canadian broadcasting policy has been based. It is

an assumption widely held outside Canada and restates one of the central stipulative precepts of nationalism — that polity and culture must be congruent. It is, I believe, a mistaken assumption, as careful examination of the Canadian case will demonstrate.

14 Culture, Communication, and National Identity Media Imperialism Canada’s experience of the penetration of American media has led to its

being taken as an exemplary national instance of a world order. The thesis of ‘media imperialism’ (Schiller 1969; Smith 1980; Tunstall 1977) is

often elaborated (and tested — see Lee 1980) through discussion of the

Canadian case. Schiller’s formulation defines the thesis succinctly: ‘Canada’s radio and television air waves are dominated by American programs. Many Canadians feel, consequently, that much of the broadcasting they see and hear is not serving Canadian needs’ (1969, 79). His assertion of Canadian discontent can readily be supported by Canadians. Sandra Gathercole (a leading nationalist particularly concerned with the economic and cultural impact of the u.s. film industry on Canadian film) writes: ‘America is a media imperialist. It invented the

concept of the free flow of information to justify its own unilateral penetration of foreign markets. The country which controls the world’s film markets has not neglected to control its own. In fact, America is the most xenophobic and protectionist media market. It shares with Red China the distinction of having less hours (two percent) of its television time devoted to foreign programming than any other nation’ (1984, 41). Elihu Katz, though far from sympathetic to the line of argument initiated by Schiller, states: ‘Canada — its struggle for cultural differentiation from

the American media is paradigmatic for developing countries but cannot be explained by underdevelopment and dependence’ (cited in Lee 1980, 8).

The concept ‘media imperialism’ signifies a modality of imperialism in which the military, political, and economic sovereignty of the putative

client-state is maintained but which constitutes the cultural and

information realm as the field in which domination is exercised. Cultural

hegemony of a dominant power in a subordinate power provides the

conditions for material exploitation (and culture and information themselves may be areas for economic exploitation involving the sale of information commodities and services in ‘unequal’ exchange), whether through the sale of goods, appropriation of resources, or construction of political or military alliances. Schiller (1969, 12) identifies u.s. media imperialism as a conscious government policy, citing the statements of a

congressional committee concerned with winning the cold war and ideological operations and foreign policy: Certain foreign policy objectives can be pursued by dealing directly

Introduction 15 with the people of foreign countries, rather than with their governments. Through the use of modern instruments and techniques of communication, it is possible today to reach large or influential segments of national populations — to inform them, to influence their attitudes, and at times perhaps even to motivate them to a particular course of action. These groups in turn are capable of exerting noticeable, even decisive pressures on their governments. (Committee on Foreign Affairs, cited in Schiller 1969, 12)

Among scholars of media imperialism there is no concensus as to the degree of intentionality or ‘conspiracy’ in the ‘activities of the United

States, and different judgments exist on how far the putatively imperialistic activities of the United States have been to its economic advantage (Lee cites as an example the u.s. ‘great but unhappy flirtation’

[1980, 86] with Latin America, resulting in substantial losses to the United States); similarly, there is no agreement on how far vu.s. interests have been served by the destabilizing effect of u.s.-originated informa-

tion on existing patterns of cultural life and social organization in the states that have received American media. But the Canadian media order

has overwhelmingly been interpreted as one in which Canada’s subordination to the United States is comprehensive, disadvantageous to Canadians, and part of a pervasive dependence on the United States. Seldom is the disadvantaging of the United States and the advantaging of the importers of information considered in the literature of media. imperialism, although vu.s. interests have long objected to Canadian ‘unauthorized and uncompensated retransmission of vU.s. originated broadcasts’ (Letter to crtc from Federal Communications Commission and the Department of Commerce of the United States, cited in Caplan and Sauvageau 1986, 654). Such protests suggest that the transborder flow of U.s. signals, the prime locus of U.s. ‘media imperialism,’ is not one that unequivocally disadvantages Canada and benefits the United states. Canadian cable operators and broadcasters deliver American pro-

gramming to Canadians at low cost. This is not, as Lee (1980), the author of the most extensive reassessment of the media-imperialism thesis, suggests, because U.S. producers enjoy economies of scale (the size of successful audio-visual-software producers varies considerably; what differentiates producers who enjoy long-term success from those who do not is entrepreneurial competence and adequate capitalization),

but because they enjoy a large and chauvinistic domestic market in

16 Culture, Communication, and National Identity which high costs of production can be amortized, thus enabling vu:s. program-producers to sell abroad products that have recouped their production costs at home. It is the size (and composition) of the home market enjoyed by u.s. producers that counts, not the size of the filmor television-production organization. Market size is important because the mass media exhibit particularly low incremental costs of production. In the terms customarily used in

the newspaper industry, second- and subsequent-copy costs are far below first-copy costs. The first-copy cost of a television drama includes

the fees of creative and technical personnel, the expenses of set construction and location shooting, amortization of the costs of the production apparatus and infrastructure. The second-copy cost is little more than that of the film stock or videotape on which the program is recorded. Much of the cost of the first print of an hour’s u.s. television drama, amounting to perhaps $750,000, can be recouped in a sale to one of the

u.s. television networks (and the remainder in sales to the vu.s. syndication market). Second and subsequent copies are available for sale in foreign markets at low cost. U.s. producers of television drama have been able to command rental revenues of, characteristically, $25,000 to $40,000 per hour from the Canadian market and simultaneously generate returns greatly in excess of costs. Such competition is very hard for Canadian producers to beat, even when the Canadian

producer is bigger than the American producer with whom the Canadian competes, and therefore more likely to enjoy whatever economies of scale obtain. Although the csc is bigger than Mary Tyler Moore Productions (MTM), the csc is relatively disadvantaged in competition with MTM. For Canadians are unable to secure their first-copy costs (unless these costs are low and the product consequently unattractive in comparison with high-budget, high-production-value American product) in their domestic market. This competitive advantage enjoyed by American producers applies only to information products that are attractive to consumers in foreign markets, and not all are. However, American producers tend to enjoy more success in selling into foreign markets than do foreign producers in selling into the u.s. market (hence

the low proportion of foreign programs on U.S. screens noted by Gathercole [1984]). The reasons for this one-way flow are complex and controversial, but one important factor is undoubtedly the chauvinism

of u.s. television viewers. Their taste for endogenous and not exogenous television is exemplified in the prevalence of sales of program

Introduction 17 formats rather than programs to u.s. television by foreign producers. Rather than buying the ssc’s ‘Steptoe and Son’ or “Till Death Do Us

Part,’ u.s. television bought the formats and made ‘Sanford and Son’ and ‘All in the Family.’ Rather than Thames’s ‘Man about the House,’ u.s. television screens its version, “Three’s Company.’ But American producers experience little comparable resistance in foreign markets to ‘Dallas,’ ‘Dynasty,’ or “The Winds of War.’ The successful extension of information markets is conditional on the cultural characteristics of products being attractive to receiving consum-

ers. There are important ‘cultural screens’ that inhibit the extension of markets. American film and television viewers seem particularly well insulated from the audio-visual experiences of the rest of the world by their cultural screens. The combination of a remunerative domesticmarket resistant to foreign productions and U.s. products attractive to foreign viewers and available at low cost explain more satisfactorily than does political conspiracy the world-wide availability of American media.

It is also important to recognize that ‘media imperialism’ is not a comprehensive and monolithic phenomenon; there is, for example, little interest in Canada (or elsewhere outside the United States) in American television news. Moreover, the daily newspapers of Canada and other states are not significantly exposed to destructive competition from the u.s. daily press; there is little interest outside the United States in American news. Lee’s treatment of media imperialism (1980), though the most exten-

sive reassessment of the thesis, itself demands critique and reassessment, not least because his treatment of Canada is very unsatisfactory. Lee mistakenly conceives of Canada as an anglophone country: ‘Canada

is a unique case. It is unique in the sharing of a common language, border, ethnic state and homogenous cultural taste with the United States’ (p. 113). He underestimates the role played by the federal and provincial governments in the field of culture and communications: ‘The Canadian government has been reluctant to regulate media and culture in general with the exception of broadcasting (p. 117). This formulation neglects the National Film Board, Telefilm Canada, the regulation of the

telecommunications industry, and the existence of provincial and municipal telephony, Telesat Canada, the formation of the Régie des Services Publics, the Canada Council, Bill C-58 removing tax benefits for

advertising expenditure in non-Canadian media (effective January 1977), the provincial censorship boards, Ontario’s Bill 64 (to curtail non-Canadian influence in the distribution of printed works), and so on.

18 Culture, Communication, and National Identity Given his lack of understanding of the composition of the Canadian population and of the activities of government in Canada, it is unsurpris-

ing that Lee’s discussion of Canada is ill-focused, inadequate, and misleading. But the deficiencies in Lee’s analysis are unfortunate, for the media-imperialism thesis deserves more critical assessment than it customarily receives.

A Canadian scholar, R.-J. Ravault (1980), points out that such countries as West Germany, Japan, and the Nordic states have been able to combine negative trade balances in information goods with rising GNP

and augmentation of their economic and political power, while the anglophone media imperialists, notably the United States and the United Kingdom, have experienced relative economic and political decline. The

central proposition of the media-imperialism thesis — that there is an equivalence between national interest, identity, survival, and communication and cultural sovereignty — remains to be demonstrated. The Canadian case may well exemplify a reverse thesis — that nations can survive in robust health even when their media are, as Tunstall (1977) put it, American. The Nation-State

Implicit in media-imperialism thesis is a normative political unit of analysis — the nation-state, an institution which exercises its sovereign political authority over the economic and cultural spheres. Transnational companies and transnational information flows are offences against this assumed norm because the economic and cultural unities they form

are not congruent with the political structure of the state. Though the nation-state is the ‘building block’ out of which a model of international relations and an international political order is constructed, there are, and have been, relatively few actual states that fit the theoretical model, one based on such states as France, Spain, and Japan where a ‘nation,’ bound together by shared ethnicity, language, religion, stable frontiers, and economic interest, is politically sovereign in its own state. Of course, even in the ‘core’ nation-states counter-indications are evident. Submerged nationalities exist in all the states mentioned ahove. Gellner reminds us that ‘nationalism — the principle of homogeneous cultural units as the foundation of political life, and of the obligatory cultural unity of rules [sic] and ruled — is indeed prescribed neither in the nature of things, nor in the hearts of men, nor in the pre-conditions of social life in general, and the contention that it is so inscribed is a falsehood which

Introduction 19 nationalist doctrine has succeeded in presenting as self-evident’ (1983, 125).

Canada shares with many other states an absence of fit between its political institutions and the cultural and economic unities in which its citizens live. Much Canadian policy has been directed towards creating

a closer fit between these incongruent constituents of Canada, to Canadianizing the economy and creating a national culture. Canada exists as a state in consequence of the refusal of the political goals of the

United States and integration into a continental North American economy. It is founded on the ‘loyal’ colonies of British North America, on a conquered Nouvelle France (key members of which preferred the

British monarchical system to the American republic and its militant

‘Bostonnais’) and the migration of dispossessed and deracinated Loyalists from the United States. Its economy developed behind tariff walls rather than on a continental basis. But many of Canada’s economic activities, even before promulgation of the 1988 free-trade agreement,

are continental. Its trade unions have an important, though declining, international (i.e., organized across the 4gth parallel) element. Much of Canada’s tertiary and manufacturing sectors is owned by v.s. interests

(a smaller but significant component of Canadian business owns enterprises domiciled in the United States). And not only has much of

the culture and values of the United States proved attractive to Canadians, but much that is identified as ‘American’ and tagged with the label ‘Made in usa’ is part of the common culture of North America, of ‘Américanité,’ and could as authentically be labelled ‘Fait au Canada’ (see, inter alia, de la Garde 1985; Lamonde 1984). Moreover, Canada has

no language and symbolic culture shared by all its citizens. Canada, then, does not display the congruence between its political, cultural, and economic realms required of a nation-state. Economically and culturally much associates it with the United States, though its political institutions were conceived to differentiate Canada from the United States and establish it as a separate state. Canada’s difference from the other North American society with which it shares a continent inheres crucially in its different political and juridical systems. But the most striking sense in which Canada does not conform to the normative model of the nation-state (and is differentiated from the United States) is

in its bilingualism. Canada is also distinctive, and in nationalist terms aberrant, in that the state has an official identity of multiculturalism (‘multiculturalism and bilingualism’ has latterly displaced ‘B and B’ — ‘bilingualism and biculturalism’ - as the official Canadian ideology).

20 Culture, Communication, and National Identity Neither set of terms captures the reality of Canadian society. For the

equivalence between distinct and equal English and French facts implied in the B-and-B notion never obtained. Though less numerous than anglophones, francophones in Canada - predominantly located in

Quebec and in adjacent areas in the provinces of Ontario and New Brunswick — have a more confident sense of identity and community than do English Canadians. The Québécois are a national community, whereas English Canada exhibits important differences in the economic interests of the provinces and less-pronounced but still evident ‘cultural’ differentiations. But, as well as this differentiation between anglophone regions, which central Canada dominates, there are marked differences between the misleadingly named ‘English’ Canadians (among whom significant numbers of those of Irish, Scots, and U.S. origin are included)

and the ‘third force’: the Canadians from neither the French nor the British ‘charter’ ethnic group, sometimes known as ‘allophones.’ The importance of the ‘third force’ led to the metamorphosis in public-policy discourse of biculturalism into multiculturalism. But, whether bilingual and bicultural (8 and B) or bilingual and multicultural, Canada uneasily fits the stipulation of nationalist ideology that a state, to be stable and legitimate, must be founded on and in a community of like people bound together by, inter alia, a shared language and culture.

In spite of Canada’s long and comprehensive commitment to a nationalist communication and cultural policy (for, in order to conform to the nationalist precept of a congruence between polity and culture, states may create nations as nations may create states) Canada does not have a national culture. Meisel comments: ‘Anyone who has even the

scantest acquaintance with life in Montreal and Toronto say, or Vancouver, cannot miss the rich consequence of this cultural identity for

the French Canadian as compared to the relative absence of an indigenous and unique culture of English Canada’ (1973, 187). Wilden echoes Meisel in his audaciously titled The Imaginary Canadian and refers to Canada as ‘Notland’: ‘not English, not American, not Asian, not European, and especially not French’ (1980, 1). MacLennan’s (1945) metaphor of ‘two solitudes’ for Canada retains its potency, and within

the single solitude of English Canada there are remarkably separate communities. (There are important arguments for the presence in English Canada of the cultural identity that Wilden, Meisel, and others have denied — see, inter alia, McGregor 1985 — but no writers, to my knowledge, argue that there is a common Canadian symbolic culture that embraces anglophone and francophone Canadians.) Yet, Canada

Introduction 21 holds together as a political institution, a state, very well. The absent fit

between nation(s) and political institutions in Canada clearly has tensions and insecurities (the slumbering giant of Quebec nationalism, the unsatisfied hunger in English Canada for identity in a nation-state of the good old-fashioned kind), but what is most striking about Canada is

not how imperilled a state it is, albeit it ill meets the stipulations of nationalism, but rather how unimportant those stipulations are. Canada is aremarkably stable and successful state. It is best understood in terms of Ramsay Cook’s (1977) brilliant aphorism that Canada is a nationalist state, not a nation-state. Although my focus is on Canada’s broadcasting policy, itis not only in

that context that Canada’s putatively absent centre is designated as a problem. In their Absent Mandate (1984) Clarke et al. describe Canada’s political culture as vitiated for similar reasons. ‘One conclusion which

can be drawn from our studies is that it is extremely difficult for any government to obtain a true policy mandate’ (p. 171). They argue that government in Canada is unable to realize comprehensive policy realignments because of the variety of interest groups that make up the

Canadian polity and the necessity for politicians to act as broker between them. For example, they claim that ‘the fragility of national identity and the competing attraction of regional politics were thought to compel an appeal to all interests and never to allow the parties to appear too committed to advancing the interests of a single group’ (p. 11). Their judgment is obviously open to empirical challenge, but my

purpose in citing Absent Mandate is not to endorse or challenge the judgment it makes on Canada’s system of government but to show that a view of Canada as a society lacking a centre is not peculiar to those concerned with communication and cultural policy. The advantages of Canada’s ‘identity problem’ have not customarily been considered. But it may be that an important political achievement such as the incorporation of Newfoundland into Canada was untroubled because neither partner, Canada or Newfoundland, found itself

faced with a loss of identity in the union (though clearly some Newfoundlanders, as the referenda prior to accession in 1949 showed, feared such a loss). The successful integration of the ‘third force’ of Canadians of non-British and non-French origin (in some areas such as

the Prairies over 50 per cent of the population) has been similarly untroubled. Indeed, the pragmatic adaptation of Canada’s party system

to this characteristic of the Canadian polity (seen by the authors of Absent Mandate as a negative characteristic of Canada’s political system)

22 Culture, Communication, and National Identity may be seen positively. ‘Canada’s political party system ... remained a collection of brokerage parties, honed to perfection over decades to be pragmatic institutions best at resolving conflicts and spreading benefits among competing interests, areas and social groups’ (Clarke et al. 1984,

175). But, notwithstanding these achievements, and their possible roots in the absence of a clearly defined Canadian identity that, as a consequence of its integrating and inclusive actions, would necessarily exclude, there are many Canadians who experience that lack of congruence between Canada’s economy, its culture, and its political institutions as profoundly disturbing. In both English and French Canada there are advocates of a classic nationalism, urging expression of the identity of the separate Canadian

nations in their own political institutions, their own states. Though advocates of the break-up of Canada are in a minority, the appeal of old-style nationalism, with its seductive prospect of a national domestic hearth, a national family, and walls to keep the warmth and family in

and the cold and foreigners out, maintains a powerful claim on the imagination of Canadians.

In contrast, Pierre Trudeau (see, in particular, Trudeau 1968) advanced the distinctive argument that Canada is a new kind of human community (not a poor approximation to the old, nation-state, kind),

which therefore offers the possibility of a new kind of national community. But his arguments have raised few echoes. Yet, Canada,

though deficient as a national home of the old-fashioned kind, has successfully created a tolerant, prosperous, and decent community, which Trudeau customarily named ‘the peaceable kingdom.’ It has done

so in conditions that will increasingly prevail across the world: an internationalized economy and culture, the experience of substantial population movements, striking differences in economic interest and values among its population, and important differences in legislation (especially social legislation, e.g., on abortion, access to health care, insurance, and pensions) obtaining in different localities within the federation. Trudeau is right; tomorrow’s world will be governed by the

same forces that have borne hard on Canada (though the world will have good reason for satisfaction if these forces are turned to such advantage and with so little damage to civil liberties as they have been in Canada). Canada has had to invent political institutions and a civil society able

to accept multiple religions and ethnicities among its population, competent to adapt to an international economy (with its attendant

Introduction 23 division of labour and decoupling of control and ownership from firms’

domicile) and able to accommodate the differences in language and

values of Canada’s founding peoples. Of course, this process of adaptation and accommodation has been uncomfortable and remains precarious. But Trudeau’s recognition of Canada’s achievement and Canada’s potential to act as a role model for an internationalizing world has not been incorporated into the Canadian self-image. Rather the phenomena that, from a Trudeauesque optic, are achievements and advantages still appear as problems. Canada is a new kind of community, misrecognized by old-style nationalism. The irony is that old-style nationalism is dominant in Canada. The Inheritance of Nationalism Cook rightly states that ‘nationalism is more than outward symbols; it is also the articulated will of a community to preserve its distinctiveness’

(1988, 85). The ethos that sprang from Nouvelle France and from Loyalism and is sustained by the interdependence demanded by, among other factors, the Canadian climate is very different from the individualistic ethos of the United States. Assent to the collective interest is a central Canadian value. While there are vituperative disputes as to whether that interest is best realized by, for example, cross-subsidies in transportation and telecommunications or by pricing services on a cost basis, the terms of the debate remain ones in which the ultimate value deferred to (whether disingenuously or not) is that of the good of the whole community. Whether articulated ironically by Crean

and Rioux recounting the winner of a competition to complete the phrase ‘as Canadian as ...’ as being ‘as Canadian as possible under the circumstances’ (1983, 17); or positively by Massey: ‘Nothing is more characteristic of Canadians than the inclination to be moderate’ (cited

in Russell 1966, 23); or negatively by Watt: ‘indistinctness, apathy, uncertainty of behaviour, this facelessness is beginning to be recognized

as a national characteristic’ (1966, 24), there is an effacement of aggressive individualism in Canada that is distinctive and attractive. Although there is no ‘national question’ in the United States, where there is a substantially untroubled understanding by Americans of what it is to be American and of where the United States begins and ends, there is little evidence, at levels between the national and those of individuals’ direct experience, of recognition of community in the United States. There is, notoriously, in the great American cities no

24 Culture, Communication, and National Identity community experience. While neighbourhood associations clean and care for their local railway station, no such sense of shared interest and perception of community property attaches to the whole of a u.s. urban transit system. In the Canadian cities, there is, it is again a truism to remark, not just affiliation to neighbourhood — whether Rosemont or Rosedale — but to the city as a whole, to its property, to the public as well

as the private spheres, and to individuals sharing in a community articulated at many levels. But Canada’s is a distinctive society, and an important element of that distinctiveness is its weak national symbolic culture. The acceptance of difference, not just between Canada’s two language communities but also between the two ‘charter’ groups and the ‘third force,” has permitted a very varied, tolerant society to develop under a single political roof. A consequence of that political achievement has undoubtedly been ‘a bland bilingual, multicultural papulum’ (Crean and Rioux 1983, 12). Crean and Rioux are quite correct to point out the

cultural consequences of the bilingual and bicultural project of Trudeau’s Canada: ‘Such processed unity may fit the political idea of the country (two languages many cultures) but it denies the existence of our two national societies and trivializes the authentic regional divergencies

in our cultures’ (p. 12). The choice is one between the new kind of

society, of decoupled polity and culture, that Trudeau saw as a possibility for Canada: ‘Canada could become the envied seat of a form

of federalism that belongs to tomorrow’s world. Better than the American melting pot’ (1968, 178-9), and old-style nation-states, in which political institutions correlate as closely as possible with anterior ‘national’ cultural characteristics. In Canadian broadcasting neither option has been decisively chosen. Hétu and Renaud (1987) point out that there is a significant absence of Canadian television programming that represents French to English Canada and vice versa. The reason is obvious: each Canadian ‘nation’ produces for its own community, its own ‘culture.’ Following the imperatives of cultural nationalism and preserving the distinctiveness of the existing English- and French-Canadian societies further entrenches the separateness of the ‘two solitudes’ and the absent correspondence between the political structures of the Canadian state and the cultural identities of its citizens. Although Hétu and Renaud (1987), and others, have established a pervasive absence of representation of the two Canadas to each other, it has to be recognized that the difficulties of such cultural brokerage are particularly strong in television drama, the program form that has been

Introduction 25 the neuralgic point of Canadian broadcasting policy in the 1980s. What subjects are there around which English- and French-Canadian experience could plausibly be brought into contact? Marriage was the solution found in Robin Spry’s Je me souviens (CBC 1979); the history of a business ‘titan’ in Montreal was tried in ‘Empire Inc.’ (cBc 1982); the bilingual civil

service in Ottawa remains to be essayed. But the real successes in one

community are seldom transferable to the other. ‘Duplessis’ (Radio Canada 1977) is an excellent case in point; ‘Lance et Compte’ (Radio Canada 1986-8) another. The first two series of ‘Lance et Compte’ attracted such small audiences in English Canada (although the final episode of the first series achieved 2.7 million francophone viewers) that the third series is not to be shown to anglophone audiences. As Trudeau

pointed out, the boundaries within which a nation exists, and which define political institutions and a state, are not necessarily, nor should they necessarily, be the same. The precariousness of the distinctive Canadian unity in difference and refusal to make the political, economic, and cultural conform to each other has been palpably demonstrated by Québécois separatist national-

ism. But it is the actual historical outcome not the what-might-havebeen that requires comprehension and explanation. Canada has hung together. Fortunately for the continued survival of Canada as a distinct society, the promiscuous consumption by each language community of

American television drama, and the weak consumption by each Canadian language community of programming from the other, do not seem to have seriously threatened Canada’s political stability. There is no significant English-Canadian movement seeking political union with the United States in order to bring political identity, citizenship, into line with cultural practice, which so prominently features consumption of American television. Canadians have a stronger community than their nationalist intelli-

gentsia allow. The hypothesis of a weak linkage between cultural consumption and political identities seems to fit the Canadian case better than does the reverse thesis dominant among Canadian commu-

nication scholars and Canadian nationalists. Canada’s origins lie in refusal of the political goal of the United States. But this refusal was a choice made by English Canadians — French Canadians were a conquered people and had no choice other than to follow their masters —

and it is in English Canada that fear of Americanization is most powerful, for it is there that the attractions of America are strongest. If nations are bound together by language, culture, ethnicity, then English

26 Culture, Communication, and National Identity Canada has (as Brimelow [1986] argues) more in common with the United States than with French Canada. Consequently English Canadians who wish to insist on separation and difference from the United States must, if they believe (as, being nationalists, they tend to do) that there is a close link between political and cultural identities, reject American culture. But those who argue a close link between political and cultural identities are faced with a contradiction. If their argument carries weight, then the presence of English and French Canada in the same political unit is, as Kedourie states, ‘a monstrosity of nature’ (1966). The monstrous nature of the Canadian confederation is a familiar motif of Québécois nationalism. But few English-Canadian nationalists have had the courage of Susan Crean (Crean and Rioux 1983) to follow this argument to its logical conclusion — two nations and separation of

English Canada and Quebec (the inconvenient 20 per cent of nonfrancophone Quebeckers and 20 per cent of non-Québécois French Canadians aside). Trudeau’s analysis is quite different and takes the case of Canada as the starting-point for a new paradigm of nationalism, rather than trying to fit the Canadian case uncomfortably into the Procrustean bed of the

old. His theory decouples cultural from political identity, as his co-national Desaulniers puts it: ‘in terms of nationality a person is either

Canadian or not, but culturally one may be Canadian in varying degrees’ (1987, 151), a procedure that makes better sense of the Canadian situation of stable and flexible political institutions, an absence of popular desire for closer political association with the United States, but a substantial shared “‘Américanité’ in daily life and experience. (Trudeau’s political practice was, of course, not wholly congruent with his theory. His governments, as Brimelow [1986] vituperatively reminds us, recruited support among nationalist élites through nationalist cultural policies.)

Winner and Losers Canadian resistance to a continental or international market economy derives from the belief that inequalities in distribution c‘ the benefits from an integrated market would render Canada, and Canadians, worse

off than they would be in an administered national market. The nineteenth-century national economic policies and the government's sponsorship of a railway system from coast to coast (A mari usque ad mare) were political initiatives to check Americanization and promote

Introduction 27 Canadianization of economic life. Canada’s broadcasting policy has been based on a similar belief: that an integrated continental information market is disadvantageous to Canadian interests. Canada’s national economic policy was one that accepted the inefficiencies of a national rather than continental market in exchange for augmented national economic

security (by ensuring that the Canadian economy was diversified and not excessively dependent on a few products that would be vulnerable to fluctuations in international trade) and retention of wealth and jobs created by economic activity within Canadian frontiers. But, though an international market does not necessarily distribute benefits equally or equitably, neither, necessarily, does an administered national market. The national policy of the nineteenth century transferred wealth from primary producers, particularly wheat farmers in western Canada, to manufacturers, principally located in central Canada, by raising the prices of imported manufactured goods to the levels at which Canadian manufactured goods could be profitably sold. And the building of the railways, notoriously, transferred public resources into private hands, so much so that the confederation agreement was attacked as a ramp for the railway interest. Paying for the cpr involved gouging Prairie farmers through high freight rates, the sale of lands granted to the railway, and so on. No less than did the national economic policy does a national cultural policy involve transfers of resources through which some win

and others lose. As in the nineteenth century, the winners in the twentieth century are predominantly located in the Toronto—Ottawa ~Montreal triangle, where cultural production, including the headquarters of the television networks, is predominantly located (see Hardin [1985] for a savage attack from the periphery on the central Canadian core’s control of the political system through which, Hardin argues, the

core favours itself and disadvantages the periphery). This general imbalance is reflected in the cBc’s allocation of resources, which favours its network rather than its regional operations: English network, $248.7

million, and French network, $165.5 million (total $414.2 million); English regional Tv at nineteen stations, $141.7 million, and French regional Tv at twelve stations, $45.8 million (total $187.5 million) (cBc 1983, 73). But, although the benefits of Canadian state policy have been unequally distributed, it is possible that even those who are relatively disadvantaged are better off, as a consequence of the state’s intervention in the market, than they would otherwise have been. Polls suggest that a majority of Canadians support government subsidies for the broadcasting sector. The Department of Communications reported (1982) that 69

28 Culture, Communication, and National Identity per cent of those polled (2,050 Canadians aged eighteen or older and living in settlements of a population of more than 10,000) favoured government support for broadcasting and 51 per cent favoured federalgovernment support. Nationalist economic and cultural policies depend for their legitimacy on their ability to deliver to consumers valued services that would not otherwise be enjoyed. Administered systems do not necessarily have allocative efficiency superior to that of admittedly imperfect markets. The degree to which consumer interests are served by specific policies, whether of an administered or market nature, cannot be predicted by pointing, depending on parti pris, to the flaws in political or capitalist markets; rather, evaluation of any particular organizational arrangements requires investigation and consideration of its specific characteristics. Rather than recourse to advocacy, based on a prior assumption that either administered or market allocations are necessarily to be preferred, broadcasting requires particularly careful attention, for the signals sent in the imperfect broadcasting market are often misleading. Conclusions about consumer preferences cannot confidently be drawn from the pattern of consumption of broadcasting services. Because of market imperfections, for example the tendency of advertising-financed systems to serve the needs of advertisers rather than audiences, many broadcasting markets — including those of Western Europe and Canada ~— have wholly or partially substituted an administered public-service system for a deficient market regime. However, an administered, public-service broadcasting system shares with advertising-financed market systems a very attenuated feedback from consumers to producers and is also subject, as are market systems, to ‘capture’ by élites who exercise their power (cynically or innocently) to serve their own rather than collective interests. In administered broadcasting systems, as in advertising-financed systems, it is hard to know what consumers want, and easy for producers to ignore consumers’ desires. Ratings suggest only what listeners and viewers prefer among available alternatives. Because of the complexity of the products, the programs offered, an important channel of feedback from consumers to producers is through critics who ‘broker’ between consumers and producers via (principally) the medium of print. The values and beliefs of this intermediate stratum of intellectuals are important intervening variables in the signalling system between consumers and producers of broadcasting. The mediation performed by this stratum of intellectuals affects the profile of broadcasting goods and services offered.

Introduction 29 In the United Kingdom (and in most of Europe), broadcasting services

have long been provided by public-sector organizations, which, insulated from the pressures of competition and the market, have often lost contact with popular taste. The ssc’s successive loss of audiences to

Radio Luxembourg and Normandie in the inter-war years, to the American Forces Network during the Second World War, to commercial television in the 1950s, and, in the 1980s, to what is estimated (New York Times 20 Sept. 1984, A17) to be 104 on- and off-shore pirate radio stations

serving the United Kingdom are eloquent reminders of the perils of a broadcasting regime created to rectify the deficiencies of the capitalist market. The precipitous drop in Ral’s audiences after the Tele Biella judgment (and thus its effective loss of monopoly of Italian broadcasting services) testifies that this phenomenon is not simply a peculiarity of the English. The preference of audiences for the ‘American’ (whether or not

made in the United States) products, gratifications, and values often denied them by a paternalistic state testifies that the imperfections in the

broadcasting market are not exclusively confined to the for-profit and advertising-financed sectors and to a patrician current of élitism and oppressive earnestness in the public sector.

The tv Audience Canadians watch about twenty-four hours of television each week (Doc

1987, 59). Overall, English-Canadian television viewing is skewed towards American programming: only 29 per cent of the viewing time of anglophones is spent watching Canadian programs. French Canadians,

in contrast, devote 68 per cent of their viewing time to Canadian material. But there are important differences in the proportion of Canadian and foreign programming watched by each Canadian language community for different program forms. Some Canadian television programming is widely consumed and

valued; notably news, public affairs, and sports. Canadian news commands 81 per cent of anglophone and 100 per cent of francophoneCanadian viewing; Canadian public affairs, 62 per cent of anglophone and 98 per cent of francophone viewing; and Canadian sports, 79 per

cent of anglophone and 98 per cent of francophone viewing. But in ‘performance programming’ (drama, variety/music/quiz), the type of programming that accounts for most television viewing, anglophones watch more foreign than Canadian programming: only 2 per cent of drama viewing is of Canadian drama, and only 18 per cent of viewing of

30 Culture, Communication, and National Identity variety/music/quiz programming is devoted to Canadian offerings. Francophones spend 20 per cent of their drama-viewing time watching Canadian drama (but 87 per cent of their viewing of variety/music/quiz

programs is devoted to Canadian offerings) (Caplan and Sauvageau 1986, 96-7). The extensive, 731-page, Report of the Task Force on Broadcasting Policy

(referred to as the Caplan/Sauvageau Report), the most recent of Canadian government reports on broadcasting, states that ‘Canadians watch Canadian performance programming in proportion to its availability’ (1986, 128). Caplan and Sauvageau conclude that there is an unsatisfied demand for Canadian performance programming. But this

judgment does not seem to be borne out by the evidence. For the proportions of Canadian programming offered and consumed match only exceptionally, notably in the case of English-Canadian drama. The task force was wrong to conclude that an increased offer of Canadian television drama to anglophone-Canadian viewers will necessarily produce a rise in consumption. It cannot be reasonably concluded that

consumption will always rise to match supply. Indeed, a study (Harrison, Young, Pesonen, and Newell 1986) of the Canadian television audience commissioned by the task force (but referred to only once in the task force’s report, without mentioning the study’s conclusions) concludes: ‘English language Canadian Drama tends to be unpopular.

There are of course dramatic exceptions but generally when nonCanadian Drama is scheduled against Canadian Drama, the viewer moves to the popular - non Canadian’ (p. 110). It is unlikely that an increase in the supply of unpopular products will produce a proportion-

al increase in consumption. Nowhere in the task force’s report is Harrison, Young, Pesonen, and Newell's conclusion mentioned, nor does the task force offer any evidence to support its key judgment that ‘Canadians watch Canadian performance programming in proportion to its availability’ (Caplan and Sauvageau 1986, 128). Much of the statistical evidence cited in the ‘Programs and Audiences’

chapter of the Caplan/Sauvageau Report is replicated in the cBc’s application to the crtc (Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission) for renewal of its television network licences (cBc 1986) — perhaps not surprising, for Caplan and Sauvageau acknowledge

that the statistics cited in that chapter of their report are based on information compiled by Barry Kiefl and others of csc Research. Like

Caplan and Sauvageau, the csc argues that availability of Canadian performance programming is the decisive factor determining

Introduction 31 whether or not Canadians view Canadian drama and variety/music/quiz programs: In such program area as news, public affairs and sports, a choice now exists between Canadian and foreign programs of the same type. Unfortunately this is not the case in the areas of drama or varietymusic-quiz programs. Yet, when the choice between a Canadian and foreign program of the same type exists, Canadians are just as likely to choose the Canadian alternative as the foreign one. This is shown by the current shares that Canadian drama and variety-music-quiz programs obtain on French television and the large audiences attracted by the drama series and specials carried by the cBc English Television Network. (cBc 1986, 201)

This is pardonable special pleading from the cBc, concerned to secure a

licence renewal from the crtTc. But, in fact, neither in performance programming nor in other television forms is there a close correlation between offer and consumption by Canadian viewers. Francophone viewers watch twice as much Canadian drama as would be the case were availability proportional to consumption (Caplan and Sauvageau 1986, 94). And, though there is a one-to-one correlation between anglophone viewing and availability of Canadian drama (2 per cent Canadian, 98 per

cent foreign) in the variety/music/quiz programming category, 25 per cent Canadian programming is offered and only 18 per cent is viewed by anglophones (Caplan and Sauvageau 1986, 95). Moreover, were availability and viewing to be positively correlated, audiences would not be exercising choices in their viewing. Each service would take an audience

share in proportion to the number of services. It is only in monopoly conditions that such audience behaviour obtains. Caplan and Sauvageau argue a simple relationship between supply and consumption. Because Canadians consume too little Canadian drama, the supply should be increased. It is clear that the increase in the supply of Canadian television drama advocated by the task force will advantage suppliers (hence the csc’s adoption of the task force’s argument), but since the existing Canadian-

drama offer seems to be avoided by viewers, it is not clear how consumer interests will be served by such a policy. Indeed, Caplan and Sauvageau consistently advocate producer rather than consumer interests. Their major proposal was for a Tv Canada satellite-to-cable service to be financed by a compulsory levy on cable operators (doubtless the

32 ‘Culture, Communication, and National Identity increased costs were to be transmitted to subscribers rather than being

borne by the cable enterprises). The task force further advocated payments to u.s. broadcasters in compensation for Canadian retransmission of their signals. The task force’s intention in introducing charges for services hitherto enjoyed by Canadian viewers without cost was to raise the cost of reception of U.s. signals, and thus promote substitution of Canadian for American products. Caplan and Sauvageau argue: ‘If a price had been attached to the importing and re-transmission of signals it is likely that the efforts of cable operators and the crtc would have been directed to other methods for increasing program choice beside the importing of foreign signals’ (p. 655). Introduction of retransmission rights is likely to result simply in increased revenue flows to the United States, rather than the decrease in consumption of U.s. services and substitution of Canadian services anticipated by the task force. Doubtless there is a price at which Canadian viewers would

decide u.s. services are too costly and would substitute cheaper Canadian services for the u.s. services forgone. But Caplan and Sauvageau offer no estimates of the charge level required to initiate this virtuous circle nor did the task-force consider whether introduction of

charges sufficient to dissuade Canadians from viewing U.s. services would be politically possible. The most likely outcome of an imposition

of retransmission rights (at the levels established in comparable instances, such as the retransmission of BBC signals by cable networks in

Belgium) would be no significant decrease in the consumption of U.s. services by Canadian viewers but an increased outflow of revenues from Canada to the United States.

The Intellectuals and the Idea of National Culture Ratings are, at best, indices of audience behaviour and are not a good

guide to audience demand. And ratings do not identify the specific components of programs that arouse the dislike or liking of audiences. Consequently, the qualitative response of critics’ and élite opinion to

programs and schedules, indicating which aspects of a program or schedule are valued, performs an important role in feeding back information from consumers to producers. To understand the ‘dialogue’ (admittedly, a very unequal exchange) between television viewers and producers, we need to consider not only ratings but also the signals sent

by élite opinion, which both shape audience response to television’s output and, more important, stand in for the unarticulated qualitative

Introduction 33 response of actual viewers to programming. Critics send signals to producers in the name of the general audience. The intellectuals who send such signals, and fill the feedback vacuum between viewers and producers of television, are significant beyond their numbers. The orientation to television and to popular taste of the intellectuals in each of Canada’s national communities is significantly different. The relatively successful attraction and retention of Canadian audiences by francophone television drama are not solely functions of the protec-

tive screen afforded by the French language that partially insulates francophone-Canadian culture from the influences of the United States (though undoubtedly this is a very important factor) but also stem from Quebec’s distinctive cultural formation, which has critics and producers who are more sensitive to popular taste than is customarily the case in English Canada.

In English Canada, the predominantly nationalist reflexes of the intellectuals (Meisel contends that ‘nationalism among English speaking

Canadians is a middle class phenomenon ... particularly numerous among those ... who make their living primarily through symbolic communication’ (1973, 201) generate a series of influential misrecogni-

tions; Caplan and Sauvageau’s argument that Canadian audiences’ underconsumption of Canadian performance programming is the result of the undersupply of such programming is a case in point.

Perhaps most important is the misrecognition of the qualities in American Tv drama and consequential misunderstanding of the reorientation of English-Canadian drama necessary to recapture the EnglishCanadian audience. The question is not one of either Canadian drama

or U.s. drama, for such a framing of the problem implies that Canadian drama and culture must be categorically different from u.s. drama and culture. Such assumptions misrecognize popular forms as the exclusive property of the United States and inhibit a creative appropriation of them by Canadian producers. In contrast, recent work in Quebec

(for example, de la Garde 1985; Lamonde 1984) has focused on the positive appropriation of American influence by Quebec, on a relationship of cultural synthesis rather than cultural imperialism. As de la Garde states: In Quebec the majority of the people are, in one way or another, in contact with the u.s. dominated market culture, and have been for the greater part of the twentieth century. This conclusion is borne out by increasing historical research on Quebec’s population culture (Mont-

34 Culture, Communication, and National Identity petit 1983, Weiss 1976, Cotnam 1977). This raises the question of the impact of audience reception and demands on the molding of mass market culture over the long term. It is safe to assume that this French speaking society in North America, which evolved from an extension of 17th century France into something which is neither

: French nor English nor truly American, is polycultural in the sense that within Quebec’s boundaries, as within all industrialized societies, co-exist competiting cultures: national, elitist, religious, popular, and the culture of the market or culture for the masses (Morin 1962). Each and every culture has its history and each and every history is intertwined with the others. The point made here is that, firstly, the u.s. dominated market culture touches the majority of the Quebec population and is in more or less direct competition with Quebec’s other cultures; secondly, this market culture is not recent; thirdly, this did not come about through invasion neither political nor military but through economic domination of the markets, both material and cultural: fourthly, this could not have come about without the active participation of the audience-buyers. In other words, the literature on active audience research can be applied on a macro-historical scale. There seems to be evidence that, over the years, through a very complex process of ‘négociations’, a mass audience from a predominantly French rural, catholic, conservative society has adopted, adapted, assimilated, integrated and negotiated for themselves a culture — a ‘vision du monde’ or world perspective of themselves and of others — which is largely based on mass produced and media distributed products, initially for and in an alien society (United States), and which sets well with the French speaking urban, secularized, industrialized North American society which is Quebec. (1985, 9)

In English Canada, by contrast, nationalist cultural policies — to return to Cook’s valuable distinction (1977) — inhibit the creation of a national culture and a nationally viewed television drama (of course, there are

deserved Canadian successes such as ‘Anne of Green Gables’ [cBc 1986], but such exceptions are misleading if taken as representative). For the cultural-nationalist insistence on evidently Canadian cultural mark-

ings in television programming tends to estrange such programming from the tastes of viewers. And when, as in ‘Empire Inc.’ (1982), a successful Canadianization of ‘continental’ forms (the mini series, the businessman hero) is achieved, Canadian cultural producers manifest unease about the ‘Continental,’ popular, and ‘un-Canadian’ characteris-

Introduction 35 tics of the resulting production. In the case of ‘Empire Inc.,’ the National Film Board of Canada, a production partner, declined to support further

the work of its producer. Meisel characterizes the English-Canadian situation in very different terms from those used by de la Garde to describe Quebec. De la Garde emphasizes the voluntary, bottom-up nature of Quebec’s appropriation of elements of North American popular culture; Meisel, the strenuous pressures from the top down, aimed at forestalling just such a process. The elite ... believes that it must do everything in its power to enable everyone to learn to enjoy the best and to resist the dulling artistic and intellectual pacifiers of rapacious interests in the media. Those who ‘know better’ have a responsibility to help less enlightened citizens and public resources ought to be allocated for this purpose. It is difficult to dissociate from this position a somewhat paternalistic conviction ...

Those who espouse it assume that the general public does not know, nor care enough about these things; it needs to be led, even if reluctantly, to a fuller aesthetic enjoyment of life. (Meisel 1973, 243)

National culture is a difficult concept. It is assuming the status of a simple category error as cultural production and consumption become increasingly transnational. In Canada the term has a very awkward status, since Canada is not a nation-state in any accepted sense and its two language communities share few cultural bonds —- unless, that is, the term ‘culture’ obscures more than it reveals. There are notorious

difficulties of definition and ambiguities attached to the category ‘culture’ (Williams 1976, 1981). Two important usages of the term ‘culture’ signify, first, the ‘anthropological’ markings of a community —

its laws, systems of authority, daily practices and routines — and, second, its symbolization and representation of itself. In the second sense, Canada has a weak national culture: there is little exchange of symbolic goods between its two language communities, and television, the medium on which this study focuses, does not play a major role in such exchanges as do exist. Rather, English and French Canada’s shared

symbolizations are those that are shared with the United States: American films, television, and music.

But, in the first, anthropological, sense, Canada does have a clear national culture that (with important interprovincial differences in health and auto insurance, taxation, employment profile, degree of secularization, religious affiliation, and so on) differentiates Canada

36 Culture, Communication, and National Identity from the United States and binds English and French Canada together (notably, a common legal system [with exceptions such as the Quebec civil code and the regulations prohibiting lawyers who are a member of one province’s bar pleading out of province], a shared federal government and civil service, national armed forces, the Rcmp, and so on). It is in the anthropological culture, the institutions of government, and the routines of daily life that Canada’s national culture inheres; in its

health-insurance and welfare plans, its redistributive social ethos, its more deferential ‘European’ attitudes to authority, its social peace, its

relative absence of racism, its qualities of ‘peace, order, and good government,’ and so on.

In contrast, there is a scanty shared repertoire of symbols that circulates widely in both of Canada’s linguistic communities, and very little ‘amphibious’ television drama. The success of the 1986—7 Radio Canada series ‘Lance et Compte’ in Quebec and failure with anglophone audiences is but the most recent manifestation of a continuing pattern

that is pervasive in Canadian television and not simply confined to drama. Hétu and Renaud (1987) point out that the csc’s ‘Nature of Things,’ a series produced for twenty-seven years and sold in thirty countries, has never been shown in Canada in French. They further point out in their analysis of magazine programs that ‘l'information collective, celle qui crée une reconnaissance commun d’une réalité commune, celle qui est a la base d’un sentiment d’appartenance et d’identification 4 une nation n’existerait donc qu’a travers onze émissions, dont trois francophones ne rendent compte que du Québec et huit anglophones ne citant que le Canada anglais’ (Hétu and Renaud 1987, 48).

The stability and integrity of the Canadian state, despite the absence

of a Canadian symbolic culture and the pervasive presence in both francophone and anglophone groups of exogenous American culture, suggests that there is a relatively weak link between, on the one hand, the strength of political institutions and citizenship and, on the other hand, leisure consumption of the symbols we designate as culture (of which television is the most important). Insofar as a national culture has been defined in Canada (that is, a common repertoire of symbols that informs the outlook of Canadians and differentiates that outlook from that of other nations), the definitions advanced have differentiated the Canadian from the popular. They have divided the taste of the Canadian masses from what is deemed to be distinctively Canadian. If Canadian culture is concerned

Introduction 37 with the question ‘Where is here?’ (Frye 1971) and the Canadian fate is that of humiliation and victimization (Atwood 1972), and the Canadian project, one of survival rather than transformation, then documentary dramas such as csc’s ‘For the Record’ series are distinctively Canadian. But they score poorly in the ratings when shown to Canadian viewers.

State versus Market: Changes in Policy Emphasis

Completion of this study fell between the publication of the Caplan/ Sauvageau Report (Report of the Task Force on Broadcasting Policy 1986) and

the anticipated tabling of a long-promised new broadcasting act for Canada. The 1988 broadcasting bill C-136, which fell as a consequence of

Canada’s general election (and the minister of communication’s losing

her parliamentary seat), provided but one symptom of an enduring Canadian concern with broadcasting policy, a concern that, in spite of government's continued attention, has produced no policy consensus or stable broadcasting order. Tiger (1985) points out that between 1928 and 1978 there were thirteen policy commissions and five revisions of the broadcasting acts in Canada. Since 1978 there have been numerous other important broadcasting policy initiatives, including the Applebaum/Hébert Report (1982), the policy reviews of the last Liberal

government (DOC 1983a, 1983b, 1983c, 1984), the auditor general's report on the csc (1984), the Caplan/Sauvageau Report (1986), the Conservative government’s statement Vital Links: Canadian Cultural Industries (Doc 1987), the House of Commons standing committee report

A Broadcasting Policy for Canada (House of Commons 1988), and the broadcasting bill (Bill C-136) of 1988.

Latterly, some Canadians have identified new communication technologies, and the new forms of market stratification they make possible,

as agencies that may deliver what decades of state regulation and government attention to broadcasting policy (symbolized by the plethora of reports) have not. Lyman (1983) argues: Cultural content itself is also showing signs of global formulation through joint venture and other arrangements thus diminishing the overwhelming American presence of the past. Transnational joint ventures in cultural productions, particularly in television and film, are increasing. Both the specialty and blockbuster projects are attracting international teams of artists, technicians and producers. They are also reflecting a more diverse set of cultural backgrounds and values.

38 Culture, Communication, and National Identity Global and regional culture are both strengthened by improving distribution because of the increased efficiencies in reaching international audiences. Therefore it should be possible to achieve a coexistence of international and distinctly regional (in world terms) culture products. (p. 24)

There are, indeed, interesting signs that the advantages long enjoyed

by vu.s. audio-visual-media producers may be ending. The major strength of the u.s. producers has been their ability to recoup televisionprogram production costs — even costs of $1.2 million per hour — from

sales in the American home market. This ability has, in turn, been conditional on the existence of a small number of exhibition channels (the networks), which command the lion’s share of Tv advertising revenues, to recycle revenues (after taking profits and network costs) to producers. But the dominance of the networks is waning. Independent broadcasters are — within the limits of Fcc regulation — constituting themselves, through common ownership and syndication of programming, as challengers to the networks. The Canadian consultants Grieve

Horner and Associates (undated, 4) project a trend in which the u.s. networks’ share of viewing (and hence of advertising revenue) will continue to decline (see table 4). If attrition of the networks’ share of audiences and revenues continues to be faster than growth in aggregate revenues, then the resulting revenue pool will be shared more evenly among a greater number of players, with each player commanding smaller resources than do the biggest current players. The ability of u.s. television to finance the production costs of an episode of, say, ‘Dallas’ at an acquisition cost of $750,000-800,000 for an initial screening and $65,000—70,000 for a second screening (Broadcasting 22 Oct. 1984, 70) will

decline. But the ability of a greater number of players to pay intermediate prices for programming will rise. Rupert Murdoch’s News Interna-

tional conglomerate’s acquisition of Metromedia (the largest nonnetwork television broadcaster in the United States) and Murdoch’s stated intention to build his u.s. television holdings into a fourth network, Fox, point towards a future u.s. regime of more, smaller, players. In this new regime, where very-high-cost programming may no

longer be affordable and where demand (and capacity to finance) for low- to mid-cost programming will increase, there is likely to be a

growth in opportunities for sales to the United States by foreign producers and a waning in the competitiveness of U.S. programming in

foreign markets. An increase in U.s. distribution capacity (through —

Introduction 39 TABLE 4

Percentage share of viewing, 1975-91

1975 198] 1986 199}

Network stations 84 75 67 56

Pay services 2 7 13 } Non-Pay cable services 1 3 7

Independentand public 16 22 22 23 SOURCE: Grieve Horner and Associates n.d., 4

licensing of new terrestrial broadcasters and satellite- and cabledelivered Pay television) and redistribution of advertising revenue among broadcasters are trends likely to diminish the advantage of a strong home market, resistant to foreign products, long enjoyed by v.s. film and Tv producers. Lyman’s prognosis may yet be vindicated. There are counter-indications to such a scenario: the merger of a major

u.s. television network, asc, with one of the principal independent groups, Capital Cities Communications (Philadelphia Inquirer, 19 Mar.

1985, 1), to form the largest broadcasting group in the United States suggests that other outcomes are possible. The successful international sales of Canada’s ‘Empire Inc.’ (notably to the world’s two largest English-language markets: to the ssc for a reputed $25,000 per hour and to Metromedia for u.s. commercial syndication for u.s. $500,000, and a percentage of revenue for a re-edited series of three two-hour episodes) illustrate both the possibilities and the limitations of the scenario. While ‘Empire Inc.’ is among the most successful of Canada’s television-drama exports, its foreign revenues will make but small dents in its production costs of $5.8 million.

In Canada, too, there are important changes. It is striking how there

has been neither implementation of the recommendations of the Caplan/Sauvageau Task Force on Broadcasting Policy, nor government

commitments to do so. The then minister of communications, Flora MacDonald, who received the report, stated that ‘the report is not the last word.” And little has happened since the report’s publication to suggest that the Government of Canada is likely to follow Caplan and Sauvageau’s recommendations (indeed, the 1989 cut of 15 per cent in the

CBC's appropriation from the federal budget suggests that the federal government does not share the task force’s conception of the csc as the

linchpin of Canadian broadcasting). The task force’s analysis and

40 Culture, Communication, and National Identity recommendations were summarized by Gerry Caplan, its co-chairman, as follows: The task force judged that there was a serious imbalance in Canada’s broadcasting system. That imbalance had grown and the private sector had become too dominant with its emphasis on American programming. The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (cBc) was becoming less powerful and less central to the overall broadcasting system and the government was cutting CBc’s money. Since we all agreed there was a lack of Canadian programming, a better financed cpc seemed important. We made what I still believe are the key recommendations to redress the imbalance in this country’s broadcasting system: (1) a stronger csc playing both popular and minority Canadian programming (2) a larger contribution of Canadian programming from the privateers and (3) a new network or two of an overwhelming Canadian kind. For us it was a TV Canada channel and probably a csc all-news channel. (G. Caplan, cited in Broadcast, 16 Oct. 1987, 27)

The task force urged strengthening of the ‘national broadcasting service,’ tougher regulation of the private sector, and growth in public-sector provision of Canadian programming (though the new Tv Canada service it recommended was not to be run by cBc—Radio Canada). It is not surprising that a Conservative federal government committed to a free-trade treaty with the United States has not adopted the recommendations of Caplan and Sauvageau. Indeed, since publication of the Caplan/Sauvageau Report, prominent members of the task force — in particular Mimi Fullerton (director general of rvOntario) — have publicly opposed a major recommendation of the task force: the Tv Canada proposal (for a satellite-to-cable service programmed by public-

sector producers and independents and financed by a compulsory per-subscriber levy on cable operators). In the latter years of Liberal federal government in Canada, a new analysis of Canada’s broadcasting institutions and a policy for future development were advanced that broke with the trajectory marked by the 1968 Broadcasting Act (which still governs broadcasting in Canada), and by the Caplan/Sauvageau Report. In particular the Federal Cultural

Policy Review Committee (Applebaum and Hébert 1982) and the

Introduction 41 auditor general of Canada’s audit of the csc (Auditor General 1984) advanced stringent criticisms of the public-sector standard-bearers of national cultural and broadcasting policy. These reports and a succession of Liberal-government policy papers (Department of Communications 1983a, 1983b, 1984) broke with the post-1968 act broadcastingpolicy orthodoxy. These documents explicitly or implicitly advocated a shift in policy emphasis from regulation to incentives, to substitution of

a market for an administered regime, and a consequential downgrading of public-sector institutions. Most fundamentally they prescribed a shift from cultural to economic goals for broadcasting in Canada. The Conservative government’s Vital Links policy statement (Doc 1987), which considers broadcasting as one of a number of ‘cultural

industries,’ continues this emphasis.

The rival poles of attraction that compete for dominance in the shaping of broadcasting policy in Canada are conveniently marked by the Caplan/Sauvageau and Applebaum/Hébert reports. It may seem

curious that the Caplan/Sauvageau Report, with its public-sector proposals, was commissioned by a Conservative government, and the Applebaum/Hébert Report, with its support for a market regime and critique of the public sector, was commissioned by a Liberal government, but so it was. Federal political parties in Canada (with the partial exception of the NDP) are not class-based parties, and each contains a constellation of ideologies and factions that in other, more class-based,

political systems would form distinct and antagonistic parties. The absence of resolution of the dilemmas in Canadian broadcasting policy may be seen as perfectly exemplifying the propositions of Clarke et al. in their Absent Mandate (1984): that political parties in Canada are so in thrall to rival interest groups that clear articulation and implementation of policies is all but impossible. However, although the authors of Absent

Mandate argue that Canada has been weakened and disadvantaged thereby, analysis of Canadian television policy in the last two decades does not support their proposition.

Structure and Historical Development of Canadian Television

There are many ... examples of steps taken to make Canada a nation despite the forces of geography and the powerful attraction and influence of the United States. The natural flow of trade, travel and ideas runs north and south. We have tried to make some part, not all, of the flow run east and west. We have only done so at an added cost borne nationally. There is no doubt that we could have had cheaper railway transportation, cheaper air service and cheaper consumer goods if we had simply tied ourselves into the American transportation and economic system. It is equally clear that we could have cheaper radio and television service if Canadian stations become outlets of American networks. However if the less costly method is always chosen, is it possible to have a Canadian nation at all? (Fowler 1957, 9)

The Fowler Commission succinctly identified the central policy dilemma

that has preoccupied makers and analysts of Canadian cultural policy:

either state-sponsored resistance to the allocations of the capitalist market or, if the market operates freely, Canada’s integration into the United States. Television is the most important terrain over which those

pervasive Canadian concerns are exercised; the House of Commons

Standing Committee on Culture and Communication stated that ‘Broadcasting Policy is Canada’s premier cultural policy’ (House of Commons 1988, 11). And, since 1968, television drama has been defined

as the strategic position on which the future of Canada’s nationhood turns. In Canada there is a pervasive belief that in the leisure habits of its population lies the key to the continued existence of the Canadian state;

Structure and Historical Development 43 that Canadian television audiences’ viewing of non-Canadian television drama is a deeply destabilizing political force. Certainly the consump-

tion of non-Canadian programming by Canadian viewers is well established. In English Canada, television has been feared as an agency of ‘continentalization’ and reduction of cultural standards, both adverse outcomes stemming from Canadian’s consumption of television from

the United States. The intensity of these fears (of which the threat of ‘continentalization’ is probably most important) is proportional to the attractiveness of American television to Canadian viewers. But French Canada’s experience has been somewhat different. Though fears about continentalization, the decline of cultural standards, and threats to the continued existence of the French language are present in francophone | Canada, television in Quebec has been experienced as a positive force. In 1974 the then head of the French Services division of cBc—Radio Canada said: Before television we had no medium of expression that was truly our own; we had almost no movies, no theatre, no balladeers, we were always trailing others. Then practically overnight, television gave us all that. Here, one could apply to television what journalist André Laurendeau said of the situational comedy Ti-Cogq ‘A nation used to the fact that the stories told are always happening ‘elsewhere’ and always involving ‘foreigners’ has now recognised itself in television with immense pleasure’ and ‘In that sense there is no doubt that television has been an essential factor in helping French Canada to identify and define itself.’ (David 1974, 3)

Two opposed forces are at work in the Canadian broadcasting system: the political pressure to ‘Canadianize’ the system in order (it is believed) to maintain the integrity of the Canadian state and Canadian audiences’

contradictory and obdurate consumption of large quantities of nonCanadian programming. ‘Broadcasting’ is a convenient but misleading term. I use it here synonymously with ‘television’ (radio has its own distinctiveness — not least, a different cost structure — but shares many

characteristics of television) though much television in Canada is not

consumed through broadcast signals. For cable has assumed the principal role of signal carriage — whether redistributing terrestrial or satellite broadcasts or in transmitting services exclusively available on cable. In program production and supply, Canadian terrestrial broadcasters are major actors but are far from being the only ones. Recently, as

44 Culture, Communication, and National Identity a consequence of government policy, Canadian independent producers have become an important source of programs and, notoriously, many programs are imported from the United States. The Canadian broadcasting regime is complicated, pluralistic, and contradictory. It is best understood historically, and my account of its development prior to the 1968 Broadcasting Act draws extensively on the work of Ellis (1979) and Peers (1969, 1979), to which I am greatly indebted.

Television in Canada Canada has 136 Tv stations. Of these, 28 are owned and operated by the

csc (of which 12 transmit in French), 37 are csc affiliates — that is, stations run for profit by private owners but that schedule varying amounts of the csc’s network programs (of which 5 transmit in French and 6, at least some of the time, in native languages), 14 are owned by independent broadcasters (of which 1 transmits at least 60 per cent of its programming to Canada’s ethnic communities), 10 are members of the

francophone commercial network Tva, 28 are members of the anglophone commercial network ctv, 4 are members of the second francophone commercial network, Quatre Saisons, and 10 are community stations and 2 educational stations (of which 1 transmits in French). The provincial public broadcasters TvOntario and Radio Québec account for a further 2 stations, and Global Television, an Ontario commercial regional station, completes the 136 Tv broadcasters (House of Commons

1988, 82). Of these, 65 per cent are organized in networks (though a developing association between Global Tv in southern Ontario and other independent broadcasters suggests that further networking is likely to develop). Canadian viewers receive signals from 101 U.S. stations. The private sector accounts for 66 per cent of Canadian stations (Hétu and Renaud 1987).

In most of Canada, the English- and French-language television services of the national public-sector broadcaster, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation—Radio Canada (cBc-RCc), are available to viewers off air. CBC-RC distributes its services through a network of privately owned

affiliates and also through owned and operated (0 and 0) stations linked together by terrestrial microwave and by satellite. cBc-RC services are paralleled by commercial networks: crv in English Canada and Tva in French Canada. Both the public- and private-sector national networks

compete for viewers’ attention against signals from regional or local

Structure and Historical Development 45 private- and public-sector broadcasters. The governments of Ontario,

Quebec, Alberta, and British Columbia (and a consortium of the governments of the Atlantic provinces) provide broadcasting services that are nominally educational but often compete directly with cBc-Rc services and with the offerings of private broadcasters. TvOntario and Radio Québec, in particular, transmit programming that informs and

entertains as much as it educates. Independent broadcasters are an important element in the private sector. Some, such as Global in southern Ontario and the recently licensed Quatre Saisons in Quebec, are effectively regional networks. Others (such as cHcH in Hamilton, Ontario) transmit a signal extending over a large and highly populated area embracing far more than a distinct locality; still others are genuinely local. In much of Canada, signals from the United States are available off air,

often emanating from powerful transmitters located just south of the border and designed to capture large Canadian audiences (stations such as those in Bellingham, Washington, or Burlington, Vermont, exist principally to serve Canadian rather than v.s. viewers). Terrestrial broadcasting, whether of Canadian or U.s. origin, is the core element in Canada’s broadcasting environment, but far from the only one. Forty per cent of Canadian homes possess video-cassette recorders (though there is a paucity of information on Canadian’s use of vcrs, whether for time-shifting or viewing of rented or purchased prerecorded tapes), 175,000 own Satellite receiving dishes, and (most important of all) 61 per

cent of the population subscribe to cable. In 1984, 80 per cent of Canadian homes were passed by cable; of these, 76 per cent of homes

passed subscribed to cable services (all statistics from Caplan and Sauvageau 1986, 55, 58, 71).

Cable Television Cable is principally a medium used to redistribute terrestrial-broadcast and satellite-television signals rather than to originate programming. Cable operators are limited in the number of non-Canadian (i.e., U.s.) signals they may offer to subscribers and, in most markets, offer the three u.s. commercial networks (ABC, CBS, NBC), PBS, and a U.S.

independent channel in addition to Canadian services, although, particularly in Quebec, La Sette, a pot-pourri of television from France,

is also offered. The basic service offered to cable subscribers is constrained by the conditions of the operating licences granted by the

46 Culture, Communication, and National Identity crTc (Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission, the federal-government regulatory agency). Cable networks are required to offer, in order of priority, all Canadian local television stations (with first priority given to the public sector), community and parliamentary channels, then out-of-region cBc or Radio Canada signals (in order to ensure national availability of cac-Rc programming in both official languages) and only after the above-mentioned Canadian services are provided may a limited number of signals from the United States be offered. But, although the cable regulations of the crtc require priority carriage of Canadian signals and only permit carriage of a limited number of u.s. signals, the raison d’étre of subscription to cable is access

to American signals. |

In a growing number of Canadian markets Pay tv, or discretionary

services, are available via cable (though Pay Tv has not been particularly

successful in Canada, accounting for less than 3 per cent of viewing). These offer a movie channel and a music channel, and, in 1986, had achieved 750,000 to 800,000 subscribers. In addition, cable networks

offering pay or ‘discretionary’ services are permitted to offer up to sixteen U.S. services on condition that the American service does not directly compete with a Canadian Pay-tv service. Additional Canadian services are available in some cable markets, in languages such as Italian and Chinese.

Satellite Television Direct reception of satellite signals is relatively unusual in Canada: cable is the preferred method of television reception and is likely to remain so for the majority of Canadians whose homes are passed by cable. Many

Canadians did acquire satellite-receiving dishes in order to bring in signals unavailable on cable (such as the u.s. movie channel Home Box Office) or which were legitimately available but only at premium rates of subscription. However, ‘free’ reception of such services is now more

difficult than formerly because many services previously available unscrambled are now transmitted only in scrambled form. The vu.s. movie channel, Home Box Office, probably the most important induce-

ment for Canadians to purchase dishes, is now scrambled, as is the Canadian ‘cable in the sky’ CANCom service. There are, thus, few reasons for Canadians with access to cable (as most have) to receive satellite television directly. cANcom offers eight television channels: four Canadian (three commercial English-language channels, crv,

Structure and Historical Development 47 CHCH, and citv, and one channel, TvA, in French) and the American ‘three plus one’ package of ABC, CBS, NBC, and PBS. CANCOM has elevated

the Canadian broadcasters it carries to the status of national ‘superstations.’ For example, cHcH, licensed as an independent local television service for Hamilton, Ontario, serves not only most of southern Ontario from its powerful terrestrial transmitter but now, via CANCOM, the whole of Canada. In 1985, CANCOM was available via cable in 604 communities, to 850,000 households. The effect of this massive terrestrial, cable, and satellite infrastructure is to make many television signals available to most Canadians. Wolfe

(1985, 110-11) notes that 33 channels are available to Toronto cable subscribers; Caplan and Sauvageau (1986, 8g) state that Canadians

receive an average of 7.5 signals. In consequence, audiences are fragmented among competing channels, and substantial distribution and transaction costs are incurred, which ultimately are defrayed by viewers. Regulation The broadcasting system is regulated by a federal agency, the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (cRTCc), estab-

lished under the 1968 Broadcasting Act. The crtc’s jurisdiction over broadcasting has been challenged by powerful actors — by provincial governments, for example the government of Quebec (which asserted provinical prerogatives in cable licensing) and the government of British Columbia (which, itself, licenses its own educational-television service

as a telecommunications rather than a broadcasting service in order to avoid crtc authority); and by private interests, suchas the cTv network, which challenged the crtc’s requirement, as a condition of licence, that CTV produce a quota of Canadian television drama. However, in spite of such challenges, which have established the limits of its jurisdiction, the cRTc has powerfully shaped the Canadian broadcasting system.

The crrc has been attacked by nationalist critics for its ineffective Canadianization of broadcasting. However, the crtc has no jurisdiction over U.S. television stations, the signals from which are such important elements in the Canadian broadcasting environment. Moreover, important Canadian interests, both on the supply (commercial broadcasters and cable operators) and demand (the audience) sides, have fostered a

broadcasting order ill-adapted to realize the nationalist and publicservice goals prescribed by the Canadian state. These goals are formally

48 Culture, Communication, and National Identity defined in Canada’s 1968 Broadcasting Act. Section 3 of the act prescribes nationalist goals for the broadcasting system that ‘should be

effectively owned and controlled by Canadians so as to safeguard, enrich and strengthen the cultural, political, social and economic fabric of Canada’ and should ‘contribute to the development of national unity and provide for a continuing expression of Canadian identity.’ The act also defines public service goals for broadcasting, which are to be ‘a balanced service of information enlightenment and entertainment for people of different ages, interests and tastes covering the whole range of programming in fair proportion.’ Canadian broadcasting history demonstrates that such goals are not realized through the unfettered operation of a capitalist market. Hence, the establishment of public-sector broadcasters, in particular cac—Radio Canada, and a comprehensive regulatory apparatus, most importantly the CRTC.

The institutions created to shape national broadcasting reflect Cana-

da’s (perhaps waning) general faith in administered allocations and public-sector institutions. Hardin (1974), for example, refers to Canada as a ‘public enterprise economy,’ and much contemporary opposition to the free-trade agreement between Canada and the United States derived

from the belief that the Canadian interest (and, in extreme versions, Canada itself) would not be served in an unregulated market. But welfare is not necessarily maximized by non-market allocations; nor do public agencies necessarily serve the national interest for which they are conceived. Canada’s broadcasting history suggests that the importation of American broadcast signals and programs, though resisted by Canadian nationalists, not only has been self-serving profitmaximization by sectional commercial interests but also has delivered valued services to Canadian audiences. The notion of a Canadian national broadcasting interest is, itself, misleading. Canadian broadcasting contains numbers of contradictory forces and interests. Contradictions exist between the hardware and software policies of the Canadian state, between the interests of the centre and the periphery, between the institutional goals and practices of the private and public sectors, between cable operators and broadcasters, and between producers and consumers. Most striking, perhaps, is the contradiction between the Canadian broadcasting policy discourse, which pre-eminently stresses nationalist goals (public service being a subordinate goal, waxing and waning in importance at different moments in Canadian broadcasting history), and Canada’s conspicuous

Structure and Historical Development 49 failure to create the conditions and instruments necessary to achieve such goals. Customarily Canada’s failure to achieve its nationalist goals in culture and communication is understood in terms of Canada’s lack of communication sovereignty and the power of opposed, exogenous, interests in the United States. But this is a misleading notion, for no foreign power exercises force on Canadian firms and audiences to eschew their native preferences. Rather, the consumption of American broadcast signals and programming by Canadians expresses not the compulsion exercised by a foreign power over a non-sovereign people but the choices of Canadians. And, though v.s. broadcasters are outside their jurisdiction, Canadian political authorities have not used their undoubted powers to the fullest possible extent over Canadian enterprises that transmit u.s. television signals. They have lacked the will rather than the power to do so. For to do so would challenge not only the material interests of powerful Canadian commercial interest groups but also the viewing preferences of Canadian audiences. The democratic political system and the broadcasting market in Canada are responsive, albeit imperfectly, to citizen and consumer preferences. But market and political structures send contradictory signals. Unless the market is totally unresponsive to consumers, then importation of U.s. signals and programs for consumption by Canadian audiences surely indicates not just the ability of Canadian comprador capitalists in the cable and broadcasting industry to know a buck when they see one but also viewers’ demand for such services. Unless the

electoral system is a complete charade, the consistent nationalist emphasis of broadcasting policy and legislation in Canada testifies to Canadian citizens’ consent to the policies promulgated by government. Both political system and market are imperfectly responsive to citizens’ and consumers’ preferences; but there is no a priori reason to reject, or accept, the signals emanating from one of these imperfect systems of expression of Canadian interests at the expense of those coming from the other. Rather, the different signals suggest contradictory interests and preferences being manifested simultaneously by viewers acting as citizens and as consumers. Nationalist broadcasting policies have realized substantial economic

benefits for Canadian broadcasters. These benefits are distributed unequally but the Canadian state’s exercise of its legislative powers has

retained jobs and wealth in Canada that would otherwise have been decanted into the United States and transferred benefits within the

50 Culture, Communication, and National Identity Canadian population. The transfers from the state budget to publicsector institutions (pre-eminently to the csc) and through subsidy (for example, via Telefilm Canada) to independent program producers have benefited their recipients (mostly located in Toronto and Montreal) at the expense of those from whom the revenues are raised and alternative

possible recipients. Certainly producer interests have benefited from nationalist broadcasting policies. Benefits to consumers can also be identified, but with less certainty. cost of service is one, but only one, relevant criterion of assessment. Provision of low-cost broadcasting services to consumers has not been a major policy priority. Canadian public policies have put in place an expensive distribution system that contains substantial redundancies, often to benefit Canadian communication-hardware manufacturers in spite of the costs of duplicated provision being borne by consumers. The

crTc does not protect the interest of consumers by regulating the rate of return of cable operators. Indeed, its regulation of cable subscription rates has been described as an arbitrary system in which projected cable rates over fifteen years “would be 2.1 percentage points higher than the rate allowed Bell Canada’ (Caplan and Sauvageau 1986, 559, 567). The

crtc and the federal government have tolerated substantial concentra-

tion in the ownership of broadcasting enterprises in order to create ‘national champions’ capable of competing in the international market.

For example, both government and regulator permitted the merger of Vidéotron (the largest Quebec cable company) and Télé-Métropole, the flagship station of the TvA francophone commercial-television chain. Similar concentrations of ownership and power are evident elsewhere — for example, in the Eaton/Bassett predominance in the crv network. In |

general, policies in the broadcasting/cable field have been directed to achieving nationalist rather than consumer ends. Indeed, the linchpin of Caplan and Sauvageau’s program -— a satellite-to-cable Tv Canada service — involves a compulsory levy on cable subscribers.

If consumers have not benefited by state power being exercised to protect their interests against corporate interests, have they benefited by the state providing (or causing to be provided) valued services that would not otherwise have been available? There are contradictory indications as to whether Canadian audiences value the broadcasting services (in particular those offering Canadian programming) provided as a consequence of public policy. Goldfarb Consultants (1983) suggest widespread consent to state cultural and broadcasting policies, and Canadian

Structure and Historical Development 51 consumption of Canadian programming has increased in recent years. Between 1982 and 1984, there were increases in the viewing of Canadian

programming offered by all types of Canadian broadcasters except programming from Radio Québec and Tva (Caplan and Sauvageau 1986, 100). However, though consumption of Canadian programming offered as a consequence of nationalist broadcasting policies has grown, Canadian television audiences manifest a striking concern to maintain their consumption of American television programs. Hardin testifies to the pressure exerted by Canadian voters to counter a perceived threat to their consumption of American programming: The federal government’s own crrc, high profile with its edicts about Canadian content and us channels — the appearance that by bureaucratic fiat it was telling people what was good for them — was an open target. In the spring 1970 session of the parliamentary committee on broadcasting, a Liberal member explained to Juneau [then chairman of the CRTC] that the mail received by the members on the content issue was ‘almost unprecedented’ and that if the members were concerned, Juneau should be able to understand why. They had to be elected every four years. (1985, 33)

Such terms as ‘consumer sovereignty’ and ‘audience satisfaction’ rarely enter Canadian broadcasting-policy discourse. Indeed, consumer behaviour — the consistent readiness of Canadian television viewers to pay for access to non-Canadian signals, their obdurate preferential consumption of u.s. rather than Canadian ‘performance programming’ (drama, series, quiz, variety, etc.) — is deemed to be Canada’s major broadcasting-policy problem. Broadcasting policy is directed not to

serving the desires of audiences expressed through their viewing behaviour, but to redirecting audience desires. Caplan and Sauvageau state: ‘The appropriate objective for public policy in the face of the technological challenge from American television is to offer all Canadians compelling home made alternatives so that they will choose to resist the foreign seduction’ (p. 76). It is striking both how often audience taste

is conceived as a problem in Canadian policy discourse and how little audience desires are researched. The Caplan/Sauvageau Report is itself an interesting case in point. The Task Force on Broadcasting Policy was appointed by the Conservative government in 1985. One chapter of its

52 Culture, Communication, and National Identity report, chapter 5 titled ‘Programs and Audiences,’ extends for fifty pages. Its account of audience behaviour is less than half the chapter and

is based wholly on audience response to the existing television offer. The task force did not enquire whether Canada’s current broadcasting regime satisfied audiences or where their sources of satisfaction and dissatisfaction lay. To say that the central problem constituted in broadcasting policy in Canada is audience behaviour is to exaggerate, but not by much. The most evident contradiction in Canadian broadcasting is that between the nationalist imperatives the political system defines for broadcasting and the continuing seduction (to use Caplan and Sauvageau’s category) of the audience by non-Canadian programming. This seduction has been evident in Canada’s broadcasting system since its inception. The Growth of National Broadcasting

Radio broadcasting in Canada began in 1920 when the Canadian Marconi Company began service from its Montreal station xwa (later CFCF). From the beginning, Canada’s broadcasting was shaped by developments south of the border. By 1923, probably 34 radio stations were transmitting in Canada and 556 in the United States (Peers 1969, 6),

and, as the director of the Radio Services of the Canadian government

observed, ‘the aether disregards all boundaries.’ In 1932, when the Canadian Radio Broadcasting Commission was established, empowered both to regulate private broadcasters and to establish public broadcasting, the combined radiated power of u.s. broadcasters was 680,000 watts and that of Canadian broadcasters less than 50,000 watts

(Ellis 1979, 2). Peers instances the popularity of u.s stations with Canadian listeners: ‘Nine tenths of the radio fans in this Dominion hear

three or four times as many United States stations as Canadian. Few fans, no matter in what part of Canada they live, can regularly pick up more than three or four different Canadian stations; any fan with a good set can “log” a score of American stations’ (Elton Johnson, ‘Canada’s Radio Consciousness,’ Maclean’s, 15 Oct. 1924; quoted in Peers 1969, 20).

In 1928, the first royal commission on broadcasting in Canada, the Aird Commission, was appointed. Its report was issued (in 1929, a decade

after the licensing of Canada’s first radio station), and followed the success of the Diamond Jubilee national networking in 1927 and a general perception of a need for a higher policy profile by government in

respect of broadcasting. Problems within Canada prompted by broad-

Structure and Historical Development 53 casts of the International Bible Students Association and with cross-

border reception of u.s. signals demanded the development of a Canadian broadcasting plan. Many of the Aird Commission’s concerns are perennials in Canadian broadcasting policy, but of particular interest was the commission’s engagement with the two major extant models of broadcasting organization: the u.s. model of competition among stations for audiences and revenue and the European public-service model of state-licensed and -funded monopoly. The Aird Commission was drawn to the European model. The commission studied both the German Reich/Land system, which had a pronounced regional content, and the British, BBc-type, centralized monopoly. It recommended that Canada adopt a system modelled

after the latter. ‘Broadcasting should be placed on a basis of public service and ... stations providing a service ... should be owned and operated by one national company ... pending the inauguration and completion of the proposed systems, a provisional service should be provided through certain of the existing stations. All remaining stations ... should be closed down’ (Aird Report 1929; cited in Ellis 1979, 3).

However, Canada inherited a system that had developed on American lines. It was unable to create a monopoly service on BBC lines because of the established presence of a system based on competition for

audiences and advertising revenue between stations in profitable markets, but which boasted few services outside Canada’s highly populated and prosperous communities. Moreover, Canada’s radio services were in danger of becoming integrated into a ‘continental,’ American, structure. During their visit to Nsc (National Broadcasting Company) in New York, members of the Aird Commission were disturbed by NBc management's reassurance that the company intended to extend service (and the same quality of service as that enjoyed in the United States) to Canada. In 1929, the two principal Toronto stations joined u.s. networks; station CFRB joined css (Columbia Broadcasting System) and station CKGw responded by joining the Nac Red network. In Montreal, station CKAC joined css in 1929, and the pioneer Canadian

station CFcF (owned by Canadian Marconi in which rca [Radio Corporation of America] had an interest) affiliated to NBC in 1930. Radio

stations serving the two great Canadian metropolises, Toronto and Montreal, accounted for half the total radiated power of transmitters in Canada.

The Aird Report led — in the teeth of opposition from the vested interests of Canadian commercial broadcasters represented by their

54 Culture, Communication, and National Identity trade association the cAB (Canadian Association of Broadcasters) — to the establishment of a national system of broadcasting in Canada. One

member of the commission, Charles Bowman, argued that only a national publicly financed system could be genuinely Canadian: The drift under private enterprise is tending toward dependence upon United States sources. Contracts are being made between Canadian broadcasting agencies and the more powerful broadcasting interests in the United States. Increasing dependence upon such contracts would lead broadcasting on this continent into the same position as the motion picture industry has reached, after years of fruitless endeavour to establish Canadian independence in the production of films ... [For] privately-owned Canadian broadcasting stations, with nothing like the revenue available to the larger stations in the United States, cannot hope to compete beyond a very limited audience which, in itself, would be insufficient to support broadcasting worthy of Canada ... The cost of equipping Canada with radio stations to compare with the most popular stations in the United States would be more than Canadian radio advertising would support. (Bowman; quoted in Peers 1969, 53-4)

Bowman’s arguments were correct and prescient. He identified the structural situation that has obtained in Canadian broadcasting to date

because, at the crucial points of decision in Canadian broadcasting history, the fundamental irreconcilability of commercial imperatives of profit-maximization with the achievement of nationalistic cultural and political goals was always fudged. Neither commercial nor national goals were ever decisively chosen. Perhaps no choice could be made, given the problematic nature of Canadian national identity and the general assent to the capitalist order in Canada. The ‘conflict within his soul’ (Ellis 1979, 10) attributed by Graham Spry to the Conservative prime minister R.B. Bennett in recognition of Bennett’s commitment both to private ownership and to Canadian Etatist nationalistic action is a conflict that is pervasive within Canada and is characteristic, perhaps, of a prosperous capitalist economy that occupies a relatively subordinate position in the world economic order. The report of the Aird Commission was followed by a period of intense debate, lobbying, and political action, resulting in the Broadcasting Act

of 1932 and the establishment of the first public body concerned with

broadcasting in Canada, the crsc (Canadian Radio Broadcasting

Structure and Historical Development 55 Commission). Bennett’s much-quoted statement exemplifies the enduring contradiction in Canadian communications policy between the customarily noble articulation of intelligent policy and equally customary

refusal of the necessary changes in the status quo required to realize stated policy goals. This country must be assured of complete control of broadcasting from Canadian sources, free from foreign interference or influence. Without such control radio broadcasting can never become a great agency for communication of matters of national concern and for the diffusion of national thought and ideals, and without such control it can never be the agency by which national consciousness may be fostered and sustained and national unity still further strengthened. Secondly, no other scheme than that of ownership can ensure to the people of this country, without regard to class or place, equal enjoyment of the benefits and pleasures of radio broadcasting. Then ... the use of the air ... that lies over the soil or land of Canada is a natural resource over which we have complete jurisdiction under the recent decision of the privy council [referring to the confirmation of federal prerogatives in broadcasting challenged by the governments of Manitoba, New Brunswick, Quebec, and Saskatchewan], I cannot think that any government would be warranted in leaving the air to private exploitation and not reserving it for development for the use of the people. (House of Commons Debates, 12 May 1932; quoted in Ellis 1979, 8)

Despite Bennett’s lofty sentiments, the crBc was established with a

budget insufficient to construct a network of transmitters for the proposed national service or to induce private broadcasters to sell air time for the broadcast of crBc programs. Dissatisfaction with the regime

established for the crsc (orchestrated and articulated by the Canadian

Radio League), and focused by political attacks (organized by the Conservatives) on the Liberal party broadcast by the crac, resulted in the newly elected Liberal government of 1936 legislating to establish the

Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, the csc. The Canadian Broadcasting Act of 1936 established a corporation

modelled on the ssc and appointed as general manager the former director of public relations of the ssc, Gladstone Murray, in preference to the two alternative candidates: Reginald Brophy, an employee of NBC,

New York; and Harry Sedgwick, the president of the Canadian

56 Culture, Communication, and National Identity Association of Broadcasters. Support for the public-service ethos was further evidenced by the appointment of Alan Plaunt (president of the Canadian Radio League) to the board of the csc.

The Radio League was established by a number of patriotic and influential young Canadian activists to press for a broadcasting order through which the goals of Canadian nationalism and public-service broadcasting on Reithian lines could be realized in Canada. The leading members, Brooke Claxton, Allan Plaunt, and Graham Spry, established

the Radio League (now the Broadcasting League) ‘to create a radio broadcasting system which can draw the different parts of Canada together, which can use the air not only for indirect advertising but more essentially for educational and public purposes’ (Peers 1969, 65). The csc’s first priority was the establishment of an effective national distribution system for Canadian radio. The daunting and costly task of

achieving coverage of 84 per cent of the population of Canada was completed in 1939. Comprehensive coverage (if coverage excluding 16 per cent of the population, about 75 per cent of which had a radio set, can be called comprehensive) was achieved in partnership with private stations that became affiliates of the csc network. Programming for the

extended network included programs sponsored by advertisers and much American product, which could be purchased at a price far below that required to produce Canadian material of comparable appeal. Thus, the csc was in competition with Canadian commercial broadcasters as a purchaser of programs (principally from the United States), for Canadi-

an talent, and for advertising revenues and audiences. The csc’s programming and purchasing policies were forced into a convergence with those of private broadcasters who sought to maximize audiences (and profits) for the least expenditure on programming by affiliating to the u.s. radio networks and securing programs from the United States.

The csc was compelled to program its schedules at the lowest cost (tending, similarly, to seek product from the United States) constrained

by shortage of funds as a consequence of heavy expenditure on its national transmission and distribution system. Though heavily influenced in its aims by Reith’s Bsc, the csc thus developed ina distinctively different fashion to the ssc. The csc’s initial development followed the

model of the u.s. radio networks: a central organization owning and operating transmitters in major metropolitan areas, making available programming produced at the centre to remote, affiliated, privately owned stations that, themselves, produced some of their own programming. But, unlike the u.s. networks, the csc (although drawing some of

Structure and Historical Development 57 its revenues from the sale of audiences to advertisers) was publicly financed and charged with the achievement of national political and cultural goals, goals that it attempted to realize both through its own programming and through its powers to regulate Canadian commercial broadcasters. The Regions Raboy (1985) argues that the establishment of cpc-Radio Canada under federal authority caused public-sector broadcasting to serve one particular definition of Canada, and a distinct conception of the Canadian public: The Canadian broadcasting experience shows how the modern nation-state, while acting in the name of such notions as selfdetermination, cultural sovereignty and public service, can skilfully maintain a set of internal power relations based on the most fundamental social inequality. It shows how an idea — in this case, the idea of the public — can be mobilised in support of a particular political project and how, under the guidance of the state, communications media in this case, the media of public broadcasting — can become a legitimating force for alignments of power which have nothing to do with the public in any democratic sense of the term. (1985, 84-5)

Assertion of Canadian-ness in public broadcasting against the ‘external contradiction’ of the United States meant that the public-broadcasting

system tended to suppress regional differences, provincial interests, and most important the different cultural and historical experience of francophone Canadians. As René Lévesque put it: The cultural situation in Quebec is not that of an independent peopie. The incorporation of this community into the Canadian confederation, which sometimes claims to be a ‘nation’ imposes special limitations on Quebec which become shackles when it attempts to develop its own values and cultural endeavours. It feels restricted in ways of which it is not always aware, and exposed to temptation to which it sometimes succumbs. The most common and at the same time, the most notable of those temptations is that of catering to ‘Culture’ and not to human beings. (1978, 181)

Lévesque’s argument and the francophone sense of alienation are

58 Culture, Communication, and National Identity echoed by western anglophones who sometimes express as radical a sense of separation from the Toronto—Ottawa—Montreal triangle that tends to fill the mental world of broadcasters, as do francophones. An articulate western Canadian commentator, Herschel Hardin, ends his pugnacious critique of Canadian broadcasting (1985) with a succinct testimony to provincial resentment of central Canada’s dominance: ‘As for Ottawa, it was where it always was, 248 miles northwest of Toronto and 126 miles west of Montreal’ (p. 332).

In spite of a nominal commitment by the csc to developing the national system of broadcasting with substantial contributions from the regions, the national system came to be one that excluded, or at best subordinated, regional voices and interests. The exception was Quebec, which, as the region in which the vast majority of Canada’s francophone population resides, was able to find a means of representing its interests and experience under the umbrella of Radio Canada’s national French-

language service. However, Quebec’s dominance in francophone services in turn tended to exclude francophone programming originating from other parts of Canada. The processes whereby the provinces came to be subordinated to the

federal government, the periphery subordinated to the centre, and a particular prescriptive repertoire of definitions of state, public, and nation institutionalized in Canada’s broadcasting structure are welldiscussed in Raboy (1985). The most important factors were the 1932 ruling of the Privy Council in London that affirmed Ottawa’s prerogatives in broadcasting and the western Canadian refusal of programming in French. During the 1930s, bilingual programming (items in French followed by items in English) came to be replaced by separate monoglot

English and French channels. In turn, the French-language channel created a potent focus for French-Canadian identity around ‘Radio Canada.’ The idea of parity between English-language and Frenchlanguage services (though the population of Canada is about two-thirds

anglophone, one-third francophone) that developed later (and the Pouvoir Francais program of the Trudeau era) provided Radio Canada with important opportunities for growth.

The Single System and the Growth of Television A recurrent criticism of the csc from 1936 to 1958 in Canada was that it was both ‘cop and competitor.’ The new corporation retained the CRBC’s

power to regulate the whole of the Canadian broadcasting system, as

Structure and Historical Development 59 well as participating as a major state-funded element within the system. The cop/competitor anomaly was not rectified until 1958 with a division of regulatory and broadcasting functions and establishment of the Board of Broadcast Governors (BBG), separate from the csc. What now appears as an anomalous integration of regulatory and broadcasting functions was an expression of the ideology of broadcasting in Canada as a single system (vide Section 3 of the 1968 Broadcasting Act). But, in spite of the

unique power of the public broadcaster to regulate and compete, no government was prepared to fund the national service and curb the power of the commercial broadcasters in order to realize the single system that nominally constituted Canadian broadcasting. Rather, an unstable compromise prevailed. The compromise did not come to an end with the separation of the csc’s broadcasting from its regulatory responsibility. Rather the, to modern eyes, anomalous yoking together

of the roles of cop and competitor expressed a fundamental and enduring conflict in the Canadian broadcasting system. The Canadian Association of Broadcasters (CAB) refer to it as a ‘compromise resulting from the uneasy amalgamation of two conflicting principles, broadcast-

ing as an instrument of national social and cultural policy and as a business enterprise’ (Caplan and Sauvageau 1986, 38). The notion of a single system has persisted, acting as a rallying flag for

nationalists who have sought to orchestrate the whole of Canadian broadcasting, public and private, for the achievement of nationalistic ends. Rhetorical genuflections to the single system have endured throughout Canadian broadcasting history, though Spry’s metaphor, ‘conflict within the soul,’ more accurately describes Canadian broadcasting, which has never been a single system, and, especially posttelevision, has progressively become less and less like a single system.

The Second World War, particularly in its early stages when the United States was not a combatant, orientated Canadian listeners to Canadian radio and particularly to the national csc services. Programming priorities in the United States, as a non-belligerent (and even as a belligerent), were different from those in Canada. The resources available to the csc as by far the largest single element in the Canadian broadcasting system meant that its war news and foreign coverage were superior to those offered by any private broadcaster. Like the Bsc, the csc had a good war, though its balancing act as cop/competitor became increasingly precarious. In 1949, a commission of enquiry into the arts and culture in Canada,

60 Culture, Communication, and National Identity including broadcasting — the Royal Commission on National Development in the Arts, Letters and Sciences (the Massey Commission) — was established. Massey reported in 1951 largely supporting the csc for its achievement of three pre-eminent goals: ‘An adequate coverage of the entire population, opportunities for Canadian talent and for Canadian self-expression generally, and successful resistance to the absorption of Canada into the general cultural pattern of the United States’ (Massey Report, 40-1; cited in Ellis 1979, 30). The inadequacies of the cBc were those of insufficiently ngorous regulation of commercial broadcasting and of ‘reticence’ as to publicizing itself. Massey, therefore, substantially endorsed the notion of the single national system, approved the cBc’s practice as a broadcaster, and condemned the csc only as a regulator.

For Massey, the csc’s faults were those of being too soft a cop and too quiet a competitor. However, Massey’s endorsement of the csc (qualified by the minority report of one member, Dr Surveyor) and his argument for the extension of the csc’s hegemony over radio in Canada

were based on assumptions that a new broadcasting technology, television, was to expose as erroneous. The Massey Commission argued that ‘the principal grievance of the private broadcasters is based ... ona false assumption that broadcasting in Canada is an industry. Broadcasting in Canada in our view, is a public service directed and controlled in the public interest by a body responsible to Parliament’ (Massey Report, 283; quoted in Ellis 1979, 31). Television was to demonstrate that the private broadcasters were correct, even if their truth was not the whole truth. Indeed, Massey’s emphasis on broadcasting’s public-service role

reflected the report’s overall hostility to mass culture, a hostility manifested in a Reithian conception of the role of broadcasting. Asin the

United Kingdom, so in Canada; the combination of television and competition between public and for-profit broadcasters demonstrated the fragility of the high-culture vocation of broadcasting. Television in Canada characteristically began before Canadian television. At the inception of the cBc’s service in September 1952 — in Toronto

and Montreal only ~ there were 146,000 television receivers in Canada, tuned to American stations. The first Canadian cable network had been established in London, Ontario, to distribute u.s. signals to subscribers.

Commercial broadcasters (and other Canadian commercial interests) were eager to establish Tv in Canada as early as possible. The csc, helped by support given by the Massey Commission, was able to block early establishment of private Tv in Canada. But not until 1952 was the csc able to command the revenues to initiate its own television

Structure and Historical Development 61 service. Its priorities were set out in the late 1940s: “The Board believes that in line with fundamental radio policies laid down by parliament for radio broadcasting, television should be developed so as to be of benefit

to the greatest possible number of people; so that public channels should be used in the public interest; and with the overall aim of stimulating Canadian national life and not merely of providing a means of broadcasting non-Canadian visual material in this country. The Board

will strive for the maximum provision of Canadian television for Canadians’ (Peers 1979, 10). The csc’s political influence and licensing power enabled it to block the development of commercial Tv but, in the absence of a Canadian service (its own lack of funds did not permit the

establishment of a comprehensive public system), a vacuum was created, into which the cross-border signals of the u.s. Tv networks flowed.

The history of radio in Canada was replicated by that of television. American signals were imported, off air, from powerful transmitters in u.s. border settlements such as Buffalo, Burlington, and Bellingham, built to deliver Canadian audiences to u.s. advertisers, and by cable to Canadians who were unable to receive a satisfactory signal with a home aerial. Again the resources made available by government to the csc for a national system of Canadian broadcasting were inadequate for the task, and were substantially less than those committed by private capital to the commercial section of the supposedly single Canadian broadcasting system. By 1958, forty-four private and eight cBc television stations were on air in Canada. Ellis remarks: ‘When cprr Montreal and CBLT Toronto finally began broadcasting in September 1952 it emerged that their production facilities and even more significant, their coverage, had been seriously compromised by the need to “keep within the government’s unrealistic allocation of funds”. The csc’s ability to “compete” with the private sector was impaired even before private Tv station licences were being granted’ (1979, 35).

In spite of inadequate funding for a national television distribution system and for the production of Canadian programming, cBc tele-

vision achieved much in the 1950s. Its English-language dramaproduction section sold thirty-five television dramas to the BBC to spearhead the ssc’s fight back against commercial television in the United Kingdom (iTv began in 1955 and its style of programming proved

immensely attractive to British audiences, leading to a catastrophic decline in the sxsc’s ratings). The francophone services of cBc, Radio Canada, developed the téléroman program format, with extravagant

62 Culture, Communication, and National Identity success in case of the legendary series ‘La famille Plouffe’ (1953—9) such that ‘hockey schedules in St Jerome, Joliette and Quebec City have been shifted to avoid games on Wednesdays. In Valleyfield the start of games

is delayed until after 9 pm. Throughout Quebec theatre owners complain that attendance drops when the Plouffes are on the air ... In Montreal eighty-one per cent of all rv sets owned by French language viewers are turned to the Wednesday night show, according to the Elliott Haynes survey’ (Maclean’s, 1 Feb. 1955; cited in Peers 1979, 54).

But the csc’s achievements satisfied few Canadians - sections of the population lacked a television service; others had access to only one

channel of television; and, in the border areas and those served by the growing cable system, Canadian channels and programming were outweighed by product from the United States. The commercial broadcasters were excluded from establishing a television service, the Massey Commission recommended, until after the csc had established a national service in the two official languages. But, in order to provide a

national television service as rapidly as possible, the government licensed private broadcasters in areas as yet unserved by the csc and declined to license second stations in markets already served by a Canadian television broadcaster until national single-channel coverage

had been achieved. The effect of this attempt to shotgun a national network based on co-operation between the csc and commercial broadcasters was replete with problems (though the strategy did achieve more rapid national coverage than had been the case with radio). The cBc was excluded from extending service to a number of provincial capitals (because private broadcasters had the initial licence) and private interests were excluded from major metropolitan markets.

Absence of service of major Canadian centres of population, the existence of competition for audiences from the u.s. networks in border

areas, the conflict of interests between the csc, the commercial broadcasters, and advertisers, and the continuing anomaly of the csc acting as cop and competitor remained central broadcasting problems. In 1955, a further enquiry (the third after Aird and Massey), the Royal Commission on Broadcasting, known as the Fowler Commission, was

appointed; it reported in 1957. The Fowler Report recommended establishment of a regulatory board, the Board of Broadcast Governors (BBG), independent of the csc, and funding mechanisms for the csc to

ensure that its funding would be insulated from direct influence by

government, and would, it was hoped, provide the csc with the resources necessary to establish a national rv-distribution infrastructure

Structure and Historical Development 63 and to fill its schedules with substantial amounts of quality Canadian programming. Fowler reiterated the orthodox litany of a single national broadcasting system of mixed ownership, with the cBc assuming the role of ‘central factor’ in the system. Implementation, or not, of the Fowler Report was to become the prerogative of a new Conservative government, returned in 1958, with close links to commercial broadcast-

ing interests. The Fowler recommendations adopted by the Conservatives enlarged the prerogatives of commercial broadcasting and reduced those of the

csc. The resulting 1958 Broadcasting Act established the Board of Broadcast Governors, maintained the csc’s direct financial dependence on government, and removed from the Broadcasting Act references to

the csc’s responsibility for the fulfilment of national purposes and responsibilities. The pac licensed second television stations in a number of Canadian cities on application from commercial interests, notably in Toronto where CFro was established by the Baton group, financed by

J.D. Eaton, ‘reportedly the most generous of all Tory campaign bankrollers’ (Time, 11 Apr. 1960; cited in Peers 1979, 230), but in Edmonton the csc secured the licence for the second station.

The BBG was soon considering requests for the licensing of a commercial television network throughout Canada, for a Canadian national commercial system to compete with the csc. The commercial network, CTV, was first established as a private company with minority ownership by its affiliated stations. It began operations in 1961, with eight affiliated members, though only those not subjected to competition from the United States enjoyed satisfactory revenues. In the three major

Canadian markets, Montreal, Toronto, and Vancouver, there was trouble. In Vancouver, the BBG was forced to authorize the sale of 24 per cent of the equity in CHAN-TV to foreign capital (the u.s. Famous Players

and British ATv); in Toronto, the dominant interest, Eaton/Bassett, attempted to replace a leading minority shareholder, Joel Aldred, by the ABC network, a U.s. company owned by asc-Paramount, giving ABC 25 per cent of the equity (though only 18.8 per cent of the voting stock).

These initiatives provided an opportunity for Graham Spry, the standard-bearer for Canadian nationalism in broadcasting, to publicize foreign ownership in the Canadian broadcasting system. Spry documented vu.s. and u.k. stakes in the Quebec and Montreal stations (and in Kitchener, Windsor, Vancouver, Ottawa, Pembroke, Cornwall, Halifax), and the proposed stake in crro Toronto, the leading member of the

cTv network. The Bsc refused to allow asc to take a stake in cFTO,

64 Culture, Communication, and National Identity though subsequently crro borrowed a reported $2.5 million from asc in return for which asc took three seats on the crro board and a share in the station’s profits. Eventually the commercial network was stabilized by a take-over of crv by its affiliated stations in 1966 (even though Fowler had warned against this measure). The effect of the expansion of Canadian television distribution was, as Spry predicted, to ‘cream off the easiest advertising revenues in competition with the csc in the major Canadian markets with some 65% of the population’ (Peers 1979, 239). The revenue shortfalls that followed

expansion of competition led to the cgc’s production budgets being squeezed. Commercial broadcasters were faced with either producing programming in Canada (and enduring revenue and profit shortfalls) or purchasing U.s. programming and profitably filling their schedules with cheap, attractive foreign product. The brief period in the 1950s in which — in spite of expenditure on

constructing a distribution infrastructure - the csc had been able to channel substantial revenues into the production of ‘performance programming’ came to an end with the establishment of the second network. In consequence of the expansion of distribution capacity, fragmentation of audiences, and the disaggregation of revenues, initiatives such as ‘La famille Plouffe’ and the English Services television dramas, which were successfully sold to the Bsc, became difficult to sustain.

In response to the commercial pressures flowing from expansion of

channel capacity, which resulted in a decline in Canadian program production, the BBG promulgated the first “Canadian content’ regula-

tions. It attempted to inhibit by regulation the tendency to secure television programming from the United States, which it had fostered by licensing an expanded tv-distribution system. The first Canadiancontent requirements were for a minimum of 45 per cent Canadian

programming, rising by April 1962 to a minimum of 55 per cent Canadian content. The long story of negotiation between a regulator charged with maintaining a Canadian element in Canadian broadcasting and a commercial television industry with strong financial incentives to minimize exposure of its audiences to Canadian programming had begun. The structural processes that the BBG had initiated with the licensing of second stations and the crv network were, in the coming decades, to be amplified by the growth of, first, cable, then satellite, distribution of broadcast television in Canada, and by the consequential penetration of the u.s. networks into markets that the technology of terrestrial broadcasting had not permitted them to enter. The customary retrospect of broadcasting historians on the BBG is to

Structure and Historical Development 65 regard it as a classic instance of a regulatory agency ‘captured’ by the

interests it was to police. This view proceeds from the axiom that Canadian national interest and identity are dependent on an effective policy of Canadian content and control in communications. Through that optic, the era of the BBG is one of a regulator complicit with a group of traitors within the gates — the commercial broadcasters — in constituting the Canadian broadcasting industry as a channel for the

distribution of u.s. programming. This analysis of the commercial broadcasting interest and its regulatory lap-dog as comprador capitalists profiting from the delivery of their compatriots’ attention and identity to foreign interests is open to a number of challenges: first, that Canadian national interest and identity are not vitally dependent on communication policy —- Canada and Canadian nationalism have survived in robust

helath in spite of the substantial u.s. presence and interest in the Canadian broadcasting system since 1919. Indeed, Canadian communication policy may be seen (from a standpoint different to the customary cultural-nationalist one) as having consistently commanded Canadians’

assent to a broadcasting system based on the profit motive and the importation of programming for consumption by Canadians at substantially less than the economic cost of production; that is, the policy has been one of consumers and distributors enjoying an abundant supply of information goods free of the task of paying an economic price for them.

Hull (1983) argues that the BBG mediated relatively successfully between the interests of commercial broadcasters and those of the national interest, and that deficiencies in its stewardship stemmed from inadequacies in the Broadcasting Act of 1958 and from lack of ministerial

concern with communications issues rather than with the ssc itself. He further argues that the promulgation of Canadian-content regulations,

even though softened by the BBG under pressure from commercial broadcasters, was definitely not in the interest of the commercial Tv and

radio industry. The controversial image of the Board of Broadcast Governors is the result of the board’s presiding over, and in part promoting, a crucial divide in Canadian broadcasting, a shift from a national system dominated by the csc to a system where commercial interests — at first the commercial broadcasters but latterly the cable industry — achieved dominance as distribution conduits for American programming (checked only by the modest inhibitions enjoined by the regulator) and the csc assumed a subordinate role. That a fundamental

seismic shift had taken place was recognized by the appointment of Robert Fowler (who had chaired the royal commission of 1955-7) to head a new advisory committee on broadcasting in 1964.

1968 and After: The Public Sector and the Market trom the Broadcasting Act to Caplan/Sauvageau The second Fowler Report urged that government clearly define its intentions for broadcasting and create effective instruments for the promulgation of its policies: ‘In the past Parliament has not stated the goals and purposes for the Canadian broadcasting system with sufficient clarity and precision, and this has been more responsible than anything else for the confusion in the system and the continuing dissatisfaction which has led to an endless series of investigations of it’ (Fowler 1965, 91; cited in Ellis 1979, 60). The twin cores of Fowler’s recommendations — clear policy objectives and regulatory restructuring — were taken into the government's 1966 broadcasting White Paper and the 1968 act that followed it. The most

important provisions of the 1968 Broadcasting Act, in 1990 still the legislation governing broadcasting in Canada, are in Section 3 and define the nationalist thrust of the act:

- That the Canadian broadcasting system is a ‘single, system ... comprising public and private elements’ (3a)

— That the system ‘should be effectively owned and controlled by Canadians so as to safeguard, enrich and strengthen the cultural, political, social and economic fabric of Canada’ (3b)

— That the programming ‘be of high standard using predominantly Canadian creative and other resources’ (3d) -~ That ‘all Canadians are entitled to broadcasting service in English and French’ (3e)

— That there be ‘through a corporation established by Parliament a national broadcasting system that is predominantly Canadian in content and character’ (3f)

1968 and After 67 — That the national broadcasting service ‘contribute to the development of national unity and provide for a continuing expression of Canadian identity’ (3g[iv]) - That ‘where any conflict arises between the objectives of the national broadcasting service and the interests of the private element... it shall

be resolved in the public interest but paramount consideration shall be given to the objectives of the national broadcasting service’ (3h). However, nationalist goals are not the only goals articulated in the 1968

Broadcasting Act; clause g(i) of Section 3 prescribes that Canada’s national broadcasting service should “be a balanced service of informa-

tion, enlightenment and entertainment for people of different ages, interests and tastes covering the whole range of programming in fair proportion.’ This clause (3g[i]) defines the whole of Canadian broadcast-

ing (including the commercial sector) as a public-service system. However, in actual practice only the public-sector broadcasters (of which, overwhelmingly, the csc is the most important) play their public-service role with any conviction. The 1968 act is based on the assumption that Canadian identity and nationhood are dependent on Canada’s communication systems. The minister, introducing the bill in Parliament, stated: ‘The most important

of these principles is surely that which established that the air waves which must be shared between public and private broadcasters are public property and that they constitute a single broadcasting system. It is impossible to exaggerate the importance of broadcasting as a means of preserving and strengthening the cultural, social, political and economic fabric of Canada’ (House of Commons Debate, 17 Oct. 1967, 3174; cited in Ellis 1979, 69). Although the 1968 act specifically defines Canadian broadcasting as a

‘single system’ (following Fowler’s recommendations), the separate elements — public and commercial — of the broadcasting system diverge

in their interpretation and performance of the requirements laid on them in the act. There are factors common to the public and private sectors of Canadian broadcasting that lend credence to the notion of it as a ‘single system.’ Notably, the shared reliance on advertising revenue,

and consequential shared interest in audience maximization, of public and private sectors. But the divergences between the two sectors are more evident than the convergences. The commercial broadcasters’ goal of profit-maximization is uneasily and inadequately reconciled with the national and public-service responsibilities prescribed in the act. Public

broadcasters the (cBc in particular), although not profit-maximizing

68 Culture, Communication, and National Identity organizations, experience difficulties not only in reconciling the act’s

contradictory injunctions to promote national unity and program diversity (that is, in reconciling the public-service and _ nationalist vocations prescribed in the act) but also in performing these tasks, prescribed by statute, within the budgets allocated by the state. It is only by considering the csc as a public-service broadcaster that its

programming output can be understood: for much has little national content. The csc devotes resources to the production of dramas such as Slim Obsession (1984) or Dreamspeaker (1977) that neither maximize audiences nor explicitly fulfil the mandate of the Broadcasting Act to (inter alia) ‘contribute to the development of national unity and provide for a continuing expression of Canadian identity.’ The csc’s origins were deeply influenced by British broadcasting. Its mandate, to ‘be a balanced service of information, enlightenment and entertainment,’ is clearly a Canadianization of the BBc’s mandate, to

‘inform, educate and entertain’ (‘enlighten’ has been substituted for ‘educate’ because the British North America Act reserves education as an area of provincial, not federal, jurisdiction). Important figures in the cBc’s history had ssc experience: Gladstone Murray, the first general manager of the cBc, was recruited from the Bsc; and the Canadian National Railways’ (CNR) Radio Drama department recruited Tyrone Guthrie from the ssc to establish radio-programming initiatives that ‘were instrumental in helping to establish nationalization of radio in Canada’ (E. Austin Weir 1933; cited in Peers 1969, 25). Peers’s (1969)

account of the csBc’s development constantly refers to Canadian broadcasting’s orientation to British practice (even if the British examples were not always followed).

Public-service broadcasting is difficult to define. There are clear differences between public-service broadcasters even in the same country (for example, between the psc and Channel 4 in the United Kingdom), and between public-service broadcasting systems in different countries that have shared the influence of the British model (for

example, the ARD in West Germany, the csc in Canada, and asc in Australia), let alone between public broadcasters such as Sveriges Radio, NHK, and PBs, which have experienced no direct influence from

the ppc. But some representative sense of the ethos of public-service broadcasting can be gleaned from The Public Service Idea in British Broadcasting, which synthesized the views of twelve broadcasting experts canvassed by the Broadcasting Research Unit (BRU) in London in 1985.

1968 and After 69 Public service broadcasting therefore rejects the focussing of programme provision on the mass market as much as it rejects the limiting of provision to densely populated areas. It refuses to seek to cater for existing tastes only, and at the points of maximum overlap in those tastes. Public service broadcasting tries to explore and develop the possibilities of the medium rather than settling heavily for the more obvious, cheaper and simpler forms of programme (recurrent diets of chatshows, phone-ins, undemanding recorded music). Public service broadcasting is required to inform, educate and entertain. This is a wide and deep prescription, which at its best is a splendid interpretation of the individual and social possibilities of a marvellous medium. (BRU undated, 3)

Notions such as these inform the policy and programming of a range of broadcasters across the world. In Canada the distinct public-service and nationalist vocations of public-sector broadcasters combine to orientate programming policy away from American material and style. But nationalism and public service are contradictory as well as complementary.

Nationalism demands the aggregation of a single audience of shared tastes, interests, and culture: public service is, rather, premised on the differences in needs and interests of a plurality of (Reith’s term) ‘publics.’ The Canadian broadcasting bill of 1988, Bill C-136 (which, although not passed into law, was to be the basis of anew Canadian broadcasting act)

reflected a different emphasis from that of the 1968 act, away from the nationalist goal of Canadianizing broadcasting and towards a publicservice goal of ensuring that audiences are offered a diverse range of programming. Canadian programming was now to complement American programming rather than to compete with it. Regulation after 1968 The 1968 act created a new regulatory agency — the crrc (the Canadian Radio-television Commission; later the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission) — to replace the ssc. The Broadcasting Act, in its Section 3 regulations and its creation of the crTc, partially fulfilled Fowler's recommendations. But broadcasting in Canada and the relations of the new regulator with its clients were no less troubled under the new order than they had been under the old. For the act was based on beliefs in a single broadcasting system, in Canadian national

70 Culture, Communication, and National Identity integrity necessitating such a broadcasting system, and in regulation and legislation being able to prescribe and control the development of Canadian communications. Fortunately or unfortunately, communications in Canada have been hard for governments to control because of Canada’s proximity to the United States and the rapid development of communication technologies unforeseen by legislators. The 1968 act did

not consider cable television, a technology that had been in place in Canada for sixteen years, let alone such innovations as broadcasting satellites that now exercise Canadian policy-makers. Cable television in Canada developed in order to distribute broadcast television signals from the United States to viewers unable to receive

them off air. The Canadian Cable Television Assocation (the trade association of the cable industry) estimates that ‘cable subscribers number 64% of Canadian television homes (5.4 million homes) and take

their service from 651 private cable systems each of which carries an average of 27 signals’ (Hind-Smith 1985, 11). The countries that vie with Canada for the status of the most extensively cabled in the world — the

small countries of Europe, such as Belgium, the Netherlands, and Switzerland — share a common experience. They have a small population relative to neighbouring countries with a comprehensible language.

This relationship means that domestic broadcasters in the cabled country have low revenues for program production compared to those enjoyed by broadcasters in the larger neighbour country. The csc has much in common with the Dutch broadcasting authority Nos, neigh-

bouring West Germany. By subscribing to cable, both Dutch and Canadian viewers are able to enjoy neighbour-country television funded by revenues larger by a factor of ten than is the domestic service. Audiences in the Netherlands watch the German Arp and ZDF services via cable just as audiences in Canada watch css and NBC.

Canadian cable subscribers’ consumption of American television benefits the three parties directly involved. The subscriber, for an average annual subscription of $64 (though in some markets the cost of cable is substantially higher), receives signals that are often unavailable

off air and enjoys reception of a technical quality at least equal and usually much superior to that available off air. The cable operator redistributes a product that is profitably sold to subscribers but for which the cable operator pays nothing. The originator of the signals — the u.s. broadcaster — though receiving no compensation from the cable operator for use of the broadcaster’s signal — achieves larger audiences and can therefore charge higher rates to advertisers. In the case of cable

1968 and After 71 distribution of pss (a U.s. broadcaster that is not advertising-financed),

the broadcaster benefits from Canadian donations. u.s. PBs stations received in Nova Scotia and Alberta via cable draw over 40 per cent of their financial support from Canadian donors — not surprising, perhaps, given that pps reception extends viewer choice more than proportionally. ‘In Toronto, one pss station adds more to viewer choice than four U.s. commercial stations. Not surprisingly, the effect of cable on the average number of options is greatest where cable introduces a PBs station to a market, such as Halifax or Calgary that has a limited number of stations available over the air’ (McFadyen et al. 1980, 214).

If cable offers such benefits, why is it identified in Canada (and Europe) as a major problem? Many regard transborder flows of television programming as a kind of pollution of the airwaves — an involuntary and unwelcome import, like acid rain — since any provision

of new services or extension of choice fragments the audiences and diminishes the revenue base for existing services. Even though competi-

tion for Canadian advertising revenue is between a small number of Canadian broadcasters and leakage of revenue south of the border has been curtailed by Bill C-58, Canadian Tv audiences are divided among a great plurality of channels, and the value to an advertiser of the audience of any one channel is thereby diminished. Thus, revenues available for production and programming tend to decline unless either more television is consumed or premium rates are paid (for example, through video-cassettes or video-disc rental or through subscription to Pay television). Viewing hours tend to be fairly inelastic - even in a

Canadian winter only so much time can be devoted to television viewing.

Given the tendency for revenues accruing to each station to decline with additional services, broadcasters have an incentive to procure their programming from sources that provide the highest appeal to viewers at the lowest costs — in most cases from U.s. producers. u.s. televisionprogram producers enjoy the largest domestic market in the capitalist

world (ten times that of the Canadian market) and one that is remarkably chauvinistic in its interests and resistant to penetration by

foreign product. Thus, u.s. producers are able to amortize high production costs in their domestic market and sell high-quality, high-production-value programming at low prices into non-U.s. markets. Canada has long been the most important export market for u.s. film, and u.s. producers of television continue to be able to undercut Canadian producers (though, because of competition among Canadian

72 Culture, Communication, and National Identity purchasers, the prices paid by Canadian broadcasters — though much lower than the cost of comparable home-grown programming - are high

in comparison to the prices paid by British or West German broadcasters). The typical programme imported from the u.s. by the Canadian networks during the 1974/5 season could be purchased for about $2,000 per half hour although the cost to the u.s. producer would be about $125,000. With a much smaller market the Canadian producer spends about $30,000 on a similar type of programme. It is scarcely surprising that Canadian viewers regard a programme costing $30,000 to produce as inferior to one costing $125,000 ... When two specific programmes of the same type are compared we find examples such as Excuse My French a Canadian situation comedy, with an estimated revenue of $16,000 and production costs of $30,000 per episode while M*A*S*H" brought in an estimated revenue of $24,000 for a purchase cost per episode of about $2000. (crTc Background Paper, The Economics of Canadian Television Production, Ottawa 1976; cited in McFadyen et al. 1980, 197)

Denis Harvey, the vice-president heading the cBc’s English-language

television service, stated (Cinema Canada 124 [Nov. 1985], 53) that replacement of an hour of American programming (presumably scheduled throughout the year) on the csc with a Canadian hour costs $15 million in production costs and advertising losses. In spite of such additional costs, the cBc transmitted only about five and a half hours of American programming a week in 1986 and has sought, subject to financial resources, to further reduce its American programming. McFadyen et al. point out that ‘an extra hour a day of prime time Canadian programming adds $4.4 million to $6.8 million to a television station’s expenses. As their expenses, on average are $5.6 million a year

this represents about a doubling of their expenses. It is scarcely surprising that Canadian television broadcasters are reluctant to invest in Canadian programming’ (1980, 159). In 1977, 62.35 per cent of anglophone Canada had access to four U.S. television channels and only 45.61 per cent had access to four Canadian television channels (CRTC 1980, 23). In licensing cable systems and

services the crtc has attempted to raise the availability of Canadian services by requiring operators to prioritize Canadian and restrict American signals. However, cable maintains its status as the medium through which Canadians can best access American television: in

1968 and After 73 consequence, cable networks have generally been very remunerative businesses. McFadyen et al. (1980, 242) estimated a 24 per cent annual average rate of return to cable licensees. Babe (1979, 128) instances an operator enjoying returns in excess of 700 per cent. The profitability of cable networks has led Canadian cable operators to maintain a powerful and influential lobby in Ottawa. Broadcasters have customarily deplored the role of the cable industry. The Canadian Association of Broadcasters (cAB), the trade association of

commercial broadcasters, stated: ‘The critical source of funding for commercial broadcast programmes depends on advertising revenue and the generation of this revenue is seriously affected by growing numbers of alternative viewing opportunities, notably those represented by u.s. stations and other programming services carried by cable’ (1981, 49). The cab’s protests are disingenuous, for the commercial broadcasters are themselves major carriers of U.s. programming, and a variety of regulations have been promulgated to protect Canadian broadcasters, such as deletion of commercials on u.s. signals carried by cable, Bill C-58 (which removed tax-deductability benefits for Canadian corporations advertising on U.S. stations), and simultaneous substitution, whereby a cable operator is required to substitute a Canadian broadcaster’s signal fora U.S. signal when a program is scheduled both by a Canadian and by

a u.s. station. These policies have produced important economic benefits for Canadian broadcasters. Caplan and Sauvageau note that ‘cBc and cTv capture a proportion of viewing time higher than their proportion of broadcast time, whereas stations in the United States

capture a much lower proportion of viewing 33% versus 47% of available programs. This difference is explained in large part by the practice of simulcasting’ (1986, 97).

Bill C-58 and simultaneous substitution are estimated to have increased the 1984 revenues of Canadian broadcasters by up to $95 million, of which 53 million came from simultaneous substitution and between $35.8 million and $41.8 million from C-58. However, Canadian

broadcasters were denied an estimated $124 million in advertising revenue as a result of ‘spill over’ of u.s. television advertisments (House of Commons 1988, 151). Advertising revenue is not only important to commercial broadcasters in Canada: in 1984-5, 18.8 per cent of the cBc’s revenue came from advertising.

These economically successful policies (which retain advertising revenue within Canada) are incompatible with achievement of the cultural nationalist goal of Canadianizing both television viewing and

74 Culture, Communication, and National Identity TABLE 5

Viewing behaviour of anglophones and francophones (percentage of total viewing)

Viewing Viewing,

with cable without cable Effect of cable

CBC 18.9 31.3 —12.4 CTV 22.4 36.9 —14.5 ABC 9.2 5.0 + 4,2 Anglophone viewers

CBS 9.9 5.0 +4.9 NBC 11.4 4.6 +6.8

Other U.S. 7.5 4.3 +3.2 Other English-Canadian 18.4 12.2 +6.2 French-Canadian 0.3 0.7 —0.4

Pay Tv 2.0 0.0 +0.2 RC 31.8 38.9 —7.) TVA 32.5 42.0 —9.5 U.S. 13.4 2.8 + 10.6 CTV 9.5 8.8 +0.7 Francophone viewers

CBC 4.7 3.6 +1.6 Other English-Canadian 3.1 0.5 +2.6 Radio Québec 3.5 3.4 +0.1 Pay Tv 1.5 0.0 +15

NOTE: Ambiguity in source’s presentation of francophone viewing of the cBc lends some uncertainty to the percentages shown for the csc above. SOURCE: Table derived from Caplan and Sauvageau 1986, 104-5

the program schedules of Canadian broadcasters. For Canadian broadcasters, who avail themselves of the formidable advantages of simultaneous substitution, can only do so if they replicate the program schedule

of u.s. broadcasters. Moreover, the cable television necessary to the success of the simultaneous substitution and commercial deletion policies increases viewing of u.s. Tv (and of Canadian independent broadcasters — both public and private — though the private broadcasters transmitting

a high proportion of u.s. programming benefit most) at the expense of Canadian network services (see table 5).

1968 and After 75 The crtc The crTc, created by the 1968 Broadcasting Act, benefits Canadian broadcasters through its licensing of cable systems only on the basis of simultaneous substitution of Canadian for u.s. signals, random deletion of advertisements of uU.s. signals, and priority carriage for Canadian broadcast services. Such measures, together with Bill C-58, have successfully ensured the profitability of Canadian broadcasters and have safeguarded, enriched, and strengthened the economic fabric of Canada. But the crtc requires a guid pro quo from firms that enjoy these economic benefits. Caplan and Sauvageau characterize this bargain as follows: ‘The key regulatory issue in Canada is where the balance is to be

struck between the business like decision and the public’s right to a return in Canadian programming for the private broadcasters’ use of public frequencies and protection from undue competition’ (1986, 443). In exchange for the economic benefits of regulation, Canadian commercial broadcasters are to deliver a Canadian cultural dividend. The main

regulatory instrument used to secure such a ‘right to a return in Canadian programming’ has been the Canadian-content regulations. (It could be argued that a similar dividend of Canadian content is exacted from cable operators who are required to support Canadian community

programming as a condition of their crrc licences. However, this regulation bears less onerously on cable enterprises than do the content regulations on broadcasters.)

Content Regulation Canadian-content regulations were introduced by the BBG in 1959 and

are currently based on the crrc’s 1978 television regulations. The regulations provide that 60 per cent of all programming broadcast on television be Canadian and that, in prime time (6:00 pm to midnight), 60 per cent of csc and 50 per cent of private broadcasters’ programming be

of Canadian origin. Canadian content is broadly defined: programs of

‘general interest to Canadians’ qualify as Canadian content. These include the vu.s. president’s State of the Union message. There is evidence that the regulations are not always scrupulously observed — this seems likely in a large system, which is difficult to police and has

high incentives for evasion of the regulations. In 1981-2 the crTc charged four television broadcasters with violation of the content

76 Culture, Communication, and National Identity regulations. One was found not guilty, another had the charge dismissed on a technicality, and the crrc dropped the other two charges. In January 1983 the crtc published a policy statement for Canadian content in television (which noted that the cBc exceeded its Canadiancontent requirements and intended to raise its Canadian content to 80

per cent) but stated there has been an unacceptable decline in the amount of Canadian programming scheduled by a number of private television broadcasters serving major markets during the hours of heavy viewing between 7.30-10.30 PM. In addition there is an under-representation of some forms of programming, particularly in the areas of entertainment and children’s programming. Canadian dramatic productions have been virtually nonexistent on private English-language television which is dominated by foreign entertainment programs and this is particularly the case during the mid-evening hours. Drama currently accounts for 49% of all viewing time on English-language television and 66% of the viewing time between 7.30 PM and 10.30 PM. However only 5% of drama scheduled is Canadian produced, and Canadian drama represents only 2% of the total time spent by Canadian viewing dramatic productions. (CRTC 1983, 6-7)

To meet these problems the crtc adopted a points system similar to that pioneered by the crpc (Canadian Film Devlopment Corporation — the precursor of Telefilm Canada) for feature-film production. A program is recognized as Canadian if it earns a minimum of six points, with the following roles, if performed by Canadian, counting for points as indicated: director, 2 points; writer, 2 points; leading performer, 1 point; second performer, 1 point; head of art department, 1 point; director of photography, 1 point; music composer, 1 point; and editor, 1 point. For a production to count as Canadian for regulatory purposes at least the

director or writer and either of the two leading performers must be Canadian and 75 per cent of all labour and post-production costs (with the exception of monies paid to the functionaries named above) must be monies disbursed in Canada to Canadians. Further special provisions apply to co-productions. Dramas that satisfy the following criteria earn a 150 per cent Canadian-content credit: produced after 15 April 1984; earns 10 points; and is scheduled between 7:00 and 10:00 PM (or, if for

children, at an appropriate time) (summarized from crTc 1984). To

1968 and After q7 inhibit dumping of Canadian content into the summer period (when viewing declines relative to winter consumption), the CRTC requires television broadcasters to satisfy content requirements within each of two half-year periods commencing 1 October and 1 April. In 1979 the cRTC, in an innovatory decision, renewed the network

licence for the crv commercial national anglophone network on condition that crv schedule twenty-six hours of original Canadian drama in 1981-2. It will be a condition of the renewal of the crv network licence that 26 hours of original new Canadian drama be presented during the 1980-81 broadcasting year and 39 hours of original new Canadian drama be presented during the 1981-82 season. In planning and developing the necessary pilots for these dramatic programs and series, a minimum of 50% should be entirely domestic rather than co-productions with foreign partners. The primary orientation should be on Canadian themes and the contemplated production should be intended for telecasting in the peak viewing periods of the evening schedule. (Judgment, Canada Federal Court of Appeal 4-54-80, 2)

CTv appealed the crtc decision, which was (after a further appeal to a higher court) finally vindicated. The federal Court of Appeal confirmed the crtc’s power to attach conditions to broadcast licences. In 1985 the CRTC announced (in Public Notice 1985-82 of 25 April 1985) that it proposed to supplement Canadian content regulations and ‘to rely on the use of conditions of licence over and above minimum regulatory requirements to stimulate improvements in Canadian television programmes.” CTv’s licence renewal in 1987 was conditional on expenditures on Canadian programming of not less than the following amounts: 1987-8, $68.4 million; 1988-9, $74.5 million; 1989-90, $80.2 million;

1990-1, $86.5 million; and 1991-2, $93.3 million; and the evening scheduling of Canadian drama at the following rates: 1987-8, 25 hours per week (hpw); 1988-9, 3 hpw; 1989-90, 3 hpw; 1990-1, 4 hpw; and 1991-2, 44 hpw. For comparative purposes it is worth noting that in 1985-6 ctv broadcast only 13 hours of Canadian drama per week (cRTC

1987, 46). The crtc has attached similar conditions to the licence of

Global Television and has stated that it proposes to attach such conditions to the renewal of all commercial television licences. Clearly, in attaching conditions to a broadcaster’s licence the crTc has a far more powerful instrument for securing commercial broadcasters’

78 Culture, Communication, and National Identity compliance with the goals of the Broadcasting Act than it has for enforcing content regulations. However, the success of regulatory policies (whether implemented through conditions of licence or content

quotas) is conditional on the economic health of the regulated industries. The commercial failure of Pay Tv licensees to avoid receivership rendered nugatory the crTc’s requirement, as a condition of licence, that 50 per cent of Canadian program-production funds be spent on drama. Increased competition for the attention of Canadian audiences from terrestrial broadcasters and new services delivered by cable, satellite, and video-cassette recorders may compromise the future ability of Canadian broadcasters to deliver competitive Canadian programming — in particular, drama. Arthur Weinthal, the director of Entertainment Programming of crv, stated at the 1988 Toronto Festival of Festivals Television Trade Forum that the future for commercial broadcasters in Canada was likely to be ‘tough sledding.’ However, in spite of Weinthal’s melancholy prognosis, it seems unlikely that television’s long-established record of high profitability in Canada will be broken so readily. Broadcasters’ average after-tax return on equity in 1984 was 18.1 per cent and, as the Toronto Globe and Mail stated (15 Mar. 1986, B1 and Bg): ‘Most of Canada’s 79 private television stations are living up to the reputation that ownership is a licence to print money, returning after tax profits in 1984 of $89.3 million.’

The crtc has few friends. It is in an adversarial relationship to the industry it regulates, which takes for granted the economic protection the crtc affords and chafes at the cultural quid pro quo the commission exacts. It is subject to directives from the federal government, which has

the power to set aside the commission’s decisions. These powers, as Caplan and Sauvageau state, favour ‘those who are adept by skill, interest or experience at influencing government’ (1986, 173). And the crtc is the principal target of cultural nationalists who hold it responsible for the perceived inadequacies of the broadcasting system. An extensive critique of the crtc (subtitled The Sellout of Canadian Television) was published in 1985. Its author’s judgment is that the crTC is ‘a captive

agency collaborating with its industry’ (Hardin 1985, 102).

Hardin points out that two of the chairmen of the commission held prominent positions in the industry they went on to regulate (Pierre Camu was president of the Canadian Association of Broadcasters and André Bureau was president of caNCoM). But Hardin does not comment

unfavourably on the prior public broadcasting experience of another

1968 and After 79 chairman, Harry Boyle, and reserves much of his anger for John Meisel,

a chairman with no previous broadcasting experience or connections (and who, it was rumoured, did not own a television receiver prior to appointment).

Hardin’s critique of the Canadian broadcasting system and of its regulation is familiar. He argues that the system has been permitted to expand too far, thus exhibiting excessive competition for audiences and inhibiting any broadcaster from aggregating revenues sufficient for a schedule of adequately budgeted Canadian programming. Hardin contends that overexpansion has been driven by the cupidity of the owners of cable companies and commercial broadcasting firms. The private sector’s influence, whether exercised directly on the commission or via the federal cabinet, has, for Hardin, improperly preferred the private sector over the public, and central Canada over the regions. But well-founded though much of his critique is, Hardin is too slow to recognize the achievements of the crTc in its regulation of broadcasting.

Successes such as stopping the penetration of u.s.-style for-profit religious broadcasting (by requiring that revenues generated be shared among all religious denominations) are forgotten and the commission is scapegoated for problems that have prevailed in Canadian broadcasting since 1919. But some of the skeletons Hardin rattles are important. His

testimony to the deficiencies of the crtc’s rules of procedure, its chicanery in refusing to seize the opportunities to augment the public, not-for-profit sectors of Canadian broadcasting (the Children’s Broadcast Institute and Provincial Public Broadcasting in British Columbia), and its blithe complicity in the transfer of licences as if they were private property is compelling. But power to regulate Canada’s broadcasting rests finally not with the commission but with the federal government. The government has not only inspired commission action for political

purposes but has also revised commission decisions for reasons of patronage and political advantage. In 1977 Pierre Trudeau, then prime minister, commissioned the crTc

to investigate the adequacy of Radio Canada’s fulfilment of the national-unity provisions of the 1968 Broadcasting Act. Trudeau stated;

‘Doubts have been expressed as to whether the English and French networks of the Corporation generally, and in particular their public affairs, information and news programming, are fulfilling: the mandate of the Corporation’ (Trudeau, quoted in crTc 1977, v). Trudeau was acting on a perception in the Liberal party, especially among its

80 Culture, Communication, and National Identity francophone members, that Radio Canada was a hotbed of separatism

and slanted its coverage of Canadian affairs to support the Parti Québécois. The crrc firmly rebutted the Liberals’ allegation, but its inconvenient finding was promptly followed by the replacement of crtc chairman Harry Boyle, as Hardin (1985, 172) points out. Cinema Canada (125 [Dec. 1985], 42) reports that the Conservative federal cabinet overruled a crtc decision to award the licence to operate a third commercial Tv network in Saskatchewan to a company controlled

by a former leader of the Manitoba Liberal party in preference to a company owned by a ‘longtime Conservative supporter.’ The company

that was first awarded the licence, Saskwest, is a wholly owned subsidiary of Canwest Broadcasting Winnipeg. Canwest is the Canadian commercial broadcaster that has been most prominent in production of Canadian television drama (see my discussion of In the Fall (1983), Chapter 10), and thus conforming to the national and cultural requirements of the crTc and the 1968 Broadcasting Act. Trudeau’s punishment of Boyle and Mulroney’s refusal to allow a

potentially lucrative licence to be awarded to a political opponent underscore how far the crtc’s authority is subject to government approval and how far decisions may be influenced or overridden for reasons of political expedience or patronage. Just as the return of a Conservative government in 1958 was followed by the award of commercial television licences to Conservative supporters (see, inter alia, Peers 1979, 230), so the return of Mulroney has occasioned benefits for his supporters. The Toronto Globe and Mail (15 Mar. 1986) and other sources have commented on the crtc’s recent soft line on the concentra-

tion of media ownership in Canada. Political interest in policy-formulation and -implementation rarely

becomes explicitly evident, but a number of contradictions in the Canadian broadcasting order are hard to explain without it — notably, the inexorable growth of a commercial sector in the Canadian audiovisual field (Pay Tv and broadcasting) that fulfils few of the cultural and national imperatives of the Broadcasting Act. However the cupidity of

commercial interests and the exercise of patronage and power by government are not the only forces that militate against Canada’s achievement of its national cultural goals for television. There is a powerful contradiction between the government’s desire to Canadianize the imagination of its citizens and its desire to promote Canada’s high-tech communications-hardware industries.

1968 and After Q4 Technopia Canadensis Canada has, as the then minister of communications Francis Fox said in Towards a New National Broadcasting Policy, the finest technical infrastructure for broadcasting in the world. Canada also has the world’s most advanced system of domestic communications satellites which is employed to distribute radio and television programming. Satellite, microwave and cable technologies have made possible major achievements in extended broadcasting services in both official languages to all but a small minority of Canadians. And this elaborate technical infrastructure, which on a per capita basis is more extensive than that of any country in the world, is effectively owned and controlled by Canadians. (poc 1983a)

The hardward focus - that is, ‘a condition of intense focus on hardware and new technologies causing an inability to see long range effects’ (Woodrow and Woodside 1982, 161) — has been named (by the

ex-minister of communications David MacDonald) ‘Technopia Canadensis.’ Technopia Canadensis is well exemplified in Canada’s develop-

ment of communication satellites. In 1981 the crtc licensed Canadian Satellite Communications (CANCOM) to provide a satellite-to-home television and radio distribution system. The licensing of CANCOM was

influenced by three factors: desire to stimulate the communicationssatellite industry in Canada for reasons of industrial policy; the existence

of an estimated 800,000 Canadian homes (Curran 1981) that can be adequately provided with television services only by satellite because they are in small communities, on isolated farms, or in remote areas; and

the perceived need for a Canadian service to compete with the unauthorized reception of u.s. satellite ‘super-station’ programs. Reception of u.s. satellite signals became extremely common in Canada, even

when strictly illegal. Bars, hotels, and motels attracted clients by offering u.s. satellite signals, principally from the Satcom 1 satellite. CANCOM was first licensed to deliver four Canadian television signals

(three anglophone, one francophone) and eight radio signals (two native-language, two French, and four English), but in 1983 the crTc licensed CANCOM to add the so-called three plus one (the U.s. CBs, NBC,

and Asc networks and PBs) package to its services. The commission’s rationale for the ‘three plus one’ decision was that, by licensing cANCOM

82 Culture, Communication, and National Identity to deliver u.s. television signals, the attractiveness of its bundle of services — including its Canadian services -— would be enhanced. CANCOM’S principal target market was cable networks that had hitherto not been able to offer Canadian television services to subscribers because of the high cost of terrestrial microwave transport of broadcast signals

to the cable headend. But individual homes (or small communities) in remote areas were also able to receive CANCOM signals via individual TVvRO ‘dish’ antennae. Essentially cCANCOM was licensed as a ‘cable in the

sky,’ delivering both Canadian and u.s. signals to subscribers. The net effect of the cAaNcom decisions has been to extend delivery of

u.s. television to Canadians who had hitherto been unable to receive it, and to expose Canadian broadcasters and program-makers to sharpened competition. As Lyman points out: The outcome of major technological evolution can be a negative one for Canada’s cultural industries. Too much emphasis on technology and the implementation of new delivery infrastructures may direct investment from programming i e investment in Canadian production. A specific example is the licensing of the Atlantic regional pay-rv network whose potential subscriber base is so small that the crtc imposed as a condition of licence a very low proportional commitment to Canadian programming (15% of gross revenues as opposed to 50% for the Ontario regional license holder). (1983, 95)

Just as the distribution technologies of radio, television, and cable created markets favouring non-Canadian producers, so has satellite broadcasting. Canada’s investment in satellite technology (in order to lower broadcasting-distribution costs) has opened new Canadian markets to television from the United States. The crtc’s decision to license CANCOM’S delivery of the ‘three plus one’ package implicitly acknowl-

edges that a necessary condition of delivering Canadian television to Canadian viewers is supply of American signals. Audiences will pay for U.S. services but are less ready to do so for Canadian ones. Pay Television Pay television embodies Canada’s most recent attempt to increase the supply of Canadian programs and to tap new sources of revenue in order to meet programming costs. The Pay-Tv licensing decision of the CRTC in 1983 (referred to by Lyman above) institutionalized a new kind of financial relationship between consumers and distributors of televi-

1968 and After 83 sion. Pay Tv is available only to cable subscribers. Unlike broadcast radio

and television, reception of which incurs no direct costs after purchase of receiving apparatus, the Pay-Tv system delivers programs only to those who pay a separate subscription. Pay Tv was licensed to: contribute to the realization of the objectives set out in the Broadcasting Act and strengthen the Canadian broadcasting system; increase the diversity of programming available to Canadians; and make available high-quality Canadian programming from new programming sources by providing new opportunities and revenue sources for Canadian producers currently unable to gain access to the broadcasting system (CRTC 1982b, 1). To achieve these goals the crtc

required all Pay-tv licensees to commit a proportion of revenue to Canadian program production (50 per cent of Canadian programproduction funds were to be spent on drama) and initially licensed a ‘national general interest service’ (First Choice/Premier Choix Canadian

Communications Corporation) in French and English and ‘regional general interest services’ in Alberta (Alberta Independent Pay Television), Ontario (Ontario Independent Pay Television, and the Atlantic region (Star Channel Services). A ‘speciality’ performing-arts service — C

Channel — was licensed for national distribution from Toronto, and a regional multilingual service - World View Television — for British Columbia. General-interest channels were required to deliver an initial 30 per cent Canadian content, rising to 50 per cent, of which drama was to account for at least half. At least 45 per cent of revenues were to be spent on Canadian programs. The crtc’s licensing decision attracted hostile comment, both at the time of its delivery and subsequently in the light of the activities of the licensees. Initial adverse comment pointed to the commission’s reversal of the conclusion it had reached in its own Report on Pay Television (CRTC

1978), that a single national Pay-television network be established (not the plurality licensed in 1982). The judgment of the crrc’s 1978 report,

of later commentators (see, inter alia, Audley 1983; Woodrow and Woodside 1982), and of a minority of crtc commissioners (see commissioners Gagnon’s and Grace’s dissent, recorded in crtc Decision 82-240)

was that too many birds had been launched: that a plurality of Pay services would fragment audiences and revenues, bid up the costs of programming (largely emanating from the United States), siphon programming from broadcast television to Pay Tv, and show preference to audiences in some regions of Canada at the expense of others. Lyman succinctly expresses the central proposition of the critics:

84 Culture, Communication, and National Identity The fundamental flaw in the crrtc’s licensing scenario lies in the incomplete economic equation that seems to lie behind it. While the objectives are laudable in terms of support of Canadian programming ... it will prove almost impossible for pay tv operators both to live up to the conditions of licence and to stimulate competitive Canadian programming — unless either the national or regional licenseholder drives the other out of the market in a particular geographic area. It appears that pay-Tv in Canada will continue the tradition of broadcasting as a conduit for American entertainment programming. (1983, 79)

Experience supports the critics’ judgment and not that of the crrc. The arts channel went into receivership in June 1983. The Alberta and Ontario regional Pay systems operated (under a common title, Superchannel) as a single service, thus competing with the national system in two crucial anglophone markets. World View was permitted to offer 40 per cent of its total scheduling time and 40 per cent of prime time (6:00 to

10:00 PM) in English, but in spite of being able to extend its market beyond the target Chinese-language community for which it had been licensed, World View went bankrupt in 1984 with 8,500 subscribers (6,000 Chinese). First Choice/Premier Choix was required, as a condition

of licence, to distribute both anglophone and francophone programming nationally. But, west of Winnipeg, subscribers to its francophone services were measured only in double figures; the revenues accruing from these subscribers were trifling when set against the costs of delivering French-language programming to them. Although circum-

stances quickly demonstrated that the requirements of the cRrc created an unviable Pay-television system, the commission had recog-

nized differences in the ability of licensees to program Canadian content. The Atlantic region licensee, Star Channel, was required to commit only 15 per cent of gross revenues to Canadian content (while the Ontario licensee, Ontario Independent Pay Television, was required to commit 50 per cent). But, in spite of this concession, the Atlantic service went into receivership. The ‘flagship’ licensee, First Choice, did not find it possible to deliver the return in Canadian content required of it by the commission as a condition of licence. First Choice partially fulfilled its Canadian-content requirments by co-producing, with Playboy Enterprises, ‘adult’ (i.e., pornographic) programs and promoted itself as the ‘Playboy Channel.’ The development was logical enough only pornography could command sufficient revenues from the frag-

1968 and After 85, mented Canadian audience to make Canadian programming economically viable.

In 1984 the crrc recognized the impossibility of sustaining the structure it had created and permitted anglophone Pay-tTv licensees to

reorganize into two services - First Choice for Eastern Canada and Superchannel for the West. Premier Choix merged with an embryonic

Quebec regional francophone service to form Super Ecran and was released from the obligation to offer a national francophone service. The Pay-television system has evolved from the initial competitive model, offering English- and French-language services across the whole of Canada, to one in which three companies each hold a local monopoly

(as a movie channel): Superchannel. for Manitoba westwards, First Choice for Ontario eastwards, and Super Ecran for French service in eastern Canada. In 1987 these services had 188,656, 509,561, and 156,246 subscribers, respectively. Pay television is estimated to account for 2 per cent of Canadians’ television viewing and to have penetrated only 16 per cent of cable homes (Doc 1987, 61).

The core of the Pay-tv system, the movie channel, has been complemented by ‘speciality services’ such as MuchMusic and TSN (The

Sports Network), the csc news channel ‘Newsworld’ (which began in

1989), and Chinese (Cathay and Chinavision) and Italian/Spanish (Telelatino) language services. When marketed as ‘low pay’ services in 1985, these channels achieved about 800,000 subscribers. In 1987 the crTc authorized the news, weather (MétéoMédia), religion (Vision Tv), children’s (yTv) channels to be offered in the basic cable package and the

Family Channel (which includes the u.s.-originated Disney Channel bundled in its program schedule) as a Pay channel. Francophone cable networks offer La Canal Famille, MétéoMédia, MusiquePlus, Réseau des Sports, and Tv-5. Developments in the Canadian broadcasting system, such as Pay Tv (and CANCOM), well exemplify MacDonald’s diagnosis. The Canadian

broadcasting system has overexpanded distribution capacity, reducing the revenues per hour available for programming finance, and thus necessitating purchase of programs from sources offering the highest audience gratification for the lowest cost — this is, from the United States; each new technological initiative accelerates the spiral of decline that sucks in more and more foreign product and makes Canadianization harder and harder to achieve. The crtc licensed a Pay-tv system in

the belief and hope that subscription funding for the service would generate new revenues for Canadian production. But, by summer 1984,

86 Culture, Communication, and National Identity Pay tv had accumulated losses of $40 million and a monthly continuing loss of $2 million. The cut-down and monopolistic pay-television system that evolved out of the wreckage of the ambitious structure sanctified by

the commission's initial licences makes a modest contribution to the funding of production in Canada and to screening Canadian programming. But Pay Tv accounts for a small proportion of viewing (Caplan and

Sauvageau estimated less than 3 per cent, about half that achieved by pay Tv in the United States) and overall has ‘failed to keep its promise on Canadian programming’ (Caplan and Sauvageau 1986, 477).

In order to promote subscriptions to Canadian Pay movie channels (so as to fund the Canadian drama these channels are compelled to

schedule) the crrc permits cable operators to ‘bundle’ American channels with Canadian. One Canadian Pay service permits the cable

network to offer five u.s. ‘speciality’ channels (but not u.s. movie channels, such as Home Box Office, which are likely to be the vu:s. channels most desired by Canadian viewers) and to carry two v.s. ‘speciality’ services for each Canadian service. The crtc’s promotion of Canadian Pay services has increased the access of Canadian viewers to

u.s. channels (including super-stations such as wtbs Atlanta), denied Canadian broadcasters exclusive and primary access to U.S. programming, and compelled Canadian viewers to subscribe to an expensive bundle of services in order to gain access to one channel (a policy that has incurred the wrath of the Consumer’s Association of Canada).

It is clear that there are continuing contradictions between the aspirations of the Canadian state to Canadianize broadcasting, the actions and interests of the Canadians who own and operate the private

sector of the broadcasting system, and, increasingly, the interests of Canadian viewers who are both denied access to u.s. channels in order to protect Canadian enterprises and compelled to purchase a bundle of services rather than select desired individual services. However, it has to be recognized that the overexpansion of the broadcasting system and the increasingly Byzantine and contradictory system of regulation devoted to its finetuning have been remarkably consistent; perhaps, it is what Canadians want. Here the evidence is contradictory. Polls consistently suggest that Canadians value their access to American television (in 1980 Gallup found that 68 per cent of Canadians thought the United States made the best Tv programs) but

also that (in 1987) Canadians were more concerned about American content in television programming than they were about an American presence in any other cultural industry: ‘Television is the only medium

1968 and After 87 which the majority of users identify as too American in its influence’ (Environics survey; cited in House of Commons 1988, 21). There is little evidence to suggest that the regime necessary to achieve the aims of the 1968 Broadcasting Act would enjoy popular support. For such a regime would involve reducing the number of signals available to Canadians,

ceasing the importation of u.s. signals and the purchase of u:s. programming, directing the revenues generated in the broadcasting system into production, not shareholders’ pockets, and increasing broadcasting revenues, whether from consumers or from the public purse. Policy Initiatives in the 1980s The Applebaum/Hébert Committee (the federal cultural-policy review committee established in 1980 by the Liberal government) noted: Cultural policy has not been entirely successful in encouraging the best use of the human creative resources Canada has in abundance. As a democratic and cosmopolitan country we have thrown open our borders to foreign cultural products and not given ourselves sufficient opportunity to enjoy the fruits of our own cultural labour. It is a telling state of affairs that our broadcasting system boasts the most sophisticated transmission hardware in the world — satellites, interactive cable, teletext - while Canadian viewers spend 80% of their viewing time watching foreign programmes on television. Broadcasting may provide the most striking illustration of this point but it is by no means the only one. Our response to this dilemma is not, however, to come down on the side of protectionism, but rather to press home the point as forcefully as we can that federal cultural policy has largely favoured physical plant and organizational development over artistic creativity and achievement. (1982, 6)

The expansion of television in Canada, one instance of MacDonald’s ‘Technopia Canadensis,’ has not been confined to the private sector, or

to high-tech distribution systems. As the Applebaum/Hébert enquiry recognized, such developments have been central to public policy. Although Applebaum and Hébert cite the federal government, provincial governments have also been important actors in the development of the broadcasting system. But while the provinces have expanded and developed their provision of television, the csc has curtailed its regional

88 Culture, Communication, and National Identity services, a policy that, of course, has reinforced the provinces’ determination to supplement the perceived deficiencies of the national system.

The cut of $85 million in the csc’s budget required by the Mulroney government in 1985 (underlined by the 1989 cut of a further $20 million

and the promise of further reductions of $10 million in each of three successive years) raised to a particularly high level of visibility the priorities of the csc in allocating resources to the network and regions: ‘Regional operation lost more jobs than ... national networks ... British Columbia (losing 81 of 689 jobs), Manitoba (85 of 528), Ottawa (130 of 758), Windsor (52 of 217), and Quebec (63 of 463) were hit harder than average’ (Globe and Mail 4 Mar. 1985, 17). Between 1981 and 1989, the cBc’s regional budgets declined from 34.2 per cent to 24.5 per cent of its total budget (though the corporation’s overall allocation from the federal

government fell by 15 per cent between 1984 and 1989) (House of Commons 1988, 111). The csc’s discrimination in favour of network operations is a consequence of the costs of regional production: ‘The net

cost-per-viewer of many regionally produced programs is thus very high relative to both network and imported programs. Underfunded, under-resourced, understaffed, local programming is far and away the most expensive Tv CBC produces and it's still not doing the job, simply because the economics of production will not permit it. Therefore it is an

“impossible dream’ (cBC 1984, iv). But within regions the same pressures that obtain nationally, and make csc—Radio Canada imperfectly sensitive to regional/provincial needs, also render provincial

broadcasters imperfectly responsive to their own peripheral areas. Radio Québec sees its production as too centralized and insufficiently responsive to the different needs and interests of Quebec’s regions: ‘facon de survivre pour une entreprise de télévision sera de se rendre indispensable en se rapprochant des gens et de leurs besoins. C’est essentiellement ce en quoi consiste la régionalisation’ (Barbin 1980, 7). The economic tendencies that within Canada favour network production rather than regional production are the same as those that, within a

larger transnational context, favour the United States rather than Canada. National programming is at once on a level too big to meet regional needs and interests and too small to compete with American

products. The president and director general of Radio Québec, G. Barbin, identifies the erosion of the middle, national, level in cultural production (specifically television) and the tendency for production to take place in unities bigger or smaller than the nation: ‘Viendra donc le temps ou la télévision nationale, comme nous la connaissons n’éxistera

1968 and After 89 plus. Pour suivre au raz-de-marée, les entreprises de télévision devront devenir trés grosses ou, paradoxalement, plus petites’ (Barbin 1980, 6).

The Caplan/Sauvageau Report

In 1985 the Progressive Conservative government established a task force on broadcasting policy. The Caplan/Sauvageau task force Committee (chaired by Gerald Caplan, formerly a leading figure in the Nop, and

Florian Sauvageau, an academic from the Université Laval in Quebec City) reported in 1986. Caplan and Sauvageau’s analysis and recommendations are on all fours with the long continuity in Canada’s ‘public broadcasting culture’ and maintained the primacy that official rhetoric formerly customarily ceded to the role of public broadcasters (notably the csc) and to regulation so as to compensate for the capitalist market’s failure to ‘safeguard, enrich and strengthen’ Canadian culture. Caplan and Sauvageau therefore broke from the market-orientated proposals and policies of the early 1980s, which in turn had represented a break from the former dominant tradition in Canadian broadcasting policy to which Caplan and Sauvageau returned. The task force stated that its ‘first priority is to make the broadcasting system serve Canadian culture’ (Caplan and Sauvageau 1986, 41). Its

most important recommendations were to strengthen the csc, to regulate broadcasting more stringently, and to establish ‘a new network or two of an overwhelmingly Canadian kind.’ The new networks were to be a TV Canada channel and an all-news channel. The recommendations and analysis of Caplan and Sauvageau (the full report, running to 731 pages, represents a piquant contrast to the Aird Report, which had 9

pages and 16 pages of appendices) are succinctly presented in an interview article with Gerald Caplan (Broadcast London, 16 Oct. 1987, 26-7). The Tv Canada channel to which Caplan refers was proposed as a satellite-to-cable channel to be funded by a compulsory levy on cable

subscribers and to be programmed, in the main, by public-sector producers: the National Film Board, the csc, the provincial public broadcasters (such as TvOntario), and French-language programming from Canadian public sources and from tTv-5 (the international francophone channel, programmed in the main by European francophone states). However, the federal government maintained the trajectory (which recommended a move towards market allocations and made a powerful critique of the state’s agencies) first established by the Liberal govern-

gO Culture, Communication, and National Identity ment of the early 1980s and did not make the turn back to ‘the good old things’ that the task force advocated. Caplan and Sauvageau’s recommendations have not been adopted by the federal government (with the exception of the news channel, which, after some conflicts, including

those between the crTc and the federal cabinet, was awarded to the CBC).

The Caplan/Sauvageau Report (1986) advocated further expansion of Canada’s broadcasting system. Its major proposal (so far ignored by the federal government) advocated that provincial public television, or at least its programming, be made available throughout Canada on a new channel — Tv Canada. The tv Canada proposal is important for three reasons. First, it responds to a widely held view outside the Toronto-— Montreal—Ottawa triangle that Canada is not adequately represented by broadcasters located in the central-Canadian core. Rather than bringing the centre to the periphery, Tv Canada offers to take the periphery to the

centre, to nationalize the regional. Second, the Tv Canada notion identifies a new source of revenue to support Canadian production. The task force proposed that Tv Canada be financed by a compulsory levy on cable operators, which will undoubtedly be transmitted to subscribers.

The tv Canada proposal exemplifies, after the Pay-rv débacle, the absence of official confidence in the existence of sufficient consumer demand for new Canadian services to meet the costs of the services. Hence, the proposal for rv Canada includes an element of compulsion; cable networks were to be required to offer and pay for the rv Canada

service. Third, tv Canada is to augment the public element in the Canadian broadcasting system, to balance the proliferation of for-profit broadcasting by a public service complementary to that of cBc—Radio Canada. The tv Canada proposal echoes an attempt in the early 1980s by the cBc to secure a licence for its cBc 2/Télé 2 service; though Caplan and

Sauvageau did not propose that the csc run Tv Canada or that all Tv Canada’s programming should emanate from the csc. In its application for a cBC 2 licence, the csc argued for public-sector expansion in order to

provide additional Canadian programs and an alternative, an oasis (a metaphor adopted by Wolfe for the title of his 1985 book Jolts: The rv Wasteland and the Canadian Oasis) as the chairman, Al Johnson, put it, to the Americanized mass entertainment elsewhere dominant in the Canadian system (Johnson 1981b, 2). Caplan and Sauvageau make similar arguments for Tv Canada (to be run by public broadcasters and the National Film Board). These arguments mark a retreat from the idea

1968 and After 91 of a ‘single system’ (the whole of which was to discharge national and public-service aims) and the advance of a new notion of Canadian and public-service programming existing as an alternative to a predominantly American mass-entertainment regime. The division of labour Caplan and Sauvageau propose is for the cBc to be ‘the major broadcaster of Canadian programming, serving both mainstream and minority tastes’ (1986, 351) and for Tv Canada to carry independent productions for minority interests not well served by either the csc or the commercial broadcasters (but not news or sport in English). Caplan and Sauvageau

further proposed that the csc offer a Pay-tv news channel (after difficulties with the federal cabinet’s overruling the crtc’s licensing of the cBc’s proposed service, cBc’s ‘Newsworld’ began in 1989). Caplan and Sauvageau’s proposals return to the ethos of the ‘public enterprise economy’ (Hardin 1974). But advocacy of the public sector is not easily reconciled with the overall policies of the Mulroney government, and there have been few indications since the task force’s report

was published to suggest that the government will implement its recommendations. For the Caplan/Sauvageau Report is out of tune not only with the Mulroney government, but with the whole trajectory of Canadian broadcasting policy in the 1980s, whether promulgated by Liberal or Conservative governments. The policies of the 1980s have emphasized the private sector and subsidy rather than the public sector and regulation.

Three instruments have been adopted, in turn, by the Canadian authorities. First, public-broadcasting organizations were created to substitute for the deficiencies of the market; second, regulation was used

to control and direct the market; and third, substantial subsidies have been allocated to the private sector in order to secure the desired ends, which neither public broadcasters nor regulation have delivered. The

process has been incremental and additive; previously established instruments have been retained but, as they have failed to achieve the desired ends, have been displaced in relative importance by others. Economic Ends for Broadcasting Policy The Liberal party (the party of government for all but nine months of the

twenty-two years that preceded the Conservative victory in 1984) established a major enquiry; a federal cultural-policy review committee in 1980. The so-called Applebert Committee, named after its chairmen, Louis Applebaum and Jacques Hébert, reported in 1982. After publica-

92 Culture, Communication, and National Identity tion of the Applebert Report, the federal government produced three major policy reports and proposals: Towards a New National Broadcasting Policy (voc 1983c), Building for the Future: Toward a Distinctive cBc (Doc 1983a), and The National Film and Video Policy (Doc 1984).

These developments articulated a major new theme in broadcasting policy — substitution of a market for an administered regime — in which there were three minor themes: the substitution of the carrot for the stick (financial inducements to achieve desired ends rather than regulation to

prevent undesired ends), a critique of the public sector (and proposals that achievement of Canada’s desired cultural and industrial goals be

sought through the fostering of private-sector initiatives and not public-sector institutions), and the subordination of cultural to industrial/economic priorities.

The Applebert Report, which underpinned the later policy statements, marks a number of policy transitions, most important a shift from a policy aimed at achieving Canadian communication sovereignty in a ‘single system’ to a pluralistic policy directed towards ensuring the presence of a Canadian voice in the programs available to Canadians.

This diminution of the established role of the public sector was accompanied by stringent criticism of it. The Applebert Report (Applebaum and Hébert 1982) and the audio-visual policy reports that followed

it (DOC 1983a, 1983c, 1984) criticized the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation—Radio Canada and the National Film Board of Canada and

proposed restructuring of the audio-visual sector on the grounds that audio-visual policy is no longer solely a ‘soft’ or cultural issue but of primary importance for industrial policy. Applebert opened the shooting season on the csc thus: The Committee fully endorses the criticism heard during our public hearing that csc television is not sufficiently open to Canadian creative talent and, more importantly, that it does not foster the growth of talent sufficiently ... the result is a hardening of creative arteries and protection of the institutional status quo. The cc is that type of over-protected operation. It is not a monopolist, but the fact that it receives so much of its gross income from Parliament effectively shields it and its employees from having to respond to changed circumstances. (Applebaum and Hébert 1982, 276-7)

and dished out more of the same to the other sacred cow of the public sector, the National Film Board:

1968 and After 93 The Board’s output of new work no longer represents a significant film experience for the Canadian public. Its short films are seldom shown in Canadian theatres because theatre owners do not believe these films have audience appeal. Nor are current NFB productions a staple of either television programming or even the curricula of educational institutions in Canada. The nrp’s displacement from centre stage has occurred for a number of reasons, of which institutional inertia is not the least important ... The nrp’s share of the federal government’s resources for film cannot be justified if judged by the cultural benefits Canadians now receive from the NFB. (pp. 263-4)

The policy recommendations of the Applebaum/Hébert Committee were that the ossified public-sector institutions should be asset-stripped. The NFB’s expertise in training and the csc’s distribution capacity should

be used to support independent productions. The grandes dames of the public sector were to act as surrogate mothers to the growing infants of the private sector.

The government committed substantial funds to stimulating production, and to supporting Canadian distributors. The crpc (Canadian Film Development Corporation; now renamed Telefilm Canada) development-program budget rose from $1.4 million to $2.4 million per

annum. These measures would, it was hoped, not just constitute Canada as a leading member of the ‘Information Society’ but, because the audio-visual industries are labour intensive, also reduce unemployment. ‘On average, the film and video industry has one employee for every $36,000 in gross annual revenues. For the 500 largest industries in North America the comparable figure is $114,000. Because the Canadian film and video industry is so labour intensive, measures to increase its economic strength represent a very cost-effective means of creating jobs’ (DOC 1984, 22).

The Applebert critique of public-sector institutions and advocacy of

the market as a more effective instrument of public policy was implemented in the Department of Communications policy papers (DOC 1983a, 1983c, 1984). The Applebert Report is a document of transition,

marking a shift from the traditional conception of Canadian media policy as a matter of struggling for the achievement of Canadian cultural goals through public-sector institutions to an emerging new conception of communication policy as the leading edge of national industrial and economic policy. State intervention and public-sector institutions are to support Canadian entrepreneurs in seizing a commanding competitive

94 Culture, Communication, and National Identity advantage for Canada in the international race to lead the way to a ‘post-industrial’ or ‘information’ society. Many national governments, those of Canada and the United Kingdom among them, have attempted to accelerate development of a post-industrial society through

support for national communication industries and the creation of an electronic communications infrastructure. Canada’s Department of Communications 1979-80 annual report succinctly sets out the Canadian aspiration: In Canada, as in many other countries, the production of information is becoming an increasingly important factor in the economy. But this shift to an information based economy will not be problem free. If Canadian industry does not participate in this expansion, the economic consequences could be serious indeed. The concern is far more than economic, however. Canada’s very survival as a nation is at stake. Data banks and information systems developed by foreign multinationals could dominate Canadian consumer and business markets. Extensive information on Canada and Canadians could be controlled by other nations. A deluge of foreign radio and television broadcasting could overwhelm the Canadian perspective and Canadian identity. In short, Canadian sovereignty could become a meaningless concept. (DOC 1981, 6)

Canada’s dilemma is that stimulation of the industries producing hardware for the information society (for example, communication satellites, interactive cable systems, electronic switching, and fibre-optic transmission for telecommunications) increases capacity and lowers the

costs of distribution of information. The consequential demand can most advantageously be supplied by importing information goods, principally from the United States, with adverse implications for national communication and cultural sovereignty. It is overwhelmingly

clear that the criteria for audio-visual policy in Canada are now economic and not cultural. The achievements noted with pride in The National Film and Video Policy (Doc 1984) are Porky's and Atlantic City —a

film whose representation of Canada was limited to an insulting one-liner about Saskatchewan. Marcel Masse, when minister of Communications, claimed (Cinema Canada 118 [May 1985], 118) that the cultural sector is ‘practically as important as the entire agricultural sector in Canada in terms of GNP’ and

that, in the United States, cultural investment per head is $7, and in

1968 and After 95 Canada $34. The priorities in national cultural policy have shifted during the 1980s decisively towards economic rather than cultural goals.

The New Realism A persistent motif of government enquiries into broadcasting in Canada has been criticism of cBc—Radio Canada for its inefficiency, opaque

management practices, and wastefulness (see, for instance, Fowler 1957; Glassco 1963). The most recent of these studies, Comprehensive

Audit of the cpc (Auditor General of Canada, 1984), was published with an introductory response from the csc, written by its president, and continues the tradition with a very comprehensive critique of the CBC's organization and management. Public-sector institutions experience problems that flow from their insulation from the demands of the market and from formal account-

ability to public or government. Lack of accountability may lead to disgraceful accumulation of perks and privileges, to social and political irresponsibility and irrelevance. For broadcasters, and other cultural agencies, insulation from the demands of the market may lead

to élitism or antiquarianism, both symptoms of lack of contact with popular taste, and to less-than-optimal use of human and material resources. In many ways the crisis identified in the csc by the auditor general is representative of the crisis of a class of institutions. European governments have responded to similar problems by privatizing broadcasting (France) and/or by attempting to expose broadcasters to more competition (the United Kingdom). Although the case for public-sector

and public-service institutions is strong, so too do the widespread criticisms of the particular organizational forms and practices of such public-sector institutions as the csc have force. (The case of the Bsc and British public-sector corporations, which so strongly influenced the establishment of the csc and Canadian crown corporations, of course immediately comes to mind.) How public-sector institutions (which

owe their existence to the need for institutions outside the reach of government and the capitalist market) are to be governed and their performance assessed remains a central, and unanswered, policy question. The auditor general criticized the absence of effective procedures for securing efficient use of resources within the csc. Here, no alibi drawn from the contradictory position of the csc vis-a-vis market or government can be found.

96 Culture, Communication, and National Identity Responsibility for program budgets and costs was fragmented because different managers were responsible for direct departmental and plant costs. This made it difficult to determine the full cost of a program and to hold managers accountable. Accurate, reliable and timely information on program costs was generally not available. Although there was ongoing monitoring of some aspects of the success of programs there was still need for periodic documented assessment of continuing major and special programs. Assessment of the performance of individuals involved in producing radio and television programs were mostly informal and seldom documented [Para 3.8].

The Corporation had not developed systems and procedures to enable the radio and Tv plant managers to calculate the annual production capacity of plants and match available resources with demand. Excess or under-capacity was not identified for individual plants or for the Corporation as a whole. Operational programming and capital decisions were made without such information. csc plants did not have systems for measuring the unproductive time of technicians. Incremental budgeting practices, staffing for peak work loads, the failure to use load levelling and the lack of information on standby and idle time all suggested that there would be a surplus of available technician time. Information on utilization of studios, rehearsal rooms and videotape recorders was also not used or not produced. Weaknesses were noted in material management practices and policies and procedures to ensure economy and efficiency were required in connection with storage in television plants and for maintenance of equipment [Para 3.9]. (Auditor General 1984)

Neither the general difficulty of separating overhead and incremental costs nor the peculiar problems of working in an industry whose prime

resource is (as Al Johnson, a past president of the csc, said) ‘genius’ explain or justify these conditions. For Johnson, the auditor general’s report, while recognizing the admittedly ‘poor job done by csc in marshalling and deploying resources,’ lacked understanding of the

nature of the broadcasting industry and the csc’s relation to the government. Johnson pointed to the more favourable report commissioned by the csc from the consultancy McKinsey and Co. ForJohnsona more pressing and continuing problem for the csc was political pressure and its consequence: “The real threat is the caution born of fear of political power’ (interview by author, 11 July 1985).

1968 and After 97 Among the areas of the csc’s activities that are specifically discussed by the auditor general is television drama. The report stated that English

Services Division (esp) drama had, exceptionally, good analysis and documentation of budgets and costs but that French Services Division (FSD) budgets ‘were not prepared and approved according to the required schedule of the production cycle.’ The auditor general reviewed in some

detail the major drama ‘Empire Inc.’ ‘In our review of the dramatic program Empire Inc we noted that as many as 10,000 hours of appointed program production staff time had been used before final approval for the project was received ... Initial approval budget of Empire Inc was $4.2 m; actual costs are now estimated to be approximately $5.8 m (p. 34). (‘Empire Inc.’ is discussed extensively below, chapter 11.)

Telefilm Canada The government’s loss of confidence in public-sector institutions such as

the National Film Board and the csc has led to the public sector’s increasingly being supplanted by independent commercial producers and distributors as the agents of Canadian policy. Characteristically government has sought to establish partnerships with the private sector and guide its behaviour through subsidy allocated by public bodies. The

most important of these bodies, known first as the Canadian Film Development Corporation (cFpc) and subsequently (since 1984) as Telefilm Canada, was established in 1967. The crpc was established ‘to

foster and promote the development of a feature film industry in Canada by providing assistance to private sector productions which have a significant Canadian creative, artistic and technical content’ (crpc leaflet, undated). In 1974 film production was further supported by the establishment of

a capital cost allowance whereby investors in qualifying film productions were permitted to write off 100 per cent of investments in the first year. These initiatives produced a remarkable rise in Canadian featurefilm production (and in production budgets). But many of the films

produced under these initiatives were unreleased (and are widely regarded as unreleasable); others had no evident Canadian elements, whether in terms of subject-matter (e.g., Atlantic City or Black Christmas)

or production personnel (the practice of hiring a phantom Canadian crew in order to qualify for subsidy and actually employing foreign — usually u.s. — nationals become notorious): ‘Most of the films made (including the not inconsiderable number never released) were de-

98 Culture, Communication, and National Identity signed for a mass market, North American audience, not a Canadian one, and usually involved Canadian cities masquerading as American cities and stories set “no place”. Leading roles were usually played by American stars, and Canadian talent tended to be used in subordinate positions. The tax shelter also attracted promoters more interested in earning high fees for their contributions than in actually making films’ (Morris 1984, 55). Between 1969 and 1976 feature-film production rose from ten films per

annum to forty, and the average production budget doubled, from $250,000 to $500,000. In 1980 seventy-seven features were produced

with an average production budget of $1.82 million. In 1981 the provisions of the capital cost allowance (CCA) were modified in order to make investment in feature-film production less attractive as a financial speculation (investment could be written off in two years). In 1984 the

emphasis on feature-film production shifted towards production for television. While the feature-film initiatives augmented the production industry and pool of skilled labour, they had little success in either the cultural or financial arenas. Of the crpc’s investment of $26 million in total production budgets of $166 million (1968-78) only $5 million was

returned. The major obstacle to the achievement of the aims of the feature-film initiatives was the difficulty of achieving adequate distribution of films produced in Canada. As in other national film markets, the financial interests of exhibitors and distributors were better served by exhibition of u.s. productions than of domestic ones. Canadians customarily point to a long-standing foreign ownership of

the two major Canadian theatrical exhibition chains (both are now Canadian-owned) to explain the inadequate circulation of films produced in Canada. But the ownership of exhibitors in West Germany and

the United Kingdom by indigenous capital has not prevented the emergence there of similar difficulties in securing circulation of domesti-

cally produced films. However, there can be little doubt that the ownership of the Canadian distribution sector by foreign capital - seven out of the top ten distributors in Canada in 1980 were foreign-owned and accounted for 84 per cent of revenues of the top ten firms (Audley 1983, 245) — has impeded the development of a Canadian industry, since profits were remitted to foreign owners rather than being recycled into

production in Canada. But the decisive problem is that, long experienced in the United Kingdom, of exhibitors enjoying a much more secure flow of profits by screening American films with high production

values (of which there is a relatively secure supply) than by screening lower-budgeted, domestically produced films in uncertain supply.

1968 and After 99 The renaming of the crpc as Telefilm Canada reflected an increased commitment to television. Telefilm Canada is permitted to lend or invest

funds from its Broadcast Programme Development Fund to ‘a project deemed to be of high quality, attractive to peak viewing audiences and, where appropriate, internationally attractive’ (Telefilm Canada 1984, unpaginated). The broadcast fund was established in 1983 (under the cFpc) and is intended to ‘promote an increase in the quantity of high quality Canadian television productions in the categories of drama, childrens programming and variety’ (Telefilm Canada 1984). Qualifying

productions are those in which the producer and two-thirds of key personnel, including either the director or screen writer and one of the

two highest-paid actors, must be Canadian. One-third of the fund is allocated to French-language, and two-thirds to English-language, productions. The fund’s resources have grown from $34 million in 1983-4 to $60 million in 1987-8.

The fund may finance up to 49 per cent of 100 per cent Canadiancontent programs (assessed under crTc guide-lines and including those made under co-production agreements between Canada and Algeria, Belgium, France, Italy, Israel, West Germany, and the United Kingdom) that can show a commitment to broadcast from a Canadian broadcaster (in 1986 Pay Tv became eligible for Telefilm program finance, but only if the Pay-Tv producer had a broadcast guarantee). Most early productions

(1983-5) under the auspices of the broadcast fund were partnerships between csc—Radio Canada and independent producers (fewer than 20 per cent of 1984 productions were with commercial broadcasters); however, following the crTc requirements for commercial broadcasters to originate Canadian drama, commercial broadcasters have become prominent beneficiaries of Telefilm funding. In 1985 provincial educational broadcasters became eligible for Telefilm broadcast-fund support. Prior to April 1985, Telefilm was permitted to invest only 33 per cent in productions, but the difficulties of assembling the requisite package of a

Canadian broadcaster (necessary to give the required guarantee of screening within two years of completion) and an independent producer, who between them were prepared to invest 67 per cent of the production budget, proved too exacting a requirement. The profits of a Canadian commercial broadcaster may more securely be maximized by

the purchase of American programming than by the production of Canadian shows, whether with a 33 per cent or a 49 per cent subsidy from the broadcast fund. TV World (June 1984) estimates program costs (for purchase of product on the international market) as: for the cBc, $10,000 to $15,000 (3 hour)

100 Culture, Communication, and National Identity and $15,000 to $25,000 (feature); for Radio Canada, $4,000 to $7,000 (3 hour) and $15,000 to $25,000 (feature); and, for ctv, $10.000 to $15,000 (4

hour) and $75,000 to $200,000 (feature). In spite of the notorious unreliability of publicly quoted acquisition costs for television drama (cf the estimated $60,000 per hour for ‘Dallas’ cited in poc 1987, 62) and the inexplicable discrepancy in Tv World’s estimate between the prices paid for half-hour programs and those paid for feature films (why are Radio Canada’s costs for feature films similar to the cBc’s and why are crTv’s costs so much higher?) and noting rv World’s caveat - ‘The programme

prices given should be taken only as very approximate guidelines — actual prices paid can vary greatly beyond the limits indicated’ - we may see that fora CTv member station (assuming that revenues accruing from

the screening of a Canadian-produced show and those from an American purchased show are equivalent) there are no possibilities of profits from the screening of Canadian product comparable to those realizable from screening American product. Let us assume a production cost per hour of $750,000 (the cost of ‘St

Elsewhere’ cited in Variety, 5 Oct. 1985) for both American and Canadian product (though the cost per hour of the successful Canadian production ‘Anne of Green Gables’ is estimated to have been $850,000 [Doc 1987, 62]). The American production is available to Canadian broadcasters at a cost of, say, $30,000. The Canadian product, with a 40 per cent subsidy from the broadcast fund, still costs $382,500. Under any conceivable scenario involving co-production, foreign sales, and greater attractiveness of Canadian programming to Canadian audiences, Canadian production remains financially unattractive. As Hoskins and McFadyen state in their discussion of the broadcast fund (1984), ‘the risk is obviously staggering.’ It is not surprising that commercial broadcasters took little advantage of the fund until required by the crtc to produce a

quota of Canadian drama as a condition of licence. The president of Global Tv (the largest commercial broadcaster in Canada, with the possible exception of crro ~ the Toronto flagship station of the crv network), David Mintz, was reported in Cinema Canada (Apr. 1985, 28) as saying that the commercial sector remained concerned about features

of the broadcast program fund. Mintz noted ‘that 100% Canadian productions are least likely to recoup their costs because they lack international sales-appeal. With Telefilm taking its 49% [Telefilm is first

in line to recoup its investment] it would appear that the chances for a private investor to break even are slim.’ However deficient the fund has

been in meeting the demands of commercial broadcasters, it has

1968 and After 101 provided a means whereby public-sector producers (notably the csc),

committed to Canadian production (using Canadian facilities and personnel, and with Canadian cultural characteristics), have been able

to command additional production resources. The price for these resources has been a forced partnership with the independent sector. The National Film and Video Policy (poc 1984) directs attention to the

difficulties independent Canadian producers experience in securing distribution and exhibition of their works and looks to broadcast television as an outlet for new Canadian productions. Thus, although the 1980s has been marked by a consistent mistrust of the public-sector

agencies by government, the csc’s control of a national conduit for distribution and exhibition of television programs has, despite the comments of Applebaum and Hébert and the auditor general, earned it a leading role in the film and video policy. The broadcast fund seems likely to have been a very effective instrument for orientating cBC production to the market-place and creating a fruitful cross-fertilization between the csc’s ‘critical mass’; its production experience, international marketing, and effective Canadian distribution; and the talent pool

that lies outside the csc’s salaried employees. Since April 1985, the provincial broadcasters such as TvOntario and Radio Québec have become eligible for financing from the broadcast fund. The new regime, based on collaboration between public and private sectors, may well call into existence for the first time in Canada a form of

creative organization that has proved very successful elsewhere. The Arthur Freed unit at MGM, Euston Films in London, and Basis Film in West Berlin were and are relatively small units, emphasizing, on a long-term basis, producers and script editors, enjoying an arm’s-length, though secure, relationship to a parent organization with adequate control of distribution and hiring of creative personnel on an ad hoc basis. Such organizations seem to mediate successfully between the perils of ossification inherent in organizations that offer ‘tenure’ and a pension to their employees (the National Film Board is probably the best

example) and the perils of casualized insecure employment with no continuity of work and inability for individuals and organizations to progress up a learning curve. Under the leadership of the executive director of Telefilm, Peter Pearson, a range of packages were assembled under the broadcast program fund initiatives. The first year of the fund July 1983 to June 1984) saw 47 anglophone, and 41 francophone, projects contracted or accepted. Radio Canada accounted for 33 projects; cBC, 24; CTV, 6;

102 Culture, Communication, and National Identity Global, 5; Télé-Métropole, 2; and anglophone and francophone independents, 18. The projects ranged from feature films to generic series such as ‘The Evergreen Racoons Weekly Series.’ Marcel Masse (when he was minister of communications) stated (in an interview with Michael Dorland in Cinema Canada 118 [May 1985], 7) that

the broadcast fund had supported more than 500 programs (or 140 projects), budgeted at more than $200 million, since 1 July 1983, with Telefilm support as investment, loan, or loan guarantee. Examples from the projects scheduled for support in 1984-5 give a sense of the range of programming and deals in which Telefilm has participated: a twinning agreement with u.K. partner Michael Peacock to jointly produce No Surrender by Alan Bleasdale (no Canadian content) and Loyalties by Ann Wheeler (no u.kK. content); Peter Ustinov’s ‘My Russia,’ where Telefilm, in exchange for supporting above-the-line costs, participates in Western

distribution rights, and the Soviet Union, in exchange for supporting below-the-line costs, secures rights for the socialist countries; ‘Danger Bay,’ a joint venture between Telefilm, the csc, and the Disney Channel (4, 3, 4), budgeted at $300,000 per half-hour, with Telefilm and the csc retaining editorial content. Considerable success can be claimed for the economic development of the Canadian production industry. Between 1984 and 1986, production funds spent in Toronto grew by 129 per cent, and in Montreal by 72 per cent (Television Business International Sept. 1988, 40). However, the most important component of growth has been American productions made ‘offshore’ in Canada rather than Canadian programs. There are insuffi-

cient Canadian productions made to enable Canadian Pay-tv franchisees to meet their Canadian-content requirements without extensive reruns.

The ‘new realism,’ associated with the enhanced emphasis on economic rather than nationalist goals, was clearly voiced by Peter Pearson when he was executive director of Telefilm Canada (Pearson is

a distinguished film-maker who was responsible, inter alia, for four important ‘For the Record’ dramas for the csc) in a speech cited in Cinema Canada (127 [Feb. 1986], 8): I am here today, as the head of a cultural agency to talk not about culture but about profit. If we can’t find a way to enable Canadian entrepreneurs, working in the cultural industries — the independent producers, the private broadcasters, the independent distributors and exporters — if we can’t

1968 and After 103 find a way for them to make a profit then probably nothing has a chance of improving ... Our only hope then is to shake off the record that has paralyzed the cultural sector in Canada for too long. So to all the tired prophets who are still trying to solve Canada’s cultural dilemma with high flown principles, and who pretend that they are prophets without honour in our own land, I suggest that there is no honour without profit ... profit for the producer, return on investment to the speculator, earnings to the broadcaster and the advertiser.

The overcommitment of $40 million by Telefilm that provoked Pearson’s resignation in late 1987 (he was succeeded by Pierre DesRoches, formerly the general manager of Radio Canada) and the implicit

charges of clientism and exercise of political patronage levelled at Telefilm’s chairman Jean Sirois (see reports in Cinema Canada 147 [1987],

12-18; 150 [1988], 33-8) are likely to discredit Telefilm’s ‘public enterprise’ status rather than its market orientation. Broadcasting policy in Canada in the 1980s has oscillated between

adherence to the nationalist policy of compensation for perceived market failure (a policy based regulation and state enterprises) and an embrace of the market because of a perceived failure of the state agencies and initiatives. Overall it has been characterized by a shift away from the

use of public-sector bodies and regulation and towards subsidy and market mechanisms. The Canadian loss of faith in the state as an agency

superior to the market is, of course, not a wholly Canadian phenomenon. There are powerful winds in the sails of the argosies of deregulation and the market across the world. (Examples include France’s sale of

its first television channel to the private sector, West Germany’s introduction of commercial Tv, the rcc’s ‘deregulation’ of communica-

tions in the United States, and the u.k. proposals to sell television franchises and radio-frequencies instead of the Independent Broadcast-

ing Authority’s selecting a favoured franchisee from the groups applying.) But this global shift is particularly controversial in Canada,

given the long-held nationalist belief in the importance of a shared culture (and a culture differentiated from that of other states and nations) as a condition of political stability and sovereignty. Conservative governments in Canada have in the past been as well disposed to

public broadcasting as have the Liberals. Indeed, Canada’s Radio Broadcasting Act, first establishing a public-sector broadcaster and regulator in Canada, was passed by a Conservative government in 1932

104 Culture, Communication, and National Identity one week after tabling of the report it commissioned from the Special Committee on Radio Broadcasting. The immediate future for Canadian broadcasting is unclear. Since delivery of the task force’s report, little has happened; the proposed new broadcasting act (Bill C-136) died on the order table as a consequence of

the 1988 Canadian election: it has not been resuscitated. De facto, therefore, the policy is the status quo — a status quo defined in the long

run by the nationalist goals of Canadian broadcasting policy, in the middle run by the market-oriented recommendations of Applebaum and Hébert and the Liberal policies of the mid-1980s, and in the short run by a government hostile to the csc and disinclined to pursue the recommendations of the Task Force on Broadcasting Policy. Policy seems to be to continue to accept Canadian viewers’ consumption of American television while providing a Canadian alternative through the

public sector (more disciplined by market organization and financial stringency than broadcasters and nationalists would like) for those Canadians who wish to watch it. While the voices of nationalism (and public service) have not been silenced by the new voice of the market, it is clear that this new voice is speaking loudest in the official Canadian television-policy discourse. Policy goals are to be achieved not in the ‘public enterprise economy’ (identified by Hardin [1974] as a distinctive element in Canada’s national

identity and created in large part to foster that separate identity) but through the ‘un-Canadian’ agencies of private enterprise and the capitalist market. It is to examination of these major ideologies that inform Canadian broadcasting policy and institutions — to the ideas of nationalism and the market — that I now turn.

Nationalism

One way of offsetting the appeal of separatism is by investing tremendous amounts of time, energy, and money in nationalism at the federal level. A national image must be created that will have such an appeal as to make any image of a separatist group unattractive. Resources must be diverted into such things as national flags, anthems, education, arts councils, broadcasting corporations, film boards; the territory must be bound together by a network of railways, highways, airlines; the national culture and the national economy must be protected by taxes and tariffs; ownership of resources and industry by nationals must be made a matter of policy. In short, the whole of the citizenry must be made to feel that it is only within the framework of the federal state that their language, culture, institutions, sacred traditions and standard of living can be protected from external attack and internal strife. (Trudeau 1968, 192)

The nation and the ideology of nationalism are notoriously inadequately

theorized. Smith comments that ‘the task of a general theory [i.e., of nationalism] must await further studies of the origins of nationalism’ (1979, viii) and also states: ‘One can only be amazed at the comparative lack of sociological interest and research in this field. Sociologists from Comte and Marx to Parsons and Dahrendorf have neglected nationalism and even today it has not become a major locus of sociological interest’ (1971, 3).

Notwithstanding Smith’s judgment (shared by Anderson 1983 and Seton-Watson 1964), there is a literature on nationalism of respectable

106 Culture, Communication, and National Identity size (see, inter alia, Anderson 1983; Breuilly 1982~5; Gellner 1983; Kedourie 1966, Minogue 1967; Nairn 1981; Seers 1983; Seton-Watson 1964, 1977; Smith 1971, 1979), in which two main conceptions may be distinguished. First, that nationalism is a comparatively recent historical phenomenon and it and the pendent notion of the nation-state as a normative ‘natural’ political unit are drawn from recent European

experience but are neither inevitable nor universal. Second, that nationalism and the aspiration for a nation-state within which the ‘imagined community’ (Anderson 1983) of the nation finds a home are ancient and pervasive. The first notion constitutes nationalism as an ideology and set of institutions more or less self-consciously produced by the ruling factions of modern states. In order to consolidate their rule (i.e., where the ideologues of a nation do not enjoy political power) the national project is invoked in order to legitimize their claims to power (see Kedourie 1966). The second notion presumes the anterior existence of nations (distinguished by shared characteristics of, inter alia, ethnic-

ity, language, religion, culture) that seek political power in order to realize the collective interests of a pre-existent community in its own political institutions, its own state. Both notions have political institutions and sovereignty at their centre. Breuilly argues: ‘Nationalism is, above and beyond all else, about politics and politics is about power. Power in the modern world is primarily about control of the state. The central question, therefore, should be to relate nationalism to the objective of obtaining and using state power’ (1985, 1-2). The first conception of nationalism designates the political as the essence of nationalism and the nation; the second constitutes the political as the expression of a prior national identity. One proposes that states have created nations, the other that nations have created states. Gellner (1983, 125), Kedourie (1966, 79), and Minogue (1967, 8) argue

against the inevitability, necessity, and antiquity of the concepts of nation and of nationalism. If nationalism cannot provide a satisfactory account of past political developments, neither can it supply a plain method whereby nations may be isolated from one another and constituted into sovereign states. The world is indeed diverse, much too diverse, for the classifications of nationalist anthropology. Races, languages, religions, political traditions and loyalties are so inextricably intermixed that there can be no clear convincing reason why people who speak the same language, but whose history and circumstances otherwise widely diverge,

Nationalism 107 should form one state, or why people who speak two different languages and whom circumstances have thrown together should not form one state. (Kedourie 1966, 79)

Beginning with the assumption that national identity is not a normative, necessary, and sufficient basis for political organization (what Minogue [1967] succinctly defines as the ‘attempt to make the boundaries of state and those of nation coincide’ [p. 12]), Gellner interestingly asks why nationalism enjoys so prominent a contemporary status (a status defined, again succinctly, by Minogue as ‘the foremost ideology of the modern world’ [p. 8]): As the tidal wave of modernisation sweeps the world, it makes sure that almost everyone, at some time or other, has cause to feel unjustly treated, and that he can identify the culprits as being of another ‘nation’. If he can also identify enough of the victims as being of the same ‘nation’ as himself a nationalism is born. If it succeeds, and not all of them can, a nation is born. There is a further element of economic rationality in the political system of ‘lateral boundaries’ which nationalism engenders in the modern world. Territorial boundaries are drawn and legally enforced, while differences of status are neither marked nor enforced but rather camouflaged and disavowed. Notoriously advanced economies can swamp and inhibit newly emerging ones, unless these are effectively protected by their own state. The nationalist state is not the protector only of a culture, but also of a new and often initially fragile economy. (Gellner 1983, 112)

The ideology of nationalism stipulates a normative congruence of political institutions, economic activity, and cultural experience and identity. It is a belief system, a set of precepts, under increasing pressure

as the world economy becomes more integrated and interdependent; the economic self-sufficiency of nation-states (even the largest, most developed, and most powerful, such as the United States) less and less easy to sustain; and cultural identities become more transnational. Elites have long experienced a transnational ‘high culture’ for which they have occasionally incurred the opprobrium of nationalists who have anathematized them as cosmopolitans. However, it is the contemporary pervasiveness of an international popular culture in and through which the masses are thought to construct their identities and aspira-

108 Culture, Communication, and National Identity tions outside the dominant political institutions of the nation-state that most worries contemporary nationalists. As the economic and cultural forces of internationalization augment, they produce resistances whereby national goals, institutions, and values are more and more insistently asserted — notably by those whose raison d’étre is threatened by the

internationalization of the economy and culture. Because political institutions are predominantly national, the rhetoric of nationalism is most insistently articulated there, but firms losing profits and markets to

foreign competition and those whose cultural capital is devalued by internationalization also assert the values of national culture and a national economy. The core precept of nationalism — the normative congruence of the political, the economic, and the cultural in the institution of a nationstate — is both pervasively inscribed in contemporary belief and value systems (as what Underhill [1966, xvi] defined as ‘the dominant twentieth century form of religion’) and an extraordinary misrecognition of the way in which most humans have lived. For most human communities, most of the time, have not lived in nation-states. Canada is hardly considered in most general studies of nationalism. Kedourie (1966, 79) cites the ‘union of English and French Canadians within the Canadian state’ as an instance that does not conform to nationalist norms, but does not consider the tensions of that union and the attempts of nationalists to undo it. Breuilly (1985, 290-3) briefly considers Canada in his study, but designates Toronto as a Québécois city and grotesquely underestimates the pervasiveness and longevity of nationalism in Quebec. He erroneously states: ‘In Quebec nationalism made few inroads among a traditional Catholic farming population prior to 1945. It has been in rapidly growing cities like Toronto that separatism

has developed fastest. But generally Quebec is less economically advanced than some of the English speaking regions’ (p. 291). These are unfortunate howlers but not ones that seriously misrepresent his poorly informed account of the Canadian case.

Canada offers grist to most nationalist mills. Quebec can be under-

stood as a classic nation of the old type (if its 20 per cent or so of non-native speakers of French are discounted), bound together by language, religion, culture, ethnicity, and shared history, and seeking to realize its national destiny in a Québécois state. Canada fits a different

aetiology and exemplifies a state of recent historical origin selfconsciously creating itself as a nation under the leadership of its élites. Quebec is a nation without a state; Canada, a state without a nation. The

Nationalism 109 mismatch (from the point of view of nationalists) between the institu-

tions of state and nation in Canada is sharpened by the absence in English Canada of a nation equivalent to Quebec in its coherence and robust, self-confident identity. For English Canada lacks the shared

ethnicity, language, and historical experience of Quebec, in part because English Canada experienced most of the immigration to Canada. Porter states that ‘immigration has had a negligible effect on the French-Canadian population’ (1965, 32) and contrasts the involution of

French Canada to the ‘kinetic population’ of English Canada: ‘Tt is unlikely that any other society has resembled a huge demographic railway station as much as has the non-French part of Canada’ (1965, 33). Though Quebec (and Montreal, in particular) has experienced substantial immigration by allophones since Porter's study, his judgment requires only to be qualified and not to be rejected. English Canada did absorb most of the ‘third force’ - the Canadians who did not come

from one of Canada’s two founding, charter, peoples originating from Britain and France. Moreover the British ‘charter’ group has not only experienced the continental forces pulling towards the United States (forces that exert a lesser, though still significant pull on French Canada)

but also lost its distinct British identity as Canada (and Britain) has decoupled from Empire. Theorists of nationalism have recognized as nations not only peoples

living in geographical proximity to each other but also ‘diaspora’ nations. The classic diaspora nation is that of the Jews but the Chinese are another case in point. A plausible case could be made for the British as a diaspora nation, a nation that during the epoch of Empire, though

widely dispersed geographically, enjoyed not just a shared identity constituted out of language, culture, religion, and ethnicity but also shared political institutions. The experience of Britishness successfully maintained by, for example, the Anglo-Argentine community, was much stronger for those living, and offering allegiance to the Crown, in Australia, New Zealand, India, Africa, and British North America. The

unravelling of Empire and the transition from being a subject of the Crown in the Dominion of Canada to being a Canadian, from being a member of a world-wide anglophone Imperial community to being a citizen of a North American bilingual state, was profoundly upsetting and alienating for many. For some, of course, becoming a Canadian offered a much more comfortable identity than had being a subject of the British Empire. But, for others, membership of the British nation, albeit

part of the Imperial diaspora, was preferable to being a Canadian, an

110 Culture, Communication, and National Identity inhabitant of what Wilden (1980) calls ‘Notland, where “being Canadian” means not being someone else — not English, not American, not Asian, not European, and especially not French’ (1980, 1). For Wilden, the ‘imaginary identity,’ being Canadian, was one of

‘fighting other countries’ wars’ (1980, 1). The alienation from the Imperial military project he voices is comparatively recent (I refer here, of course, to English Canada and do not forget the conscription crises and the refusal of most Quebeckers to spill their and others’ blood for

the British Empire). War memorials across Canada testify to the slaughter of Canadians, uncompelled by duress, in the name of Britain as well as in the name of Canada. None is more eloquent than that in Quebec City, the heart of French Canada, memorializing those who, marooned in the francophone society they dominated, travelled across the world to die for the Empire. The citation on the monument reads: To those sons of Quebec who gave their lives in South Africa while fighting for the Empire ap 1899—1902.

Not by the power of commerce, art, or pen Shall our great empire stand. Nor has it stood But by the noble deeds of noble men, Heroic lives, and heroes’ outpoured blood.

The Imperial project and the identity of Empire are now rather vieux jeu. Imperial identity is no longer on offer. And English Canada remains less confident of its own identity, its own unity in differentiation from other communities, than does Quebec. English Canada’s weak sense of itself

as an ‘imagined community’ is both its problem and its advantage. Its imperfect conformity to the stipulations of nationalism readily permit-

ted the successful integration of another state, Newfoundland, and massive immigration of the ‘third force’ into the Canadian polity extraordinary political achievements, which are unnoticed, testifying to

the advantages conferred by Canada’s absence of a hard-edged, experienced-in-depth, exclusive national identity. The political reflexes of Québécois nationalists are characteristically

triggered in order to preserve and maintain an antecedent national culture and community; those of English-Canadian nationalists to construct and develop something new. Québécois theorists affirm nationalism as an unproblematic and natural vocation of human

Nationalism 111 societies: ‘What is nationalism? It is simply the manifestation of the natural and spontaneous solidarity that exists among members of a human group sharing a historical and cultural tradition from which the group derives its distinctive identity’ (Brunet 1966, 47). English Canadians affirm, rather, the political and constructed nature of nationalism: ‘No amount of quibbling about the different meanings attached by “English” and “French” to the word “nation” can obscure the fact that in the 1860s a political nationality was being founded ... Nor is there room to doubt that English-speaking Canadians, then and even more now, thought of Canadian nationality as something that included

people of French, British and other origins and which would move steadily towards its own sense of identity. The identity was not to be homogeneous in the American sense but diverse’ (McNaught 1966, 64). Gellner (1983) and Smith (1979) discuss nationalism in terms that are

useful for understanding of Canada. Both consider twentieth-century nationalism largely as a defensive response by peripheral areas and states to an international economy dominated and directed by core states and regions. ‘For nationalism the tyrant is imperialism the alien coloniser, the invading enemy, the predatory stranger’ (Smith 1979, 117). Both Canada (in relation to the rest of the world and, particularly, the successive dominant metropoles of France, Britain, and the United States) and Quebec (in relation to anglophone Canada) can plausibly be understood in these terms. The notion of the political authority of the state as ‘protector: not ... only of a culture but also of a new and often initially fragile economy’ (Gellner 1983, 112) has been uppermost in Canadian nationalism and has led Canadian nationalists to see their country as sharing with other peripheral nations a relationship of ‘dependency’ in the world economy. Such notions were rebuffed by Minogue with all the vigour and confidence of a non-peripheral insider: ‘Nationalism is a political movement which seeks to attain and defend an objective we may call national integrity. It seeks freedom but freedom can mean many things. The demand for freedom already carries with it

the suggestion that nationalists feel themselves oppressed. Out of this freedom-oppression complex of ideas we may extract a general description of nationalism: it is a political movement depending on a feeling of collective grievance against foreigners’ (1967, 25). But the ideology Minogue so confidently disdains is one that retains its power to mobilize the imagination and actions of many. The conflicts

over Nagorno Karabak, the expulsion of minority populations from Romania and Bulgaria, the secessionary gestures of the Baltic states,

112 Culture, Communication, and National Identity unresolved national questions in, inter alia, Ireland, Corsica, and Catalonia, and a threatened (or promised: see, inter alia, Nairn 1981) break-up of Britain testify to the power of nationalist ideas on the old

continent. European events echo those on other continents. The collective grievance against foreigners to which Minogue reduces national sentiment remains an extraordinarily powerful force. The Canadian case is happily attended by less-spectacular acts of malice, vindictiveness, and contempt for human rights than have been those mentioned above. The Varieties of Nationalism in Canada

Nationalism and national identity have long been dominant motifs in Canadian culture. The questions ‘Who am I?’ and ‘Where is here?’ have been addressed in Canada with an explicitness that is unusual in states

that have a more confident perception of symmetry between political identity, citizenship, and cultural identity, nationality. That is not to say that all Canadian cultural productions are concerned with the national question; nor that cultural assumptions in Canada are marked only by a nationalist stamp (there is a powerful suspicion of the popular, which often runs in harness with nationalist concerns, sharing a suspicion of ‘American’ mass culture; see, for example, Joyce Nelson’s nutty The Perfect Machine: rv in the Nuclear Age [1987]); nor that British, American,

French, or German cultural productions are unmarked by a national (or nationalist) discourse. But, in Canada, various factors have combined to keep the question of Canadian national identity both an urgent and an

uncertain concern. And, therefore, Canada offers an opportunity to track nationalist discourses that have (but not because of their absence) received too little recognition in societies so confident in their national identity that the identities of class, gender, and ethnicity have been chosen by cultural analysts for attention rather than the ‘invisible,’ because taken for granted, ideology of nation. There are at least three nationalisms circulating within Canada: those voiced in the name of Canada’s two founding nations, the British and

the French, and that seeking to synthesize the, respectively, insecure and confident nationalisms of anglophones and francophones into a bilingual and bicultural federal identity uniting the two solitudes. The latter, federalist, strategy is now pre-eminently identified with Pierre Trudeau. Trudeau’s program rests on a tradition of French-Canadian political thought, as authentically ‘Canadien’ as those advocating

Nationalism 113 separatism, exemplified in the writings, inter alia, of Bourassa and Cartier. These conceptions decouple state and nation, political citizenship and institutions, from national identity. Georges Etienne Cartier, one of the fathers of Confederation and.a prime minister of Canada, for example, wrote: Lorsque nous serons unis, nous formerons une nationalité politique independante de I’origine nationale ou de la religion d’aucun individu. Il en est qui ont regretté qu'il y eut diversité de races et qui ont exprimé l’espoir que ce caractére distinctif disparaisse. L’idée de l’unité des races est une utopie: c’est une impossibilité. Une distinction de cette nature existera toujours, de méme que la dissemblance parait étre dans l’ordre du monde physique, moral et politique. Quant a l’objection basée sur ce fait, qu'une grande nation ne peut pas étre formée parce que le Bas-Canada est en grande partie francais et catholique et que le Haut-Canada est anglais et protestant et que les provinces intérieures sont mixtes, elle constitue, a mon avis, un raisonnement futile a l’extréme ... Dans notre propre fédération, nous aurons des catholiques et des protestants, des Anglais, des Francais, des Irlandais et des Ecossais et chacun, par ses efforts et ses succés ajoutera a la prospérité et a la gloire de la nouvelle confédération. Nous sommes des races différentes, non pas pour nous faire la guerre, mais afin de travailler conjointement a notre bien-étre. (cited in Rémillard 1980, 73-4)

And Henri Bourassa, founder of Le Devoir, argued for a Canadian nationalism ‘based on the duality of the races and the special traditions

this duality imposes. We are working toward the development of Canadian patriotism, which in our eyes is the best guarantee of the existence of two races and of the mutual respect they owe each other. Our people ... are the French Canadians; but the Anglo-Canadians are not foreigners’ (1904; cited in Cook 1969, 149).

Trudeau attempted to construct an identity for Canada in which membership of one of the national communities of Canada could coexist

with citizenship of the Canadian state: a state that non-exclusively embraces the national identities of the two founding nations (and those of the native peoples and the ‘third force’). Here he follows Bourassa,

who favoured a chessboard structure for Canadian society wherein separate adjacent francophone and anglophone communities would constitute a strong national whole: ‘the biggest obstacle that could be thrown up against the slow but sure conquest of the English provinces

114 Culture, Communication, and National Identity by American thinking ... would be the implanting in each of these provinces of French-Canadian groups that were as strong as possible. They could be given their own schools and French speaking priests so

that they could set up their own parishes and they would be like so many small Provinces of Quebec’ (Bourassa 1912; cited in Cook 1969, 143).

Trudeau’s conception of Canada is not one of a melting pot in which ali Canadians are assimilated to and judged by reference to normative

standards of Canadian-ness but rather one of diverse cultures and

traditions, and two official languages guaranteed by formally defined judicial rights. His model for Canada is one where political authority, the state, does not depend on, or fit, national identity of its citizens. As he states: ‘It is not the concept of nation that is retrograde; it is the idea that the nation must necessarily be sovereign’ (1968, 151). He points to

the potentially infinite regress possible if political units are to be constituted on national lines. If a political unity is only legitimate insofar as it contains no minorities who do not recognize themselves in the unit, then there are, for Trudeau, no possibilities of coherence or stable states,

for there are too many nations to be accommodated in separate individual states. Trudeau’s opposition to the nation-state is further based on the supposition that they have promoted war —- ‘The most important thing is that the nation state idea has caused wars to become more and more total over the last two centuries’ (1968, 157) — and necessitate denial of civil liberties and the rights of citizenship to minorities. For nation-states attempt to promote social solidarity and internal coherence by preferring nationals at the expense of minorities who have often been suppressed or expelled. Trudeau argues on an ethical rather than an economic basis for a large

political unit (although he considers the economic arguments against separation) and against both Québécois separatism and anglo-Canadian chauvinism. Nationalism realized in a nation-state is, for Trudeau, simply a barbaric archaism belonging to ‘a transitional period in world history’ (1968, 177). His conception of Canada is of a new kind of human society in which the maximal social unit — the state —- enjoys the freely given allegiance of its citizens and embraces citizens who are unified by

none of the forces that have traditionally glued together national communities: language, culture, religion, geography, or economic interest. Trudeau’s vision is, quite simply, that of an idea, one that seizes the opportunity presented by the historical accident of Canada. It

seeks to maximize the potential latent in so plural a society by

Nationalism 115 maintaining it as a unity out of which a new kind of human society may be conjured rather than — as the nationalists of the two founding nations tend to do — attempting to return to an imagined point of origin, unravel

the precarious unity of Canada, and call into existence separate nation-states based on identities of language, culture, and religion. Armour’s The Idea of Canada attempts a philosophical theorization of a

transnational Canadian state. Armour points to the absence of integrating Canadian experiences: ... in conventional terms, Canada, as a nation, is not possible. Conventional wisdom has it that there have to be unifying forces to which one can point — one language, or one culture, or one clear geographic region. Canadians, divided by geography, unsure of what version of either official language they speak and write, proud of a culture in which any man may wear a tam o’shanter in any tartan of his choosing, they also like to frighten themselves by buying large numbers of strange books called things like Bilingual Today French Tomorrow. (1981, 71)

Trudeau’s vision fills few such absences. His model is almost exclusively political and has offered little to compare to the thick, visceral experience of regional communities in Canada and to persuade Newfoundlanders, Prairie farmers and workers in the resource industries, Québécois, or the anglophiles of British Columbia that a Canadian state makes sense in anything other than an abstract fashion. Canada is simply too big, and perhaps too young a country for national identity to have much concrete meaning. Few communities have so much space and so little history. Canada is fortunate in being bound by neither the

temporal nor the spatial chains that keep the ‘old’ nation-states together. To be sure, there is a Canadian history but one where much

needs to be forgotten if contemporary Canada is to hold together. Trudeau’s period of office saw the conscious abolition of many repositories of collective memory (and their replacement by others). Among the most important of those that declined were the regiments of

the Canadian army (though the Canadian Forces Reorganization Bill preceded Trudeau’s first period of office as prime minister by a few months). Clearly a s-and-B society could not easily accommodate institutions that guarded relics, such as the hood in which Riel was hanged: recorded battle honours, such as North West Rebellion; and celebrated their links with British army regiments. (The interested

116 Culture, Communication, and National Identity reader may discover these icons in the scruffy shrine afforded the Queen’s Own Rifles of Canada in a remote attic of Casa Loma.) The national vacuum is filled by a clearly marked local patriotism, a

local loyalty and affiliation that is as marked in Newfoundland, the Maritimes, or Alberta as it is in Quebec. For it is the province, and sub-provincial units such as the city, not Canada, that offer a locus for day-to-day life and many of the institutions that keep identity in place. The complex negotiations between the sentiments attaching Canadians to their country and to their locality, between the claims of political and social coherence and the rights of Canadians to live differently from each other (to have distinct societies), are constantly exemplified in Canadian history, most recently in the, as yet unratified, Meech Lake agreement,

an agreement vigorously opposed by Trudeau (see Johnston 1988), though Trudeau himself, in one of his most important essays, ‘Federal Grants to Universities’ (in Trudeau 1968), eloquently testifies to Canadians’ commitment to the prerogatives of the provinical governments and to their sense of themselves as rooted, not in Canada exclusively (or, for

some, at all), but in Nova Scotia, Quebec, Saskatchewan, or Alberta. Careless (1969) comments: ‘The true theme of the country’s history in the twentieth century is not nation building but region building ... what has been sought, and to some degree achieved is not really unification or consolidation but the articulation of regional patterns in one transcontinental state’ (p. 9).

Trudeau’s aim of accommodating disparate Canadian communities under a single political roof demanded a more truly equal partnership between the French and the English in Canada, particularly in the matter of language rights, and required anglophone provinces to cede to francophones the rights long enjoyed by anglophones in Quebec. It is a matter

of historical record that the balancing of the linguistic books was performed by Quebec’s promulgation of the ‘Charter of the French Language’

(Bill 101, 1977) reducing the rights of anglophone Quebeckers to the precarious condition of francophone rights in the other provinces, rather than the English-speaking provinces (with the exception of New Brunswick) giving adequate recognition to the claims of francophones (so much for Bourassa’s vision of francophone communities across Canada). For Trudeau the reflex represented in Bill 101, and indeed in Québécois

separatism as a whole, was that of an endemic fear of the future: In 1960, everything was becoming possible in Quebec, even revolution ... A whole generation was free at last to apply all its creative

Nationalism 117 energies to bring this backward province up to date. Only it required boldness, intelligence and work. Alas freedom proved to be too heady a drink to pour for the Canadian youth of 1960. Almost at the first sip, it went at top speed in search of some more soothing milk, some new dogmatism. It reproached my generation with not having offered it any ‘doctrine’ — we who had spent the best part of our youth demolishing servile doctrinarianism — and it took refuge in the bosom of its mother, the Holy Nation. (1968, 206)

Trudeau’s anger and disappointment at his fellow French Canadians’ refusal to embrace his vision of their future is mirrored in the reciprocal

disenchantment and rage of more classicly nationalistic FrenchCanadian intellectuals. Neither have been able decisively to harness Quebec to either the federalist or the separatist vision. The strength of French-Canadian, Québécois nationalism, its rootedness in a shared

historical experience, is the major impediment to a refocusing of Québécois identity: ‘The very ideology which was marshalled to preserve Quebec’s integrity, French-Canadian nationalism was setting

up defense mechanisms the effect of which was to turn Quebec resolutely inward and backwards’ (Trudeau 1968, 201). Trudeau recognized the durability of Canada’s two language communities and, instead of seeing the strengths of their national consciousness as irremediable obstacles to a shared political project (as did René Lévesque in his image of English- and French-Canadian political union as equivalent to ‘two scorpions in a bottle’), proposed a new form of political association in

which the old unities of nation and state were no longer sought: ‘two main ethnic and linguistic groups; each is too strong and too deeply rooted in the past, too firmly bound to a mother-culture to be able to engulf the other. But if the two will collaborate at the hub of a truly pluralistic state, Canada could become the envied seat of a form of federalism that belongs to tomorrow’s world. Better than the American melting pot’ (Trudeau 1968, 178-9). Perhaps only in the city of Montreal and its hinterland does Trudeau's vision have any concrete reality. But

the successful articulation of the B-and-s identity that was Trudeau’s historic political achievement is not unchallenged. Both English- and French-Canadian nationalisms remain as forces through which opposi-

tion to Canada’s dominant order may be articulated; for language remains a most powerful dividing force. Gellner (1983) argues: ‘Nationalism has been defined in effect as the striving to make culture and polity congruent, to endow a culture with its own political roof, and not more

118 Culture, Communication, and National Identity than one roof at that. Culture an elusive concept was deliberately left undefined. But one at least provisionally acceptable criterion of culture might be language as at least a sufficient if not a necessary touchstone of

it’ (pp. 43-4). Kedourie (1966), too, places importance on language, stating that ‘language is the means through which a man becomes conscious of his personality. Language is not only a vehicle for rational propositions, it is the outer expression of an inner experience, the outcome of a particular history, the legacy of a distinctive tradition’ (p. 62) and defines ‘the test then by which a nation is known to exist’ as ‘that of language’ (p. 68). By such a test, as Kedourie states, the arrangement

of national boundaries in North America represents ‘monstrosities of nature’ (p. 79). By such a test Quebec and adjacent sections of New Brunswick, Ontario, and the state of Maine should form, with St Pierre and Miquelon, a nation-state, and the remainder of Canada (except those areas mostly populated by the Inuit, which would join Greenland and Alaska) join the United States. Clearly the absurdity and unlikeliness of such an outcome demonstrates that language is not the only test of national identity, though the difficulties of implementing the Meech Lake agreement (the basis of Quebec’s assent to the post-patriation constitution) and securing French language rights outside New Brunswick and Quebec testify to the importance of language. French has focused Quebec’s differentiation from English Canada and anglophone North America. But the absence of a decisive commitment of the Québécois to separation and national sovereignty indicates that linguistic differ-

ence is not a sufficient condition for the achievement of nationhood. Moreover, Quebec is by no means perfectly synonomous with French Canada, still less with ‘le fait francais dans l’Amérique du Nord.’ But the

outposts of the diaspora nation of the defeated habitants of Nouvelle France retreat year by year. Few Cajuns now speak French; the franco-

phone population of the Prairies is in decline; and the enduring francophone populations of Ontario, New Brunswick, and the state of Maine draw strength and endurance from their proximity to Quebec. English Canada cannot be differentiated from the United States on

grounds of language, and English-Canadian nationalism is divided between advocates of separation from Quebec (on grounds that bilingualism is an absurd basis for a nation and that the nationhood of English Canada would, like that of Quebec, be strengthened through separation from those of alien tongue) and those who (like Bourassa) advocate bilingualism and unity with Quebec as a defence against assimilation into the United States.

Nationalism 119 The imperfect locus Canada offers for patriotic sentiment and sense of

community spurs contemporary separatist nationalists (from both of Canada’s main language communities) such as Crean and Rioux (1983) to advocate a separation of Canada into two nations in order to realize and affirm the ‘one element, that is always there if a nation exists, and that is identity — the sense of national community felt by individuals’ (1983, 16), in a project contrary to Trudeau's. Crean and Rioux proceed from different premises to Trudeau’s secular rationalism. Their concern is primarily with the differences in culture that distinguish Canada’s two language communities. They affirm, as classical nationalist theory customarily does, the homologies between language and culture, culture and identity, and identity and citizenship. Two of the leading ideologists of the respective nationalisms of English and French Canada, Susan Crean and Marcel Rioux, collaborated in writing Two Nations/Deux pays pour Vivre (published in

Toronto and Montreal in 1983). Their book is a representative and coherent statement of symmetrical separatist nationalisms, each of which sees little to be gained in continued association with the other nation inside the Canadian state and each of which seeks a route to national self-determination in, as they say, ‘a world of American pre-eminence.’ Crean and Rioux perceive national self-determination as

a pre-condition of individual freedom. For them the achievement of freedom requires the rolling back of the u.s. empire (which exercises its

power over and within Canada principally through cultural domination), a task in which the nations of Quebec and Canada may find common cause and the ultimate terminus ad quem of a new form of ‘association.’ The change sought by Rioux and Crean, and for which they seek to mobilize support through the agency of nationalism, is a

defeat of technological rationality, of the big corporation, of the international capitalist order. Invoked both as an agency through which this struggle may be prosecuted and a centre of value under assault from the new forces is the nation-state through which people are ‘gaining the

necessary power to conserve and develop themselves as a complete society’ (Crean and Rioux 1983, 93). Crean and Rioux stand for the good old things against the bad new ones, asserting communities called into

existence by history against the new communities (or for them antitheses of community) demanded by the new international cultural and economic order: an order that they see as synonymous with the United States. Their model is the autarchic sovereign nation-state, the existence, or possibility, of which is assumed as a kind of anterior essence. It

120 Culture, Communication, and National Identity is remarkable that Two Nations makes almost no attempt to specify the

nature and limits or describe the salient features of the national communities it confidently invokes. Instead, an ecological analogy is

used to sustain Crean and Rioux’s conviction of the health and superiority of their model of human society: High-tech society favours adaptation and the statistically average, basing its understanding of the social sciences on the idea that individuals ought to adjust to society at all costs in order to preserve the status quo. According to the German biologist Kurt Goldstein, an adapted existence can still be a sick one — for example the domesticated animal that manages somehow to make do in a restricted environment but would not survive if released back into the ‘natural’ environment. The healthy individual he says, ‘Is not normal but normative, and is capable of creating and assuming his or her own norms’ (p. 142)

To this and the critique of Americanism that constitutes the bulk of Two

Nations little is added other than a stirring theological affirmation of faith: ‘Because we love our countries and believe in our fellow citizens, we feel confident that we will find the fresh solutions we so badly need. Unlike some English Canadians who doubt that Canada can exist as a nation without Quebec, we are convinced that English Canada exists, as does Canadian culture, distinct and independent of American or British or Québécois culture and wants only the room and recognition to flourish’ (p. 157). Here an essence of national indentity is implicitly adduced — the Canadian culture believed in exists in potential, its realization is possible only when liberated from the suffocating presence of the actual. The change enjoined by the authors is a change that leads

to the actualization of an assumed point of departure and origin, a pre-lapsarian paradise before the Americans, when the authentic and local thrived, and which America mortally threatens: ‘For all its innocuous and glitzy exterior American cultural influence takes dead aim at all local cultures especially their political and economic aspects’

(p. 88). Here, as elsewhere, Crean and Rioux exhibit the classic nationalistic reflex identified by Gellner (1983), who argues for the centrality of culture in the nationalist project, ‘the element which is most

crucial from the viewpoint of nationalism: identity or diversity of culture’ (p. 92) and states that ‘nationalism is, essentially, the general imposition of a high culture on society’ (p. 57). Gellner’s category of

‘high culture’ is a particularly pertinent one, for Canadian cultural

Nationalism 121 nationalism is caught in a notable contradiction: that of requiring the recruitment of the popular imagination to the nationalist colours while simultaneously demanding a transformation and rejection of popular taste — taste that is excessively internationalized, or as stated here, ‘imperial.’ Television, for many Canadian nationalists, is the Trojan horse of ‘continentalism’ par excellence that most threatens the anterior values of Canadian-ness. Joyce Nelson’s The Perfect Machine: rv in the Nuclear Age (1987) is a representative instance of an agglomeration of nationalist hostility to the United States, capitalism, television, modernity, and rational thought. She states: ‘Virtually the same corporations developed Tv and the full blown nuclear arms and nuclear power systems, the two mass media that dominate our age — television and the bomb — cannot help but be entwined in an ideological embrace’ (p. 12).

The notions of culture, and the pendent hostility to television, that inform the views of Crean and Rioux and Nelson are conservative. They signal a notion of culture as a force that originates from and guarantees the existence of an anterior national community. Changes or influence from the outside, any force that compromises the autonomous develop-

ment of a ‘complete society,’ are to be anathematized. In spite of the claim Crean and Rioux made on the first page of Two Nations, that they are addressing the general public and not ‘our political and economic elites,’ it is, in both French and English Canada, élites, and not the general public, who disdain ‘imperial taste.” A more nuanced account is required in respect of Quebec, where there is an intellectual stratum sympathetic to popular taste: a feature of Quebec society observed by, of all people, Lord Durham in the 1830s: ‘The most educated people of each village belong in society to the same families and have the same level of birth as the illiterate habitants I have just described ... the most perfect equality always characterizes their relations; the man who is superior by virtue of his education is not separated from the exceptionally ignorant peasant who rubs shoulders with them by any barrier of custom or pride of interest’ (cited in Rioux 1971, 45). Albeit, as Lamonde argues (1984),

there is a ‘cultural and linguistic attraction of France for Quebec’s intellectuals and their consequent alienation from the mass popular culture of Quebec which is fundamentally North American’ (p. 106). Lamonde points out that a similar sense of concern that Americanization

was ‘the greatest misfortune in our history, much worse than the English conquest,’ for the conquest ‘did not succeed in breaking our French spirit, while today, this spirit is going under swamped by foreign influence’ (Adélard Dugré, La Campagne Canadienne [1925]; cited in

122 Culture, Communication, and National Identity Lamonde 1984, 110), circulated in Quebec earlier this century. However, the antiquity of fear of the foreign suggests there is a genuine robustness in the cultures of Canada when faced with competition from the United States. There is, of course, evidence to support a view that the impact of broadcasting is qualitatively different from that of older media and that

the assimilation of French Canadians into an anglophone society (advocated by Durham in his report), which was successfully resisted by French Canadians in the nineteenth century, is a more serious threat in

the twentieth. Rioux (1971) states that ‘the number of Canadians of French origin who become anglicized i e who declare to census takers that English is their mother tongue has steadily increased 3.5% in 1921, 7.9% in 1951 and 10% in 1961’ (p. 108). Trudeau and Rioux unite, as they do on little else, though sharing a

history of collaboration on Cité Libre, on the importance of shared historical experience in the formation of the French-Canadian or Québécois nation. Trudeau’s words are justly celebrated as a passionate

voicing of the French experience and a judicious evaluation of the reflexes acquired through generations of subordination: Nationalism was the main focus of almost all French Canadian social thought. This indisputable fact needs no explanation here. A people which had been defeated, occupied, decapitated, pushed out of commerce, driven from the cities, reduced little by little to a minority, and diminished in influence in a country which it has nonetheless discovered, explored and colonized, could adopt few attitudes that would enable it to preserve its identity. This people devised a system of security which became ovedeveloped; as a result, they sometimes over-valued all those things that set them apart from others and showed hostility to all change (even progress) coming from without. That is why our nationalism, to oppose a surrounding world that was English speaking, Protestant, democratic, materialistic, commercial, and later industrial, created a system of defense which put a premium on all the contrary forces: the French language, Catholicism, authoritarianism, idealism, rural life, and later the return to the land. (Trudeau 1974, 7)

It is remarkable how prescient Trudeau’s judgment remains; written in

1956 his analysis of French-Canadian nationalism, its resistance to change emanating from outside, and fetishization of the domestic can be applied almost completely to the twin nationalisms promulgated in Two

Nationalism 123 Nations. Rioux’s dissent from Trudeau’s analysis begins with Trudeau’s characterization of French-Canadian particularism as ‘overdeveloped’ and ‘overvalued.’ For Rioux, Trudeau is not an authentic ‘gens du pays.’ His analysis of the past and model for a future federal Canada are overly

abstract, and Trudeau himself is unrepresentative of the FrenchCanadian (or indeed any) national community: ‘Independently wealthy, very well-educated, of mixed ethnic background, perfectly bilingual, he can transcend the ethnic peculiarities which afflict almost all of humanity’ (Rioux 1971, 100). Trudeau, at home anywhere, does not, it is implied, share the general human longing for a home — a home that, for Rioux, and for nationalists in general, can only be found in the nation,

characterized by Rioux as ‘the most stable and coherent large scale human group ever produced.’ Trudeau’s vision of the future is one in which the homes built on the classic European model of monolingual, monocultural, monoethnic, and monoreligious nation-states are transcended by unprecedented social units in which people will have to find

a home in polyglot, secular, multiethnic, and multicultural societies. Rioux speaks for and from those, the French Canadian, who have got little out of the Canadian approximation to such an entity and see no reason to persist with a fantasy that, since its genesis after the conquest, has proved dangerous to them and an instrument of their subordination. In his historical account (1974) of the formation of Quebec, Trudeau demonstrates how nationalistic involution produced an élite and ideas ill-suited to Quebec’s needs and consequently further embedded French

Canada in a subordinate position in Canada and internationally. Trudeau argued that the orientation of Québécois intellectuals and nationalists to the past — to ‘la foi, la langue, la race’ and to traditional Quebec rural life — produced an intellectual system in which the élite ‘had diagnosed our intellectual, social and economic plight with some vigour, had censured our people’s lack of spirit and exhorted them to show initiative and perseverance; had preached the familial, rural and

national virtues; had spoken at length of reforming the educational system; had gone over time and again the ideas they clung to; then their social thinking stopped strangely short; they had not yet said anything about our absorption into the real world of the industrial revolution’ (p. 12). Instead, ‘our nationalist “social doctrine of the church” proposed the renewal of economic and social life by five means: the return to the

land, small business, the cooperative movement, the Catholic trade union movement, and corporatism’ (p. 18). The burden of Trudeau's celebrated introduction to the book he

124 Culture, Communication, and National Identity edited, The Asbestos Strike (1974), is to show that the nationalist culture of

Quebec produced a political regime — Duplessis’s — that did not serve Québécois interests, and that the asbestos strike itself, resisted by the

provincial authorities with great brutality, demonstrated both the bankruptcy of the old order and the possibility of a new: The memorable asbestos strike occurred because the industrial workers of Quebec were suffocating in a society burdened with inadequate ideologies and oppressive institutions ... because our moral and political philosophy of labour did not take enough notice of the fact that we had become an industrialized people ... the asbestos strike was significant because it occurred at a time when we were witnessing the passing of a world, precisely at a moment when our social framework — the worm eaten remnants of a bygone age — were ready to come apart. (pp. 66-7)

Rioux and Trudeau disagree little on the formation of the Québécois; their differences concern what should replace the ‘passing of a world.’ For Rioux, what was passing was anglophone dominance of Quebec’s

economic life and federal hegemony over the province, opening a window for the Québécois to become really ‘maitres chez soi’; for Trudeau, what was passing was the old nationlist belief, its shifting ideologies of religion, ruralism, and chauvinism kept in circulation by a native élite whom they profited. Trudeau’s advocacy of transcendence of traditional Quebec nationalism, drawing its coherence from the past,

in a new transnational state, Canada, creating its coherence in the future, clearly threatened the nationalist élite of Quebec - an élite committed to putting Quebec’s culture and identity under its own political roof. Though English Canada has not had so powerful a sense

of communal, national identity as has Quebec, Trudeau’s B-and-s vision, with its decoupling of the political structures of the state from the cultural ‘habitus’ of the nation, also has profoundly unsettling implica-

tions for anglophones. If Quebec nationalists aspire to retain their identity as a nation of the good, old-fashioned kind, English-Canadian

nationalists wish English Canada to become one. Trudeau is the enemy of both nationalist projects.

English-Canadian Nationalism English Canada has not had the same experience as Quebec; it escaped

the centuries of involution that has kept the ‘fait francais dans

Nationalism 125 ’ Amérique du Nord’ in place. In consequence, English-Canadian nationalists have had to invent the nation to which they feel they belong. These inventions have a precarious character and are often distinguished by an overwhelming sense of the fragility of EnglishCanadian identity, a fragility that is most powerfully evoked in George Grant’s Lament for a Nation: The Defeat of Canadian Nationalism (1971).

Grant arguedthat English Canada has lost its chance to create a nation;

so precarious isnational identity that it no longer has a chance of existence; ‘Canada’sdisappearance was a matter of necessity’ (p. 5). But

Grant’s lament provides the point of departure for perhaps the best account of the forces of coherence and identity in English Canada and the potential for English-Canadian nationhood — Herschel Hardin’s A Nation Unaware (1974). Hardin argues that three contradictions have governed and called into existence a shared Canadian identity: French Canada as against English Canada; the regions as against the federal centre; and Canada as against the United States (p. 12). Hardin shares with Trudeau a vision of formal political structures shaping Canadian national identity and, as is characteristic of English-Canadian reflections

on identity, a view of federation with French Canada as one of the distinctive components of English-Canadian identity. It is often argued that such a conception of identity is simply whistling in the wind and

that the English-Canadian experience is one precisely of absence; English Canada simply does not have an integrating history or culture in

the way that Quebec or other nations do (Quebec’s 1978 A Cultural Development Policy for Quebec is as good a locus as any to find the charge; see also Feldman [1984] and Wilden [1980]). As Crean and Rioux (1983)

point out, the Pepin/Robarts enquiry on Canadian unity in the mid-1970s

found, and offered, no principle of national cohesion, only a ‘bland bilingual multi-cultural pabulum ... Such processed unity ... denies the existence of our two national societies and trivializes the authentic regional divergences in our cultures’ (p. 12). Rather, itis argued, English

Canada is a strictly political expression with few uniting forces of geography, economic interest, ethnicity, or experience to hold together

its four distinct regions — the Pacific, the Prairies, the Atlantic provinces, and central Canada (Bourassa, with delightful panache, described Canada as a ‘geographical absurdity’ [cited in Cook 1969, 118]). And nowhere in Two Nations does Crean do more than assert an English Canadianness; Wilden (1980) argues that the Canadian is imaginary and Canada is ‘Notland,’ existing only in a negative relation to the great somewheres of France, Britain, and the United States.

126 Culture, Communication, and National Identity Hardin is highly unusual among English-Canadian cultural nationalists in offering a positive definition of Canadian, and in particular EnglishCanadian, identity. Hardin attempts a definition of the cultural unity that integrates the English-Canadian consciousness. It has, he argues, three components:

‘a public enterprise culture,’ ‘a redistribution culture,’ and ‘a public broadcasting culture.’ In essence, Hardin argues that English Canada is united in, and its sense of community and collective responsibility

expressed largely through, agencies of the state such as the cnr, (pre-privatization) Air Canada, the csc, and the Polymer Corporation. Hardin’s account is open to obvious empirical objections — commerical

broadcasting in Canada in its longevity, political clout, and extent of popular consumption has just as great a claim as the csc to be regarded as authentically Canadian, and while it is true that Canada has many crown corporations, in aggregate Canada is overwhelmingly a privateenterprise economy. Yet his distinctions between the Canadian and other North American conceptions and practices of community ring true. In Canadian cities the brutal contrasts between ghettos and lush suburbs that distinguish the United States are significantly attenuated; the gap between the lowest and the highest in Canada, while stiil

inescapably evident, is smaller than its u.s. counterpart. Canada consents, often grumbling and reluctantly, but consents none the less, to redistributive tax and subsidy measures. Though there is an element of special pleading in Hardin’s elevation of the public sector to the status of a central definition of Canadian identity, his argument enables us to

understand the pervasive Canadian-nationalist resistance to market rather than administered allocation, to criticism of public-sector bodies (even the indefensible Canada Post), and the excessive disappointment

and rage directed at public-sector bodies that ‘fail’ to achieve their nationalist vocation (see the vituperative testimony to Hardin’s disappointed faith in the crTc in Hardin 1985). Other important, and divergent, notions of English-Canadian nationalism are advanced by Clarkson (1966, 1985) and Brimelow (1986).

Clarkson (1985), though making the extraordinary judgment that Trudeau and his governments were not nationalists, said: ‘Looking at the Trudeau governments’ record from 1968 to 1979 there can be little room for doubt that, from the prime minister through the cabinet to the upper and middle ranks of the federal bureaucracy, nationalism was consistently resisted by the federal government, whether it was French

Nationalism 127 Canadian separatism or English Canadian demands for economic and cultural protection’ (p. 18), and arguing that the national project was subordinated during the Trudeau era, acted as an important broker of Trudeau’s national vision and advanced a notion of ‘binationalism’ (Clarkson 1966) similar to Trudeau's bilingualism and biculturalism. Clarkson’s notion is ‘binational in the sense that the two basic groups in our system — the French speaking and the English speaking — must be encouraged to consolidate their national personalities and perfect their political cultures in terms of their linguistic identity’ (p. 139). Clarkson’s project of social engineering has the prospective characteristic of much Canadian nationalism — Canadian identity and nationhood

have to be made rather taken as given. He also argues that English Canada is organized around an absent centre (a notion explored in an aesthetic context by Feldman [1984]) and lacks the repertoire of shared

faculties and experiences that distinguish other nations. ‘What the English-Canadian political culture boasts in stability it lacks in content. Long established nationalities have a tradition in which folklore, architecture and literature combine to create an identifiable civilization ... being a country of immigrants is to be a land with little common civilization apart from the technology of industrialization and the political process

itself’ (Clarkson 1966, 138). The force exerted by the ‘technology of industrialization’ is not exclusively nationalizing and, as the international division of labour and economic interdependence increase, becomes increasingly internationalizing. The symbiosis between industrialization and nationalism (named by Clarkson as the ‘technology of industrialisation’ and the ‘political process’) is argued by Smith (1971), citing Smelser, to pertain only to one stage of development: ‘Nationalism is a sine qua non of industrialisation because it provides people with

an overriding, easily acquired, secular motivation for making painful

changes. National strength or prestige becomes the supreme goal, industrialisation the chief means’ (Smelser; cited in Smith 1971, 44).

Events in Canadian history, such as the linked developments of confederation, the building of the transcontinental railways, and the National Policy, lend themselves to analysis in these terms. But Smith (again following Smelser) distinguishes between early stages of nationalism when the ideology fosters change and economic advance (again the Canadian examples cited above spring to mind, and also more recent events such as Quebec’s nationalization of electricity-generation) and later stages when growth may be retarded by ‘reaffirming traditional

128 Culture, Communication, and National Identity values, generating irrelevant anti-colonialistic sentiment and encouraging expectations of ready made prosperity’ (Smith 1971, 44). Nationalism and economic advance are increasingly in conflict. For economies of scale and specialization are more and more realizable only

when production is organized internationally; national markets and productive units are, even in the largest states, often too small for optimal realization of efficiency. The effectiveness of the brake national-

ist sentiment puts on transnational economic restructuring is proportional to the relative strengths of the groups who have benefited from the earlier ‘painful changes’ (and have a vested interest in resisting their own displacement in a new cycle of change) and those whose interests will be served by a new round of changes. What was once a symbiotic relationship between nationalist politics and economic development is now, increasingly, an antagonistic relationship (and not just in Canada; see the United Kingdom’s relationship to the European Economic

Community as a case in point). The negotiation of the free-trade agreement between the United States and Canada proved so controversial precisely because the agreement made sense only if nationalism and

economic efficiency were in an antagonistic rather than symbiotic relationship. However, the controversy over free trade demonstrated that the benefits of Canada’s national economic policies were by no means equally shared and that there were important Canadian econom-

ic interests that would be well served by the organization of the Canadian economy on a continental basis. Not all the interests of a nation are served by nationalism. Clarkson and Trudeau advance a model of Canadian identity and a program for political development based on Canada’s ‘binational’ character. Theirs is not the only model of Canadian identity currently advanced; both Canadian nations have their respective separatisms. Quebec’s (whether manifested actively in demands for political sovereignty or passively in social involution) is comprehensible in a people for whom the threat of assimilation and what Rioux (1971) calls ‘the social

and cultural forms of domination and privation which are just as resented as economic underdevelopment’ (p. 141) has come from the west and east rather than, as it has for English Canada, from the south (though there are powerful arguments to suggest that ‘la survivance,’ the continued existence of a francophone society in North America, was much easier in Canada than out of it). English Canada’s ‘domination,’ ‘privation,’ and ‘underdevelopment’ are less often foregrounded in English-Canadian nationalism than in Québécois nationalism and fewer

Nationalism 129 English- than French-Canadian nationalists have advocated separatism (though Jane Jacobs [1980] contemplates it with equanimity). Susan Crean (1983) is unusual among English-Canadian nationalists in looking forward not to a binational Canada but to one of two nations in which a distinctive English-Canadian nation will coexist in ‘association’ with Quebec. Brimelow (1986), like Crean (1983), puts English Canada’s identity and experience at the centre of his project. But whereas Crean argues that English Canada’s national identity can be realized only by maintaining English Canada’s separation from the United States (while disengaging from Quebec), Brimelow argues for English Canada’s cultural and linguistic identity with the United States. He proposes a continental

future for English Canada within a ‘super-nation’ (p. 7). Brimelow attempts to construct for English Canada a nationalism and

national identity as robust as Quebec’s. His project necessitates a critique of French Canada and of the dominant ideology of Canada’s political life over the last couple of decades: bilingual and bicultural nationalism. Here Brimelow underestimates the importance of the political; for him politics is simply an activity performed by parasites leeching on the body politic and the best political system is one in which

regulation and direction of the economic and cultural activities of the populus are minimized and opportunities for the parasitic new political

class are reduced. He attends insufficiently to politics and political institutions as the creations of communities in order to realize goals unachievable by the free play of market forces and individual preferences. But Brimelow’s critique of the political in Canada is a necessary

element of his program of establishing an ‘anthropological’ EnglishCanadian nation the interests and values of which are misrecognized and subordinated (he argues) in Canada’s existing political order. Like Rioux, he argues that one Canadian nation has dominated the other. However, unlike Rioux, Brimelow believes it is English Canada that is dominated. Unsurprisingly, given his conception of the nation, Brimelow finds it bizarre that English Canada integrated into a continental economy and culture and sharing a language with the United States should be in a political union with French Canada. Brimelow refers to Canada (1986, 6) as a ‘geographical expression.’ The reference to Metternich’s definition of Italy before the Risorgimento

is audacious, for history demonstrated the successful realization of Italy’s national potentiality and the instability of Austria’s imperial super-national project. But Canada is more a political than a geographi-

130 Culture, Communication, and National Identity cal expression — a state called into existence not by geography but by politics. Politics is a grubby business, and Brimelow’s disgust with the

political process, winning friends to isolate enemies, buying off the strong because the weak have nothing to sell, leads him to denounce the

lies, self-deception, naked self-interest, and general tragedy of the commons writ large in the existing Canadian political system. His disgust leads to a critique of Canada’s ‘unusually large and powerful public class’ (1986, 7) and a program of English Canada’s separating from Quebec and thus realizing its vocation as an upstanding nationstate - monoglot, conscious of its history, able to realize its continental identity. For Brimelow, English Canada’s embrace of Quebec rather

than the United States has traded English Canada’s birthright of purpose, vitality, and identity for a guilty, deferential, and corrupt tagging along behind an alien political leadership and agenda. The patriot game (after which his book is named) in which the new class articulates a binational ideology in order to feather its own nest has eviscerated English Canada. He refers to the French and English versions of ‘O Canada’ — the English empty of content, the French memorializing the ‘terre de nos

aieux’ and the distinctive experience of the French fact in North America, a theme that he crystallizes in a characteristically audacious figure of speech: “Like a dog on the operating table licking the hand of the vivisectionist, the Quebec Anglophones hope that their meekness will curry a little favour’ (p. 210). The principal ogre in Brimelow’s story is Trudeau the theorist and executor of the B-and-s ideology. For Brimelow, Trudeau’s vision is simply a kind of three-card trick worked on credulous Anglos by a sharp

operator from the wrong side of the Ottawa River. He refers to Trudeau’s program as an “Orwellian compulsion’ motivated by ‘the stark necessity of denying English Canada’s history’ (p. 121). He overstates the extent to which the B-and-B program demanded only English Canada to adapt and change and the extent to which English Canada has denied its origins. In spite of his assertion that it is ‘the

Anglophones whose emblems and rituals have been removed or transformed’ (p. 123), the Union Flag still flies outside Queen’s Park in

Toronto. And his protestation that Canada’s cultural life and popular memory are impoverished relative to Australia’s (Where is the Canadian Breaker Morant or Gallipoli? he asks) founders on the empirical rocks of

films such as Billy Bishop Goes to War, The Wars, and Going Home — subjects, The Patriot Game claims, that are ‘essentially prohibited under the Anglophones’ self-denying ordinance’ (p. 128).

Nationalism 131 But there are important truths in his recognition that Trudeau’s goal for Canada involved a painful forgetting (but not just, as he suggests, for English Canada) and that cauterization of memory is painful indeed. It was not for nothing that the translation of ‘Je Me Souviens’ from decent obscurity on Quebec’s provincial coat of arms to insistent visibility on every automobile registered in Quebec was performed by the rq as part of its militating against a B-and-s society in Quebec.

The past is a central value for Brimelow, and recollection and conscious rediscovery of its past are, for him, necessary conditions of nationhoood and a successful future for English Canada. His valedictory sentences state his thesis explicitly: For th’ old Romane valor is not dead Nor in th’ Italian breasts extinguished. No one took any notice of course and Italy’s moment passed. Perhaps the English speaking peoples can console themselves that their art too will cause them not to be forgotten. But until the Canada Council contrives to subsidise another Michaelangelo an English Canada that remembers its past and understands its North American future would be an acceptable substitute. (1986, 289)

The appeal of the bad new things, of a ‘truly pluralistic society,’ of an

idea, is anaemic indeed beside the memories of a shared past and the potent consciousness of a shared history. For English Canada, the past that Brimelow invokes as a core around which the nation should cohere — a past that is wrongly silenced under the B-and-s ideology — is English

Canada’s military history. He attempts to construct an equivalent retrospective symbolic system to that of the Québécois (‘O Canada, Terre de nous aieux’) with a refocusing of English-Canadian attention on its solid past — Ypres, the Somme, Dieppe, the Falaise gap, the battles

for the Rhineland, the loss of mcs Athabaskan, Korea, and so on. The dead to whom Brimelow lends a voice are potent advocates and their challenge - ‘If ye break faith with us who die we shall not sleep’ — is compelling. But the memories of the dead are wasting assets, each new generation is further estranged from them, and, of course, the voices of those who died on the Somme will have less-than-compelling claim on the attention and votes of the ‘third force’ in Canada’s population. The inheritance left by the English-Canadian past is not one that can

be unproblematically appropriated by the present: for Brimelow’s notion of an English-Canadian nation of pLus (People Like Us) to be

132 Culture, Communication, and National Identity realized no less collective forgetting would be required than for the Trudeau package of a ‘truly pluralistic state,’ about which he squeals. For the bad new things not to be crowded out by the good old ones, a conscious program of forgetting, Orwellian or not, was required and will be in all programs of political change. The process, of course, preceded Trudeau. The flag debates in the 1960s, after which the Red Ensign was replaced by the Maple Leaf, testify both to the power of the old things and to the rapidity with which the new can become naturalized. But, on closer examination, Brimelow’s program for English

Canada (if not that of actual integration into the United States, at least a North American co-prosperity sphere under another name) would also increase the burning away of quantities of inconvenient cells in the collective memory. The statement ‘English Canada is part of the greater English speaking nation of North America’ (Brimelow 1985, 150) is both true and foolish — true in that many of the economic activities of Canadians, as producers and consumers, are conducted on a continen-

tal basis; and true, too, in that many of the cultural unities in which Canadians live are continental: the consumption by Canadians of American television is legendary, and the lexicon of Canadian talent that works south of the border is long. But one can be culturally and economically Canadian in varying degrees. Politically one either is or is

not. And it is in political terms that Brimelow’s formula is foolish. Canada is not politically part of the ‘greater English speaking nation of North America.’ Much of its identity and past consist precisely in refusal of that option. For the Gleichschaltung that Brimelow wishes to foster, through closer approximation of English Canada to the United States, as much of the English-Canadian past would require to be forgotten as in Trudeau’s program against which The Patriot Game inveighs. Inconve-

nient acts of Canadian un-Americanism, such as Lundy’s Lane or Queenston Heights, must be forgotten as would the multiple unAmerican examples of Canada’s prioritization of the state.

Brimelow is an old-fashioned nationalist, deeply troubled by an absence of fit between political institutions and the linguistic, cultural, and economic unities in which people pre-eminently live out their lives. Unfortunately for him, the world is becoming more and more hostile to the classic nation-state with its coherence guaranteed by the congruence

of its political cultural and economic practices. More and more the economic and cultural unities in which people live their lives (as Canadians perhaps pre-eminently know) are international. It is political

institutions that lag, and there is a very marked tendency for these

Nationalism 133 institutions of waning but still considerable power to attempt, with increasing desperation, to assert their authority over the transnational activities that more and more often escape their grasp. But though the political institutions of the nation-state are highly imperfect in their responsiveness to the popular will, they are the only remotely effective

instruments through which the public may check the activity of the powerful. The question is one of choice between an attempt to realize an old-fashioned state in which the nation is sovereign and the creation of a

political order that embraces the transnational economic and cultural unities that are displacing the national. Brimelow opts for the good old things and attempts, in The Patriot Game, a process of Gleichschaltung. He attacks the policy of creating in Canada a state in which two nations (at least) have a political home. He correctly identifies Trudeau as the chief advocate of the heresy he seeks to extirpate and effectively cites many examples of the gross patronage, political jobbery, peculation, intellectual prostitution, and generally jackal-like behaviour of the central Canadian new class that mobilized the vision of a ‘truly pluralistic state’ in their appropriation of privilege

and power. Of course, any demon king worthy of the name has unattractive lesser devils and cloven hoofs. And, in a twentieth-century

catalogue of the seven deadly sins, Trudeau would perfectly embody the Luciferian sin of pride. But, like Lucifer’s, his arrogance has a spectacular and incandescent quality, and the lesser demons are, for their lesser attractions, better targets for The Patriot Game's attack. Brimelow’s critique follows that elaborated by numerous prior commentators in observing that the central-Canadian metropole exploits the western-Canadian periphery in the name of nationalism, of a notionally peripheral Canadian defensive strategy against dominant international metropoles. The ‘Patriot Game’ played consumately by Canada’s political élite and their intellectual allies and alibis, is one that within Canada has created (as Pratt [1977] observed in another context) ‘a division of labour between an industrialised core and the hewers of wood and drawers of water of the periphery’ (p. 158). The National Policy of the nineteenth century and the Liberals’ depressing hydrocarbon prices below world levels (sad irony that the Progressive Conservatives’ permitting Canadian prices to return to world levels coincided with the unravelling of opEc and the fall in oil prices) both benefited central Canada at the west’s expense. Herschel Hardin’s Closed Circuits (1985) — unmentioned by Brimelow - bitterly testifies to the chicanery of the Ottawa new class in the service of their central-Canadian clients at

134 Culture, Communication, and National Identity the expense of the west in particular, and at the expense of decent Canadians in general. The flavour of Hardin’s critique is nicely captured

in his comment: ‘A hearing ... exists so that Toronto lawyers and promoters and their openly mercenary clients and their Ottawa lobbyists

can go to Regina and lecture the people of Saskatchewan about democracy’ (p. 203). Both Hardin’s and Brimelow’s books are overwhelmed by an animus borne of personal experience. There is much in each that smells of the settling of long-nurtured old scores. Brimelow seldom refuses himself the pleasure of sticking it to the Toronto-Ottawa-

Montreal élite, among whom, in his incarnation as a journalist for Maclean’s and the Financial Post, he clearly spent much time. His recurrent references to Stephen Clarkson, Christina McCall-Newman, Richard Gwyn, and Peter Newman speak of long hours spent in the company of the ‘new class.’ With it, but not of it. Brimelow presented his candidacy fora place in the new guard of Canada’s intelligentsia but was rejected for the job by the old guard. The reasons for his rejection are not

hard to detect. He puts forward a program of remarkably un-Canadian activities as his pitch, believing essentially in as little government as possible (for him political direction of the economy inhibits the optimal

allocation of resources and therefore impoverishes the community relative to the benefits it would enjoy in a free market). He constitutes politics as the alibi for the capture of resources by interest groups who

neither deserve nor produce the surplus. His disdain for politics, prioritization of unfettered free-market economics, and recognition of

the ‘Américanité’ of English Canada’s culture (a characteristic he wilfully refuses to recognize in Quebec) lead him to unfold a narrative (mostly implicit) with a denouement of English Canada leaving home and moving in with the boy next door. Here the Siamese twins of Brimelow’s argument require separation. His critique of the ‘Patriot Game’ in Canada is flawed in its espousal of old-fashioned nationalism as a standard by which the Canadian attempt

to create political institutions competent to meet the challenges of a transnational economic and cultural experience and a polyglot society is to be judged. But Brimelow’s ‘continental’ preference for free-market economics and individual rights provides him with a very firm foothold

for his attack on the political groupies and intellectual whores who served as foot-soldiers and bagmen in the production of the ideology and political power bloc essential to the B-and-B program. One of the fascinating elements of The Patriot Game is its testimony from one who was inside but not of the Toronto-Ottawa-Montreal élite to the seizure of

Nationalism 135 the opportunities the federalist project offered to pursue personal advantage at the expense of the public good. The ‘overdevelopment’ of the political in Canada (emphasized by Clarkson [1966, 138] as one of the few fragile bonding forces in Canada) follows from the relative absence in Canada of the centripetal forces of shared national language, common ethnicity, shared economic interest,

natural frontiers, and national history present in the European nationstates that constitute the normative point of reference in nationalist

discourse. But these European states (perhaps only Spain, France, Britain, and Russia) are highly exceptional in having long experienced congruence between their political institutions and the nation bound

together by long-established centripetal forces. And they, too, are experiencing centrifugal pressures as submerged nations, such as the Bretons, Welsh, and Basques, assert themselves; as the ethnic composition of the populus changes with immigration and emigration; and as

both culture and economy become transnationalized -— just as, in Canada, national political institutions are mismatching the economic and cultural relations and identities made by the citizens of the old-nation states. In this context Brimelow’s desire to make equivalent the political, economic, cultural, and linguistic unities in which Canadians live is a

Quixotic archaism. The old European-style nation-states in which political institutions matched and were sovereign over the economic and ‘cultural’ are in a very precarious situation and will themselves have to adapt to increasingly ‘Canadian’ conditions. They no longer (if they ever did) constitute a model for other states. But Brimelow’s critique of

Canada’s political order cannot simply be dismissed as an attempted sweeping back of history’s tides by a Connecticut Canute. The political system in Canada is one that leaves important groups (notably the west) effectively unrepresented and has an overdeveloped “public class.’ But the strengths of The Patriot Game are those of a critique. It is no more free

of misrecognitions than are the generation of English Canadians whom Brimelow holds culpable for their pusillanimity and paralysing assumption of guilt before the tribunes of French Canada. While Brimelow is at

liberty to regard the United States as the ‘last best hope of classical economics’ (p. 106), many of the values he espouses are more evident in U.S. economic and constitutional ideology than in day-to-day experience in the United States. And he is performing a sleight of hand in attaching all the bad elements in Canada’s political life to the presence of French

Canada and promising a more ‘American’ political culture in English

136 Culture, Communication, and National Identity Canada following its decoupling from Quebec and the realization of English Canada’s national vocation. There is no reason why Brimelow

should not advocate a more ‘American’ identity for an EnglishCanadian nation-state, but there is no necessary connection between English-Canadian political sovereignty and a closer approximation to the political culture of the United States. It is not, after all, simply the French fact that has maintained in Canada a political tradition with more

emphasis on collective right than that of the United States, with its prioritization of individual right, and that has as core values ‘Peace, Order and Good Government’ rather than ‘Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.’ To take an example from the cultural industries that so exercise Canadian nationalists and vex both Brimelow and free-trade negotiators: u.s. broadcasting legislation has a central value of serving the ‘public convenience interest and necessity’ (Communications Act

1934), Canada’s ‘to safeguard, enrich and strengthen the cultural, political, social and economic fabric of Canada’ (Broadcasting Act 1968).

The coupling in The Patriot Game of the values of the United States with a policy of English Canada’s realizing its destiny within a ‘greater

English-speaking North American nation’ (p. 7) is tantamount to proposing English Canada’s candidacy for the fifty-first state, a program that may occasionally (very occasionally) play in Peoria but not often in Port Hope.

Polity and Culture There is then no consensus in Canada on the composition of the nation or on the relation of political institutions to culture and identity. Rather,

there is a consistent nationalist impulse to fit the political and the cultural together, whether by changing political institutions to fit cultural and linguistic communities (the commitments of Brimelow, Crean, and Rioux of separatist nationalists in Quebec and English Canada) or by changing culture and identity to fit political institutions (the policies of Trudeau, Clarkson, and other binationalists). While the nationalists project is always one of making equivalent the political and cultural, making congruent state and nation, there is a difference in the articulation of these two elements in the different Canadian nationalisms. Québécois nationalists argue from the experience of the historical-

ly established Quebec nation for political sovereignty. The same argument (though made from a less firmly established experience of

Nationalism 137 cultural nationhood) is made by Crean and Brimelow, representative separatist English-Canadian nationalists. Trudeau and his epigone Clarkson argue, in contrast, from Canadian political sovereignty and towards the creation of a Canadian cultural experience that will buttress Canadian political sovereignty (Trudeau placing less emphasis on the importance of congruence than does Clarkson), and, by firmly differentiating Canada from the United States, will realize the opportunity to create in Canada a new kind of society.

For all these writers, culture in general, and the mass media in particular, are crucial sites of contestation, sites where a key contradiction is articulated between the consumption habits (and tastes, insofar as these can be deduced from consumption) of the Canadian populus (both francophone and anglophone) and the policies of the nationalists. While not actively challenging the nation-building activities of their

respective élites, the masses have continued their consumption of cultural goods of non-indigenous origin (except for news and sport) while remaining politically Canadian. It seems likely that the desires for separate national homes — whether Crean’s for an English-Canadian or Rioux’s for the ancient edifice of Quebec — will continue to animate nationalist sentiments and remain

hard to reconcile with either Trudeau’s version of an international ethical community (a kind of republic of letters universalized) or the international division of labour in a world economy on which nationstates have less and less leverage. For those — notably the French Canadians — who have had less than their due from a federal state that has officially been bilingual and bicultural, returning home through the

creation of a nation-state continues to be an entrancing goal. It is, however, easy to mistake the solidity of the good old things for necessity, to embrace Rioux’s rootedness in a traditional Quebec experience rather than Trudeau’s cosmopolitanism. In Canada, the bad new things have their own concreteness, and Trudeau may turn out to be more representative of the society’s authentic currents than is Crean or Rioux. Edmonton, Toronto, Montreal, and other Canadian cities are working communities that embrace an extraordinary ethnic and cultural population mix. None is vitiated by the extreme social antagonisms and brutal contradictions of other North American metropoles. And Mont-

real has a genuinely polyglot character. There are elements in the Canadian experience that give concreteness to the notoriously ‘abstract,’ ‘intellectural,’ and ‘unrealistic’ discourses of nationalism best represented by Trudeau’s writings. And though the Canadian case fits

138 Culture, Communication, and National Identity few of the stipulative precepts of academic studies of nationalism, Canada holds together as a state with considerable success. It demands not accommodation in the existing Procrustean bed of academic theory, but a revision and reworking of the theory. The Trudeau model, though seldom cited in academic literature, may well be that that best explains the Canadian case, Trudeau’s challenge

to classic nationalist theory is part of an important continuity in French-Canadian thought. I referred earlier to the continuities between his and Bourassa’s and Cartier’s positions, but these are not the only antecedents of Trudeau’s. In 1864, Doutre at the Institute Canadien, the home of the ‘Rouges,’ argued: ‘Language is only an agent of human thought and one should cling to it only because of the services it renders

to this thought. One can never think of a people’s language as an element of a nationality. Blood even less so, since it changes continually in modern times’ (Doutre 1864; in Cook 1969, 111).

There is an important contemporary current of thought in Quebec that emphasizes its synthetic and appropriational culture (see de la Garde 1985), which, though seldom embracing Doutre’s polemical recklessness in arguing for a ‘universal nationality’ (Cook 1969, 113), marks a temporal forward extension of the continuity in Canadian nationalist thought marked by Doutre, Cartier, and Trudeau. Within this highly contested terrain, broadcasting (and other cultural industries) has an evidently key position. Clarkson’s program for the development of a binational Canada allocates the integrative functions in a fissured collectivity to institutions of symbolization, chief among which are the mass media: ‘More active and potentially far more effective as symbols strengthening our sense of national identity are the

institutions of mass communications. The nature of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation ... is inextricably linked with the role of national integration’ (Clarkson 1966, 147). And it is this role that is enshrined in the 1968 Broadcasting Act, which charges broadcasting ‘to

safeguard, enrich and strengthen the cultural, political, social and economic fabric of Canada’ and to ‘contribute to the development of national unity and provide for a continuing expression of Canadian identity’ (Section 3g [iv]). Itis not surprising that broadcasters have been

no more successful than politicians in harmonizing the contradictory forces of the economy, the political system, and the culture into a coherent Canadian nationalism. Nationalism is an ideology of resistance to untrammelled integrated markets. It asserts the power and legitimacy of political over economic

Nationalism 139 allocations. There are undoubtedly moments when the economic interests of those within the boundaries of a national market have been

optimized by the state’s resistance to market allocations. But such benefits that accrue from a national policy are not necessarily equally or equitably shared by those in whose name the free-market allocations are resisted. Nor are benefits for those within the national Laager necessarily greater in aggregate than they would have been in a market of greater size. Canada’s ‘public broadcasting culture’ (Hardin 1974) reflects a recog-

nition of the imperfect allocations of the commercial-broadcasting market and a belief in the superiority of administered allocations for serving the needs and interests of listeners and viewers. Though the commercial-broadcasting market is highly imperfect, its imperfections are not necessarily absent in an administered system.

Nationalist policies may not (as Trudeau argued of Duplessis’s Quebec) necessarily serve the collective interests of a nation or equally or equitably distribute the fruits of nationalist economic and cultural

policies. And there is in Canada an abundance of groups whose interests are served by nationalism. Brimelow (1986) charges that the ‘new class,’ including a cultural-media élite, is among such interest groups. Trudeau’s bilingual and bicultural program for Canada, decoupling political institutions of the state from national communities, offered a promising political solution to the problem of the Canadian state (and an

interesting model for political institutions in a world that is becoming increasingly organized around transnational economic and cultural relationships). It demonstrated that the traditional nation-state is far from being the only stable and successful form of government.. The Trudeau model challenges the central stipulative precepts of nationalism based on congruence of cultural and political communities. Elements in Canadian broadcasting reflect this decoupled structure: there is de facto separation of the csc and Radio Canada and virtually no Canadian television programming consumed by both Canada’s language communities. Yet historically (and in the 1968 Broadcasting Act) Canadian public-sector broadcasters and regulations have been charged with a nationalist vocation of, in Gellner’s terms, ‘making culture and

polity congruent’ (1983, 43). And creating congruence remains an important aspiration of Canadian intellectural élites — an aspiration articulated in vituperative opposition to ‘continental’ culture and to American television. Cook (1977) argues that, while Canada has the

140 Culture, Communication, and National Identity character of a ‘nationalist’ state, it has little of the congruence between its polity and culture demanded by nationalists: it is not a nation-state.

The stability of Canada’s political institutions and the continuing differences between its civil society (its welfare state, respect for the rule

of law, etc.) and that of the United States (in spite of the absence of a symbolic culture shared between English and French Canada and the pervasive consumption of American symbolic goods) suggest that the congruence between polity and culture demanded by nationalism is not necessary and that nationalist cultural policies in Canada are based ona false premise. These are particularly difficult questions to address in the context of television since the broadcasting system is imperfectly responsive to consumer taste and demand. Advocates of public-sector institutions and allocations rightly point to the imperfect consumer sovereignty of the broadcasting market; critics of public-sector institutions and regulation, to the danger of élites’ capture of resources. Such contradictions and difficulties are pervasive in broadcasting policy: in Canada the

difficulties are compounded by the absence of consensus on the composition of the nation, in whose name much public policy is enacted, or on the relation of culture to polity. The nature of Canadian

national identity and the role of broadcasting in the Canadian state remain highly problematic.

Maximization of Satisfaction: The Market Paradigm

Though the 1968 Broadcasting Act defines Canadian broadcasting as a ‘single system,’ Canada’s broadcasting system is fissured and contradictory. The goals variously sought by Canadian broadcasters — public service, promotion of national identity, and profit-maximization — are mutually antagonistic.

Public-sector broadcasters are caught between the imperatives of public service (demanding a range of different programs for distinct publics) and those of nationalism (demanding programming of mass appeal that will bind the different communities and interests in Canada together in a single Canadian culture and consciousness). Canada’s com-

mercial broadcasters pursue the maximization of profit, best achieved by assembling the largest number of viewers at the lowest possible cost in programming. Aggregation of the largest possible number of viewers into a single audience is the antithesis of public-service broadcasting,

which programs for distinct publics. Minimization of commercial broadcasters’ costs (desirable only so far as is consonant with audiencemaximization) is best achieved by purchasing and programming Ameri-

can television -— the antithesis of a Canadian nationalist strategy. However, as well as contradictions, there are also synergies and mutual dependencies between the public and private components of Canada’s nominally single broadcasting system. The couplets public and private, state and market, administered and competitive are both complementa-

ry and contradictory. Private broadcasters owe their existence and profitability to the legal and regulatory apparatus of the state; some commercial broadcasters are affiliates of the public csc network and take

much of their programming from the cBc, which in turn needs the

142 Culture, Communication, and National Identity affiliates in order to achieve national coverage; the csc sells advertising

and competes with private-sector broadcasters for talent, programs, advertising revenue, and audiences. And programs are jointly produced by private- and public-sector partners collaborating under the aegis of Telefilm Canada’s broadcast fund. The profitability of the private sector is conditional on effective regulation to create barriers to entry to the Canadian broadcasting market. The regulatory requirements that broadcasters be Canadian nationals, that reduce competition among broadcasters by limiting the number of licences granted, and that inhibit Canadian advertisers from advertising on vu.s. Tv all favour established insiders — the incumbent broadcasters. In exchange for the benefits of reduced competition and improved profitability that accrue from regulation,

Canadian private broadcasters are required to deliver a quota of programming (Canadian content) that conforms to the nationalist cultural criteria of the regulator. The terms of this bargain are constantly

renegotiated but several commentators (see, inter alia, Hardin 1985; Niosi 1984) have argued that the bargain is unequal, and that private broadcasters have been excessively favoured by Canada’s broadcasting regulation, from which they have secured monopoly rents but in return for which they have delivered an inadequate quality and quantity of Canadian content. Canada has neither a ‘free market’ in broadcasting nor ‘free trade’ in broadcasting goods and services. It has a large administered sector established to provide services that the free market will not deliver. The market sector is highly regulated in order to protect established Canadian

broadcasters and exact from them services they would not otherwise provide. No more than public broadcasters are the commercial broad-

casters in Canada part of a free market. However, in Canada, as elsewhere (see, inter alia, Peacock 1986a) a free-market system is increasingly advocated by critics of the established broadcasting order.

The Market Paradigm

Steven Globerman’s Cultural Regulation in Canada (1983) makes a trenchant and provocative attack on cultural regulation in Canada and vigorously advocates the allocations performed by the capitalist market

rather than those of an administered system. Globerman argues that Canada’s historical choice of an administered cultural system, including

regulated broadcasting with important public-sector elements, has

Maximization of Satisfaction 143 denied Canada benefits that would have been delivered by a free market. These benefits have been forgone because a political market has been operating in Canada through which unrepresentative élites have

been able to capture resources and serve their own, rather than the public interest, under the cloak of nationalism. For Globerman, a prime instance of this ‘rip-off’ has been the capital cost allowance (cca) for film production. ‘The 100% Capital Cost allowance stands as a monument to irresponsible policy making and comes as close to being a pure taxpayer “rip off” as one is ever likely to find’ (Globerman 1983, 77). This ‘rip-off’ is of substantial size: ‘The absolute dollar values of the allowable tax deductions, which are some guide to the value of resources channelled

to the film industry by the tax writeoff, are not trivial. The estimated $13m tax writeoff in 1977 amounted to about 1.5% of total federal government expenditures on culture in that year’ (p. 14). The effect of such transfers from the state budget to private beneficiaries is, Globerman argues, ‘substitution of the preferences of bureaucrats and politicians for the sovereign preferences of viewers and listeners’ (p. 29), and worse decisions that would otherwise be made: ‘Besides reduced allocative efficiency and adverse distributional consequences, critics of cultural intervention express concern about a deterioration in the quality of cultural output in Canada. For example Mordecai Richler has written:

“nationalists are lobbying for the imposition of Canadian-content quotas in our bookshops and theatres ... in a word, largely second rate writers are demanding from Ottawa what talent has denied them, an audience”’ (ibid). Globerman’s choice of Richler to substantiate his argument is unfortu-

nate because the filming and tele-dramatizations of Richler have been made possible by the government whose judgment he mistrusts. The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz (1974) was supported by the crpc and the

cca, Joshua Then and Now (1987) by Telefilm Canada and the csc, Wordsmith (1979) by the csc. But Globerman’s argument does not fall so

easily. The capital cost allowance has also been the object of cultural nationalists’ attack. And his questioning of whether Canadians’ best

interests are served in ‘an increasingly interdependent world (both economically and politically)’ by ‘xenophobic cultural policies’ (1983,

87), and of the relation between national cultural production and national identity and survival, has substance. Globerman is representative of believers in untrammelled capitalist markets in insisting on the separation of the political, the economic, and the cultural. It is, for him, axiomatic that a perfectly competitive market

144 Culture, Communication, and National Identity optimizes both productive and allocative efficiency and that its outcomes represent the best possible approximation to the collective will. There is, therefore, effectively no role in such a system for political institutions that can, from his point of view, only obstruct the efficient operation of markets and thereby serve the interests of a sectional power

élite. Globerman’s viewpoint also tends to challenge, implicity if not explicitly, the usefulness of the notion of culture. If markets are made by individuals exercising their faculty of choice, then notions of culture and of identity and interest binding individuals on more than an occasional

and adventitious basis tend to dissolve. Here, of course, Globerman’s viewpoint is radically opposed to that of nationalists. The keystone in the nationalist argument is the presumption of a close linkage between the cultural and political. But powerful though Globerman’s critiques of

nationalism and its effect on the political market are, there are few grounds for supposing that consumer sovereignty is any more perfectly realized in actual (rather than theoretical) capitalist markets than in the statist regimes he criticizes. Moreover, broadcasting has distinct charac-

teristics that make the market paradigm espoused by Globerman particularly difficult to apply.

In both political and capitalist markets, resources are hijacked by privileged minorities, and inequities and inefficiencies are firmly entrenched. However, Globerman’s critique, a salutory and persuasive one, of the operation of the political market in Canada’s cultural industries does not consider the relationship between the political and capitalist markets and the substantial complementarities between them. Nor does he recognize the inequities and inefficiencies in the capitalist market. The theoretical stick with which he belabours cultural regula-

tion in Canada is purely theoretical. Doubtless perfect competition would be preferable to the chicanery of committee politics, which undoubtedly obtains in Ottawa (see Hardin 1985). But when one examines

the actual operation of markets (political or capitalist) one finds them

highly imperfect. The conditions stipulated in economic theory for perfect competition are seldom, if ever, satisfied. Where is the perfect competition that performs the superior allocations sought by Globerman? Not, surely, in the United States, Chile, or the other economies modelled on Chicago. Consideration of broadcasting in the United States and its efficiency would not help Globerman’s polemic against regulation, though it is the u.s. television market that best approximates an unregulated market with minimal public-sector presence. The Federal Communications Commission (Fcc), the regulatory body

Maximization of Satisfaction 145 established in the United States by the 1934 Radio Act, has increasingly

sought to increase the free play of market forces, by promoting competition rather than by exercising regulatory power — power that the

mainstream of American political theory sees as an inadequate substitute for competition. The deregulation movement that has so strongly marked American communications policy in recent years is confined

neither to broadcasting nor to the Reagan presidencies. The most important event — the AT«T consent decree — was instituted as an anti-trust case by the Justice department in 1974 and settled in 1982. It broke up the world’s largest corporation to promote competition and minimize regulation — generally perceived in the United States as an

unnecessary cost and brake on innovation. Yet, even in the United States there has been no unanimity about the benefits of broadcasting deregulation or, indeed, about the usefulness of applying the market paradigm to broadcasting policy. An exchange in Broadcasting (the trade journal of the u.s. broadcasting industry) between the head of the rcc’s

Office of Plans and Policy, Peter Pitsch, and Timothy Brennan of the

Economic Policy Office of the Department of Justice conveniently signals the terms of the competition-regulation debate.

The bottom line (literally, in his article) for Pitsch is that ‘the presumption in favour of competition in the marketplace is based on a

careful analysis of complex issues’ (1984, 22). Pitsch assumes that technological innovation in the ‘broadcasting’ market (vcr and cable) is

introducing competition and diminishing the legitimate role of the regulator. Growing competition and public satisfaction with broadcast television. — ‘For most people over-the-air commercial tv is an extremely efficient means of distributing the programming that they desire’ (p. 22)

— lead to a diminished role for regulation, although Pitsch does acknowledge a residual role for regulation because of the absence of perfect competition in the u.s. broadcasting market. (Pitsch does not reflect on the contradiction in his argument between American viewers’ imputed satisfaction with broadcast television and their embrace of alternatives.) Brennan (1984) notes the recent deregulatory practices of the Fcc but argues that a broadcasting policy based on a theory of competition and the virtues of the market-place is flawed. The broadcasting market is imperfect because of barriers to entry to the market-place (the finite nature of the radio spectrum) and, in particular, because there is no direct economic relationship between viewers and broadcasters. The market in broadcast television inheres in the relationships between

146 Culture, Communication, and National Identity advertisers and broadcasters on the one hand and between broadcasters

and program producers on the other. Consumers, the audience, are simply a product sold by broadcasters to advertisers (see Smythe 1981b for a discussion of the audience as a commodity).

Furthermore, because broadcasting has characteristics of a ‘public good’ (though Brennan does not explicitly use this category), the market

paradigm does not fit the broadcasting case: ‘There is no economical way to keep non-paying viewers from watching: this inability to charge viewers directly prevents broadcasters from profiting on the basis of meeting their audiences’ desires, potentially causing an inferior mix of programs’ (Brennan 1984, 30). The cost of alternatives to broadcast television that are free-rider proof and are responsive to fluctuations in demand and supply may be so high as to price new delivery systems out of the market. This is by no means a purely theoretical concern. The cost of cable subscriptions is sufficiently

high to have promoted substantial numbers of u.s. subscribers to disconnect from systems, and in turn cable theft (unauthorized and unpaid-for reception of cable signals) is in some franchises 50 per cent as

numerous as authorized subscriptions. To render cable networks more theft-proof raises the costs of service, providing a greater incentive to theft and to disconnection. Indeed, so pervasive has cable theft become that it was the basis for an episode of ‘Hill Street Blues’! Brennan argues that neither in provision of broadcasting services does a well-functioning market exist (because of scarcity of spectrum capacity, though other barriers to entry such as high initial capitalization required for new entrants could also be mentioned) nor in consumption of broadcasting (because of the ‘public good’ characteristics of broadcasting and the high costs of alternative delivery methods such as cable and satellite, which may price them out of the market). Instead Brennan

proposes that economic paradigms are inferior to those of ‘other disciplines such as psychology, sociology, political science and ethics [that] become necessary for informed policy choices’ (p. 30). Brennan’s argument that the competitive-market paradigm is inappropriate for broadcasting is one that will come as no surprise to those socialized in the ethos of public-sector institutions and public-service broadcasting.

But competitive market theory may still be an interesting point of departure for broadcasting-policy analysis, for it remains to be demonstrated that Pitsch’s claims for u.s. commercial broadcast Tv are false. It

is, he argues, ‘for most people ... an extremely efficient means of distributing the programming that they desire’ (Pitsch 1984, 22). Still

Maximization of Satisfaction 147 more does it remain to be demonstrated that non-market systems, such

as European and North American public-service broadcasting, are superior to market systems in delivering the programming that most people desire. Neither commercial broadcasting as practised in the United States, where regulation is minimized, nor public-service broadcasting based on the European model can be said to optimize consumer welfare and maximize satisfaction. For both modes of organization of broadcasting share characteristics that make them unresponsive to consumer demand. It is correspondingly difficult to assert that high aggregate consumption of broadcast services corresponds to high aggregate satisfaction. The Competitive Market

Economists customarily advocate competition as the optimal instrument for maximization of aggregate welfare in the belief that competition improves both productive and allocative efficiency. As Brennan (1984) puts it: ‘Economic theory suggests that an unregulated competitive marketplace will efficiently provide consumers with what they want, as long as each available product can be bought and sold in a well functioning market’ (p. 30). The principal characteristic of a well-functioning market is that it is perfectly competitive, which in turn depends on: 1 / large number of buyers and sellers; 2 / individual transactions being small relative to the total size of the market; 3 / the product traded being homogenous and there being substitutes for it readily available; 4 / buyers and sellers enjoying perfect information; and 5 / freedom of entry to the market (conditions drawn from Gellhorn and Pierce 1982, 30-1). Few of these conditions are satisfied in any mass-communication market. Neither in the newspaper or broadcasting industries are there large numbers of sellers in any particular location or market; condition 1 is not satisfied. Depending on the nature of the transaction (e.g., buying a newspaper or a cinema admission ticket) condition 2 may be satisfied, but in respect

of other transactions, for example, the allocation of radio-frequencies (which although usually performed at zero cost must still be considered a transaction) or purchase of rights to intellectual property or performers, usually will not be. Condition 3 is rarely satisfied: the Financial Times is only to a limited extent substitutable for the the Daily Mirror, the Philadelphia Inquirer, or the Globe and Mail (still less for La Presse). Indeed, the whole point of

148 Culture, Communication, and National Identity mass communications is to differentiate each information commodity from the others so that one is not substitutable for another. One watches ‘Dallas’ weekly because each episode is different (to discuss the corresponding necessity to establish consumer loyalty to products by giving them consistent characteristics is not my current purpose). similarly, condition 4 cannot be satisfied. Consumers customarily

(and I do not write here of film buffs, literature students or other deviants) purchase information commodities only if they lack perfect information. One purchases information to become informed or experience new gratifications. It is only after consumption of the information that the buyer is able to determine whether his or her welfare has been augmented by the purchase, whether financial and/or time expenditure was ‘worth it.’ Condition 5 is also seldom satisfied in mass-media markets. Newspaper production has formidable barriers to entry because of the high capitalization required to establish a newspaper. Film and Tv program producers deliberately raise barriers to entry as a business strategy, by their purchase and assertion of intellectual-property rights, development of a star system, and high-budget productions. Radio-frequency spectrum scarcity and the high cost of establishing alternative distribution media such as cable networks constitute high barriers to entry into television broadcasting. Communications (and broadcasting, in particular) are not alone in exhibiting less-than-perfectly competitive markets. Galbraith (1973) suggest that economics needs a new theoretical paradigm based on normative non-competitive market conditions rather than on an increas-

ingly mythical notion of competition. Indeed the durability of the paradigm of the competitive market is a prime support for Galbraith’s contention that “economics is not primarily an expository science, it also serves the controlling economic interest’ (Galbraith 1973, xiii).

The Information Commodity

Communications poses further problems to neoclassical economic analysis. Information has very low marginal costs of reproduction and is not destroyed in consumption. The difference between ‘first copy’ and ‘second and subsequent’ copy costs of newspapers well exemplifies this

characteristic of information. The first-copy cost of a newspaper, for example, includes the salaries and expenses of journalists and photographers, the amortized capital costs of the printing works, as well as the

Maximization of Satisfaction 149 cost of ink and paper. Second and subsequent copies include only their material costs in ink, paper, and wear on type and presses and so on. The rapid decline in cost of serving additional consumers that character-

izes the print medium is even more marked in broadcasting (until a certain point is reached where the cost of transmission facilities to serve, say, the last 1 per cent of population living in terrain where propagation of signals is poor far exceeds the proportion of the cost of service borne

by each 1 per cent of the 99 per cent). Thus, there are considerable barriers to entry to new suppliers once well-established enterprises are in place. New entrants to the market are vulnerable to predatory pricing, the costs of which existing suppliers can spread over a wide consumer base. There are, of course, niches in the information market, and there is a class of information where returns can be maximized by high pricing in order to confine the information to relatively few purchasers for whom part of the product’s value is its exclusivity. Share-tipping newsletters or the Economist Foreign Report are examples of this class of information, one in which value is dependent not just on the quality of the product but on restricted circulation. Information of this kind lends itself to being sold in successive markets differentiated by price and time. For early sight of intelligence on, say, the foreign-policy implications of a quarrel among the royal family of Saudi Arabia, subscribers to the Economist Foreign Report will pay a premium. The same information will be sold later at a lower price in élite journals such as the Economist itself, and later still by journalists in the daily press who have themselves acquired it from the Foreign Report. Markets of this kind exist in the stratification of

film exhibition between first- and second-run theatres and in the ‘cascading’ of a particular film property through theatrical exhibition,

video-cassette, premium and basic cable channels, and broadcast television. There are no categorical differentiations of mass and specific markets for information, only different strategies that may be used to maximize returns from sales of information.

Information is not the only commodity with steeply declining marginal costs of production, but there are few other commodities with its characteristics of imperishability and inexhaustibility in consumption. Each of these characteristics favours existing enterprises (as long as intellectual-property rights can be successfully asserted). The continuing interest in Chaplin films and in ‘T Love Lucy’ and ‘The Munsters’ permits the owners of these intellectual properties to continue to exploit

them. Since these goods were not exhausted in their initial consump-

150 Culture, Communication, and National Identity tion, they remain as actual and potential competitors to new entrants to the information market. New entrants can always be undercut on price since initial cost for old products have long since been recouped and only the marginal costs of further exhibition remain to be recovered. MGM'S recycling of dance segments from its musicals in That’s Dancing or

the packaging of heterogeneous old movies for television under the omnibus titles Nostalgia or The Worst of Hollywood exemplify these characteristics of the information commodity. Furthermore the same absence of conditions for perfect competition obtains in the communications industries as in other industries where enormous market power is possessed by existing productive entities — power that will deny or limit

entry to the market by new competitors by the exercise of genuine market power or when corporations have grown beyond economically optimal size: by capturing and exercising political power. Allocation The distinctive characteristics of the information commodity are not the

only factors that make the competitive-market paradigm imperfectly applicable to broadcasting. The distribution systems used for electronic media customarily do not conform to the stipulations of the market model. Neoclassical economic theory recognizes ‘public goods,’ a class of goods or services (including broadcast television) that are ‘indivisible and non-excludable. National defense, the provision of police and fire services for the community, mosquito abatement, public radio and television, weather forecasts, and clean air are examples of public goods exhibiting these characteristics. They are indivisible in that consumption by one person of the protection offered by the armed forces does not

diminish the possibility of its consumption by another’ (Gellhorn and Pierce 1982, 18).

It is true that particular organizational forms of the services instanced

above may render them divisible and excludable. Fire services have served not the collectivity but only those who subscribe to them. Private security firms offer crime prevention and suppression only to those who pay. The military may decide in executing a campaign to retreat and deny protection to a group of people in order that they may better protect others, or preserve the fighting capacity of the military unit. But clearly there are forms of service provision that do exemplify the characteristics of indivisibility and non-excludability that define ‘public goods.’ Broadcasting is such a ‘public good.’ Broadcast information is

Maximization of Satisfaction 151 indivisible, within a given time span and (depending on power and frequency of transmission) geographical location. Efforts to make broadcast services conform to the normative market patterns and deny ‘free riders’ have not met with much success. Attempts to remodel the market for broadcasting so that the classic price system may operate —

for example, through scrambled transmission of broadcast television signals that makes them intellibible only after rental (or purchase or construction) of a decoder — have proved unattractive and costly means of delivering television. For example, Wometco Home Theater (WHT) transmitted a single channel running feature films in scrambled form in the greater Philadelphia area from 1982 to 1984. wut charged subscrib-

ers $24.95 per month and an additional $3.95 per month for late-night ‘adult’ films. Subscribers declined from 20,000 in 1982 to 4,408 in November 1984, when the service was terminated. Such subscription services require, it is estimated, 60,000 subscribers in order to break even, and in the 1982 - 4 period sixteen such services ceased operation in the United States (Philadelphia Inquirer, 28 Nov. 1984, 91).

Other attempts to introduce competitive market conditions into ‘public good’ broadcasting have adopted new technologies of distribution such as broad-band cable or broadcasting by satellite. Each of these technologies has been perceived (see, inter alia, Pitsch 1984) to abolish

the scarcity in the radio spectrum that has been thought to limit the number of broadcasters. Technical change and innovation can undoubtedly create competitive conditions where they were formerly absent but they do not always do so. Development of microwave and later satellite transmission in long-distance telecommunications abolished what was previously a ‘natural monopoly’ (a further instance of market structure that does not conform to the stipulations of the market paradigm). But although technical change did create a more perfect approximation to a competitive market in telecommunication (by eroding a natural monopoly), technological changes in the distribution of broadcast television have not yet done so.

Satellite broadcasting maintains the public-good characteristics of terrestrial broadcasting - indeed, it is arguably possessed by greater public-good characteristics than terrestrial-broadcast television since its propagation characteristics are not limited by geography as seriously as is terrestrial broadcasting. Cable, a venerable technology, dating in the United States from 1949, in Canada from 1952, and in the United Kingdom from 1955, has the economic characteristics of a natural monopoly not a competitive

152 Culture, Communication, and National Identity market; that is, it is a business in which economies of scale apply formidably (with existing technologies) so that, in a given geographical area, supply can be achieved at least cost by a single supplier. However, it is a one-finger exercise to demonstrate that broadcasting has characteristics that render it imperfectly susceptible to organization and analysis on a market basis. The questions remain ‘how imperfect is

the broadcasting market?’ and ‘what are the merits and demerits of operating broadcasting through an admittedly imperfect market regime or through some other means?’ Competition is deemed to optimize productive efficiency and allocative efficiency. There seems no reason to doubt that competition in broadcasting will maximize (if indeed competition does maximize) productive efficiency in important respects. However, the result of the introduction of competition may be to demonstrate the relatively high efficiency of established structures and practices. In the United States, broadcast television remains dominant even when subjected to competition from alternative delivery systems. In the United Kingdom there has been little investment in cable systems in spite of the government's encouragement, and little enthusiasm for satellite television. Terrestrial broadcasting remains the dominant distribution system for television because of its superior productive efficiency. In program production efficiency is probably quite closely related to competition, though with significant advantages for highly capitalized producers (because matching program supply to audience and advertiser

demand is extremely difficult, thus requiring producers to have adequate reserves in order to continue production after the inevitable failures they will experience). It is in allocative efficiency (or lack of it) that the most important peculiarities of terrestrial television broadcasting inhere. Reception and consumption of television is of a “public good,’ for the benefits of television are non-excludable and imperfectly sensitive to pressures of consumer demand. In respect of the transmission of broadcast television, competition between services is necessarily limited because of the shortage of radio-spectrum capacity (though this shortage bears more heavily on Europe than it does on North America). But there is clearly ‘competition’ for viewers’ attention when two or more channels are simultaneously available to viewers, and, in systems that are financed wholly or partly by advertising, competition for advertising revenue. Although there are important truths in Smythe’s argument (1981b) that advertising-financed broadcasting serves the advertiser rather than the

Maximization of Satisfaction 153 viewer, successful production of the audience commodity is conditional on providing audiences with, if not what they want, at least what they

are prepared to accept. There is a partial truth to the proposition that competition for audiences’ attention maximizes viewer welfare. Although I have established qualifications and limits to the degree to which competition exists in broadcast television, it is not true that allocative efficiency is uninfluenced by the presence or absence of competing television signals. However Pitsch’s claim — ‘For most people over-the-air commercial Tv is an extremely efficient means of distributing the programming they desire’ (1984, 22) — cannot be sustained. The television audience expends two resources in exchange for the gratifica-

tions it receives when consuming television. The first is money: in the form of the proportion of the cost of the receiving apparatus, electricity, etc., expended per unit of programming consumed, in the form of the increment of the price of commodities purchased by viewers,

which is attributable to the cost of television advertising incurred by the products’ vendors; and sometimes in the form of payment of the broadcast-receiving licence fee. These monetary costs are extremely low (they have been calculated by Ehrenberg and Barwise [1982]

to amount to less than two pence per viewed hour for the u.K. viewer), do not take the form of a direct financial transaction with the broad-

caster, and do not vary according to the quantity of television consumed. The second resource exchanged by audiences is time, which is

an inelastic resource, though one clearly enjoyed differentially by various sections of the audience. If we take expenditure of the resources

of time and money by audiences we find that, per hour of leisure activity, television consumption can be performed at an extremely low cost relative to many other leisure activities. Compared, for instance, to

eating out, cinema-going, dancing, drinking in a pub or tavern, watching professional sport, or driving, television watching is a very low-cost activity and, as a result, it is reasonable to suppose that its consumption is not particularly sensitive to the nature of the product or service it offers.

Competition for the leisure-time expenditure of viewers is one in which cost of gratification is very significant. Broadcast-television consumption tends to be high among sections of the audience for whom the cost of television (low in absolute terms though it may be) is high relative to their capacity for leisure expenditure — which may be due to

low disposable income (the poor, the young, the old), or to them enjoying much time for leisure activity (the old, the unemployed), or

154 Culture, Communication, and National Identity both. When closely comparable competitors to broadcast television

becomes available (e.g., Pay Tv) the evidence is that demand is extremely price sensitive. It cannot therefore be assumed that, because

there is a high degree of consumption of television, there is general audience satisfaction with it — ‘that it gives the audience what it wants’ —

only that it is an exceptionally good bargain. A further limitation on the degree to which allocative efficiency can be achieved in respect of broadcast television inheres in the absence of an economic exchange taking place between viewers and broadcasters. Rather, the economic relationship is between broadcasters and funders

— the state or commercial advertisers. Because of the public-good characteristics of television broadcasting, potential viewers cannot be excluded from reception, and finely differentiated audiences cannot be constructed and sold to advertisers. To be sure, some differentiation does take place — audiences for afternoon television are principally

women and for children’s programs, children. But highly specific packages of viewers cannot be sold to advertisers with the same degree of precision as, say, magazine journalism can sell an audience of social

class AB males aged 15 to 25 or direct-mail advertising can sell an audience of suburban dog owners. Thus, broadcasters do not compete in the sale of audiences to advertisers by attracting different groups of viewers to programs finely tuned to their interests but by constructing large undifferentiated audience packages. css successfully competes (or does not) with asc by offering advertisers a lower cost per 1,000 viewers. cBs achieves (or not) its lower cost per 1,000 by scheduling programming that maximizes viewership. This is best done by scheduling programming that is acceptable to most people rather than programming that is most highly valued by some people but that, because of the very specific

characteristics valued by some, will alienate others. The tendency to absence of correlation between programs that appear high in apprecia-

tion indices and those that appear high in gross audience ratings empirically substantiates this pattern that theoretical analysis predicts.

While audience choices between programming offered on different channels at the same time within the same geographical area are significant choices, they are choices within parameters set by a system that does not maximize allocative efficiency. Allocative efficiency is unlikely to be high in any television-broadcast-

ing system. What can confidently be said is that audiences express preferences between alternatives available at equivalent costs. There

Maximization of Satisfaction 155 seems no reason to doubt that in the United Kingdom Irv is more popular

with audiences, is a closer approximation of ‘what they want,’ than is Channel 4; that in the United States, of new programs launched in the 1984-5 season ‘Miami Vice’ (NBC) was closer to ‘what audiences want’ than was the sadly prematurely curtailed ‘Paper Dolls’ (asc). But such expressions of preference are hardly more reliable as an index of audience demand than was Bezonian’s choice an index of his. Yet such choices are the only indices available to policy-makers and analysts when they are concerned with the public good of terrestrially broadcast television. The signals sent by audiences, imperfect though they are, are ignored

by broadcasters and policy-makers at their peril. The preferences expressed between, say, CBS and NBC, CBC and PBS, or ITV and BBC2 are

significant preferences. There are no grounds for supposing that higher

ratings for, say, ‘Fame’ than ‘Nova’ do not correspond to audience preferences for ‘Fame’ vis-a-vis ‘Nova’. But it cannot be assumed that ‘Fame’ is necessarily what audiences want or that established broadcast-

ing services deliver an optimal repertoire of programming to satisfy viewers’ demands. The paradigm of the competitive market is particularly inappropriate to broadcast television. In transmission the system has characteristics of a monopoly (whether because of the barriers to entry associated with

limited spectrum capacity or the high capitalization required for distribution systems), in reception those of a public good where free riders cannot be excluded. The ‘failure’ of the broadcast television market has led to proposals for

its abolition and substitution by a market in which a direct economic relationship between producers and final consumers can prevail. The Peacock Committee (Peacock 1986a) in the United Kingdom advocated a

future regime of ‘electronic publishing’ in which subscription, or pay, television would supplant broadcast television. But the chairman of the Peacock Committee (see Peacock 1986b) also pointed out that transaction costs in a “pay per’ regime may outweigh benefits and that a ‘table d’héte’ menu may be preferable to ‘a la carte,’ because it offers better value for money in spite of delivering reduced consumer choice. Glober-

man (1983), however, has no such hesitations. For him a wellfunctioning capitalist market is necessarily the best means of serving consumers’ interests. He states that ‘market failure denotes the presence of one or more conditions that preclude the efficient allocation of resources by private transactions. That is, left to its own devices, the free

156 Culture, Communication, and National Identity market will either produce “too much” or “too little” of a particular good

or service ... conditions that potentially give rise to market failure include the inability to exclude non-payers from enjoying the benefits of output purchased by others (ie a “free rider” problem)’ (p. xix). The free riding that so troubles Globerman is a problem only when constituted as such by apostles of the capitalist market such as him. Their dislike of the free rider is either vindictive (why would x enjoy what y has purchased

even though y’s enjoyment is not thereby diminished) or, more substantially, based on the fear that everyone will choose to be a free rider and no one will pay for the goods or services that are in question.

However, economically dysfunctional public goods are one of the chief agencies whereby a collectivity is created and kept together. Group identity (and classically national identity) is thought to be focused in and kept in place by ‘public good’ agencies such as the military, the police, and broadcasting services. The public-good characteristic of indivisible benefits (I am aware that there is no unanimous assent to identification of the police and other public goods as benevolent) can, from a point of

view other than that of neoclassical economics, be seen as advantageous. [he very indivisibility of the benefits, defined as a problem by market economists, engenders social solidarity and an egalitarian society. And perhaps only neoclassical economists such as Globerman would place so much faith in the benevolence of the rich and powerful and the superfluity of the state as an agency of redistribution as to write

where segments of the population are, for reasons beyond their immediate control, forced to live at unacceptably low standards, government assistance can be seen as an appropriate way of “centralizing” philanthropic contributions that the more well-off members of society would voluntarily wish to make anyway’ (Globerman 1983, xix). The ‘public good’ characteristics of television broadcasting are such

that allocative efficiency and consumer welfare are unlikely to be heightened by competition. Yet there seems to be no reason to doubt that both within public-service broadcasting systems — such as those in the United Kingdom and West Germany — or commercial systems — such as that in the United States — a schizophrenic pattern of audience

behaviour exists, whereby high consumption coexists with public dissatisfaction with the television programming offered. This conundrum can be analytically unravelled by explaining that television viewing is a remarkably inexpensive leisure pursuit and consumption is therefore likely to be insensitive to less-than-complete audience satisfac-

tion with the programming offered. But policy-makers still have to

Maximization of Satisfaction 157 grapple with the problem of maximizing consumer satisfaction in a situation in which the only real indicator — quantity of consumption measured in the ratings — is highly imperfect. Globerman’s polemic against Canada’s system of cultural regulation

advances a powerful critique of the dominant values inscribed in Canada’s broadcasting order. In both the public and private sectors there are systems of administered allocations that reflect the pervasive Canadian assumption, formulated by Clarkson, that ‘free trade is the slogan of hegemonic imperial economies’ (1985, 236). Globerman’s advocacy of a free market is insufficiently sensitive to the imperfections of information, and particularly broadcasting, markets. A

satisfactory organizational form and mechanism of accountability and

response to audience demand remains to be created for broadcast television. It seems therefore very unlikely that television broadcasting

can ever be successfully ‘deregulated’ and that therefore Brennan's (1984) rather than Globerman’s (1983) or Pitsch’s (1984) paradigm is to be preferred: ‘Other disciplines such as psychology, sociology, political

science and ethics become necessary for informed policy choice’ (Brennan 1984, 30). The market paradigm is imperfectly applicable to broadcasting, for broadcasting exhibits few of the characteristics of a well-functioning market. The peculiar economic characteristics of the

information commodity and the natural monopoly and public-good characteristics of the distribution systems for broadcast signals render the market paradigm imperfectly applicable to broadcasting. To these distinctive characteristics of broadcasting should be added the enormous power possessed by established enterprises ~ power that will deny or limit entry to the market by new competitors not only by the exercise of genuine market power but also by the capture and exercise of

political power. Such political power, as Galbraith (1973) points out, customarily goes with economic power.

The questions that Herschel Hardin posed with respect to the administration of the railways in a ‘public enterprise culture’ remain central to broadcasting policy. Though the market paradigm can be shown to be an inadequate foundation both for analysis of broadcasting and for the formulation of broadcasting policy, so too can the statist alternatives that are customarily invoked. ‘What are the best ways of giving public enterprises maximum freedom from political interference without giving up ultimate parliamentary control? And the question that is implicit in all of these: what is the ideal relationship between economics and political democracy?’ (Hardin 1974, 82-3).

158 Culture, Communication, and National Identity Canada is not alone in having imperfectly established in public-sector

institutions a real responsibility to the public. Certainly advertisingfinanced broadcasting systems do primarily serve advertisers rather than audiences, but even the democratic control differently institutionalized in the public-broadcasting orders of the Netherlands and West Germany has proved defective in important respects. (So, a fortiori, have the public-broadcasting systems established on the Bsc model, which have no mechanisms of democratic accountability at all — the German, in the overpoliticization of executive and creative functions [see Falkenberg 1983; Williams 1985] and the Dutch in its inadequate service of mass audience tastes and desires [Ang 1985].) There is no satisfactory model of accountability to audiences, or, put differently, consumer sovereignty, extant in broadcast television. The choice is between different systems, each of which must be assessed in terms of which is the least worst rather than which is beyond criticism. Canada’s broadcasting culture is particularly interesting in that the controlling élites of the commercial and public sectors are largely distinct and animated by different aims (though each element of the notionally

‘single system’ is dependent on the nationalist architecture of the broadcasting system). The public sector is driven by the motive of achieving nationalist ideological goals and the private sector, profitmaximization. But neither sector is able to devote itself exclusively toa single goal. Commercial broadcasters are required by the regulator as a

condition of licence to deliver Canadian content in order to achieve nationalist goals; public broadcasters (in particular, the csc) are driven to maximize revenues from sale of programming and advertising. Neither public nor for-profit sectors can ignore either nationalist or profit-maximizing imperatives. As the Federal Cultural Policy Review Committee commented: ‘The resort to commercial revenues has a profound influence on the kind of programmes that reach the screen in the first place ... producers make programs that have great similarity to each other and ... it leads all Canadian broadcasters, including the csc, to compete with each other for the acquisition of those foreign, mostly American programmes that are expected to draw large audiences’ (Applebaum and Hébert 1982, 278).

The condition described by Applebaum and Hébert is known by nationalists as ‘cultural dependency’ — the subordinate relation of a peripheral to a metropolitan culture. It is to resist and transform this dependent relationship flowing from competitive market conditions that the Canadian state has promoted non-market institutions. A

Maximization of Satisfaction 159 penalty attached to such practices; insulation from market conditions (the raison d’étre of state policy and institutions) slows adaptation to changed conditions and (unless countervailing channels through which consumers can express preferences are established) stifles responsiveness to demand.

The endemic weaknesses of public-sector institutions are their susceptibility to élite capture and slow adaption to changed needs and circumstances. The market paradigm advocated by Globerman (1983) offers a powerful critique of public broadcasting and of the state’s role in Canadian broadcasting. But, no more than the object of its critique is the

system advocated by Globerman a satisfactory means of achieving consumer sovereignty and serving the public interest. Canada has generally deemed imperfect statist outcomes preferable to those that flow from the operations of a capitalist broadcasting market. Though Hardin’s attribution of a ‘public broadcasting culture’ (1974) to Canada smacks of special pleading — Canadian broadcasting is less unitary a phenomenon than his noting implies — there is a remarkably important

public presence in Canada’s broadcasting order. For the market is assumed to deliver only economic and cultural dependency (for a contrary view, see Globerman and Vining 1984). It is to this idea of dependency, which has been of great importance in forming the mental set of Canadian communications scholars and policy-makers (particularly in English Canada), that I now turn.

Dependency Theory and Television in Canada

The kernel proposition in dependency theory is that the market economy constitutes peripheral states as exploited dependencies of core states. Though first a theory of economic relations, dependency theory has metamorphosed to embrace cultural relations, and ‘dependency’ is now a pervasive metaphor used to characterize Canada’s relation to the United States. It has become the dominant optic through which scholars of Canadian communication (with some exceptions, such as Toogood

[1969] and Desaulniers [1982; 1985]) have analysed the Canadian audio-visual media. The notion ‘dependency’ implies an opposite: autonomy or independence. The implied core value asserted in dependency theory is national autonomy, and dependency theorists customarily invoke the political power of the state as a counter to the forces of an international economy, which are judged to advantage core states at the expense of peripheral and dependent states. Moreover, as Krasner (1985) points out, there are many instances of states refusing participation in international economic relationships, even when these promise to be advantageous (though dependency theory customarily designates such relationships as part of a zero-sum game in which the metropole gains at the expense of the periphery), in order to safeguard the autonomy and independence of the state.

Canada has frequently been regarded as a dependent economy. Dependency theorists, taking Canada as their locus, have proposed an account of Canadian history in which Canadian interests have systemati-

cally been subordinated to those of successive dominant metropoles whether these were the colonial powers exploiting a staple product —

Dependency Theory and Television in Canada 161 fur, wheat, or timber — at the expense of balanced development and Canadian national autonomy, or the United States, which, through its

trading relationship, was judged to have constituted Canada as a supplier of primary products but to have retained high value-added stages of production in the United States. Canada’s dependent status has not been regarded as a solely economic condition. Clearly colonial status, as a constituent of the successive French and British empires, was one of political dependency and absence of sovereignty; some Canadians believe Canada’s contemporary relationship with the United States to be of a quasi colonial kind and that the new ‘colonial’ power, as

did the old, appropriates resources (e.¢., in fisheries and disputes over Arctic jurisdiction) that Canadians deem to be theirs. Canadian dependency theory has passed through three stages. First, the ‘staples theory’ received its classical articulation in Innis’s finest work The Fur Trade in Canada (1956). History poses a problem to staples

theorists in that the development of manufacturing in Canada and Canada’s transition to its current highly urbanized state are not readily reconciled with the underdevelopment predictions of staples theory.

The second stage of dependency theory has therefore argued that manufacturing in Canada has been essentially of a ‘branch plant’ kind

and that the metropolitan powers, pre-eminently the United States, have retained R«p and high value-added stages of production at home. Both the ‘staple’ and “branch plant’ stages of dependency theory are concerned with ‘base’ rather than ‘superstructure.’ Each sees the Canadian economy developing in the interests and under the control of metropoles and through the complicity of a Canadian propertied élite, a

comprador class that owes its allegiance to transnational rather than Canadian values. Opposed to this group and its transnational ‘continental’ values is another élite, the predominantly non-propertied intelligent-

sia, a group (or groups, for Canada’s two language communities and their intellectuals are distinct) that has increasingly identified the superstructure and culture as the loci of dependency and has articulated a distinctive tertiary stage of dependency theory. This third stage of dependency theory is best exemplified by Dallas Smythe’s Dependency Road (1981b), which integrates dependency theory

with a long-established Canadian conception of the nation being synonymous with its communication systems. In the seventeenth century the Voyageurs’ exploration of the Great Lakes and the Saskatchewan and Mackenzie water systems in the course of the fur trade opened up an east-west communication system around which Canada

162 Culture, Communication, and National Identity was constituted. The nineteenth century consolidated this east-west orientation with the construction of the Inter-Continental and Pacific railways, and in the twentieth century the Canadian state sponsored east-west links such as Trans-Canada Airlines, later Air Canada (which

began as a subsidiary of Canadian National Railways), the TransCanada Pipeline, and the Trans-Canada Highway in order to foster physical integration of the Canadian state, and also communication networks such as csc radio and television and Telesat Canada to knit Canada together electronically. The reworking of dependency theory in

a tertiary, ‘culturalist,’ mode is both an instance of a world-wide intellectual devaluation of ‘economistic’ theories of social change and social power (asserting, instead, the importance of consent rather than duress and the superstructure rather than the base) and an attempt to

maintain the central theses of dependency theory without the flaws present in its staples or branch-plant modes. Implicit within dependency theory is a notion of national economic autarky and a view of trade as a zero-sum game in which benefit of one party is necessarily at the expense of the trading partner. This is not the place for a review of the Canadian economy, but there is much in the contemporary Canadian economy to support the optimism of the vision with which Innis concluded The Fur Trade in Canada. In spite of relatively

high unemployment and a high fiscal deficit, much of the Canadian economy is in good shape. There is a substantial sector based on the renewable resources of fisheries, timber and agricultural industries, and hydroelectric power. Manufacturing in key sectors such as automobile manufacture and steel is in surplus, and there is a diversified — though

in most sectors still depressed — extractive industry. Plus the hightechnology information and electronics sectors, some of which (Telidon

and the satellite program notoriously) are sustained only through extensive subsidy, while others, e.g., telecommunications-switchingequipment manufacturing, are world class. The services sector also has its bright stars; the Canadian bank’s return on equity (15.53 per cent) is, according to the rnca Banking Analysis (Financial Times, 1 Nov. 1984, 8),

the highest in the world (u.s. banks returning 11.65 per cent). As regarding Canada’s trading relation with the United States, for depen-

dency theorists that of a dependent periphery with a dominant metropole, recent trade statistics suggest that, although bilateral trade is considerably more important to Canada than it is to the United States, the trading relationship is one that favours Canada. In 1984 U.s. foreign trade saw exports of $117.1 billion and imports of

Dependency Theory and Television in Canada 163 $187.6 billion and a negative balance of trade with Canada of $20.4 billion ($46.5 billion in exports to Canada and $66.9 billion in imports). The u.s. trade deficit with Canada accounted for 28.9 per cent of its overall deficit (Time 13 May 1985, 23). Canada’s trade with the United States in 1984 substantially exceeded its trade with the rest of the world: total Canadian exports were $112,495 billion (Cdn), to the United States $85,087 million (Cdn), and total Canadian imports were $95,842 million (Cdn), from the United States $68,540 million (Statistics Canada 1984;

cited in Clark 1985, 16). Admittedly Canada is more dependent on international trade than are most other developed Western countries, with exports accounting for 28 per cent of Canadian cpr (orcD Data Base; cited in Clark 1985, 18) and Canada’s international trade is predominantly with the United States (76.3 per cent of exports and 72 per cent of imports; Clark 1985, 31), but there seems no obvious reason why this bilateral relationship should be perceived as one of Canadian dependency.

The Canadian economy is not, then, one that necessarily has to be perceived as disabled by dependency. And dependency theory in Canada has proved extraordinarily protean, metamorphosing through successive stages as the propositions advanced have been contradicted by the unfolding of events. None the less, dependency theory has been an influential paradigm, informing the analyses of scholars concerned with Canada’s communication order and communication policy itself. Ideas do count, and accordingly the structure and historical development of ideas of dependency in Canada repay attention. Staples Theory The classic text of the staples theory is Innis’s The Fur Trade in Canada (first published in 1930). Its central thesis is: ‘The trade in staples, which characterizes an economically weak country, to the highly industrialized areas of Europe and latterly the United States, and especially the fur trade, has been responsible for various peculiar tendencies in Canadian

development’ (1956, 401). Stated thus, there is nothing particularly exceptionable about Innis’s thesis. Though, to sustain his judgment that

these ‘peculiar tendencies’ were negative and that there were other more favourable possibilities of development available for Canada would have required an economic history that considered economic activities in Canada other than the fur trade during its heyday and showed how fur trading ‘underdeveloped’ them, and a more compre-

164 Culture, Communication, and National Identity hensive account of the indigenous Canadian fur-trading companies than is given. Innis’s concentration on the Hudson’s Bay Company makes a mercantilist analysis (which argues that the surplus from the fur trade was predominately remitted to the British metropole rather than retained for investment in Canada) hard to resist. Nor does his chosen

emphasis on the fur trade permit him to consider the industrial forts

established by the Hudson’s Bay Company and their impact on Canadian development — or dependency. There are, then, grounds for questioning the typicality of the fur trade and the paradigmatic status it, through Innis’s study, has had for dependency theory. Smythe himself

(1981b, x) points out that staples theory could have been applied to Britain’s southerly thirteen colonies and does not explain either the rise

to power of the United States or Canada’s dependency in manufacturing. Rather than decisively demonstrating the fur staple’s role in establishing Canada as a dependent economy, Innis (and it is one of the strengths

of his book that it offers data that can be reworked to support conclusions other than his) shows how the economic characteristics of the beaver and the fur trade stimulated exploration and development (certainly of a particular kind) in Canada. He cites abundant evidence of the advantages the fur trade brought to native Canadians — the Indians —

quoting a French source reporting an Indian’s remark: ‘In truth my brother, the Beaver does everything to perfection. He makes for us kettles, axes, swords, knives and gives us drink and food without the trouble of cultivating the ground’ (p. 28). Innis cites much evidence to show that the fur trade was as much a mutually advantageous trading relationship, in which each partner benefited from trading goods in which a comparative advantage was enjoyed, as it was a case of Europeans corrupting and enslaving a noble people with drink and duress. The Europeans supplied cooking pots, knives, axes, firearms, and woollen cloth, which enabled the Indians to control nature and appropriate a surplus from it far more effectively than they had in the past. The Indians employed their knowledge of the land, the habits of game, and their expertise in survival in the woods to supply Europeans with furs. However, for Innis, in spite of the reciprocal benefits realized

for trading partners by the fur trade, it was a trading arrangement in which Canada remained dependent: ‘The fur trade was vitally dependent on manufactured goods from Europe — the organization never took

an independent position from the old world such as an organization with diversified economic growth could afford. Canada remained in the

Dependency Theory and Television in Canada 165 first instance subordinate to France and in the second place subordinate to Great Britain, chiefly through the importance of the fur trade and its weak economic development’ (p. 118).

But (as Innis states at certain points) a more nuanced account is necessary. What alternative models of development were there for Canada? Its climate and terrain were far less advantageous for agricul-

tural development and therefore for settlement than were, and are, those of the United States. Atlantic Canada has, in Halifax, one major ice-free port; the United States has a promiscuous plurality of excellent

harbours, from Portland southward. The advantages of climate, soil, and ease of communication explain, far more satisfactorily than does dependency theory, the more rapid development of the American economy than the Canadian. Other economic historians interpret the role of the staple differently than does Innis: Mackintosh (1967), for example, saw the staple trade not as a mode of economic organization and production that retarded development of the colonial periphery but as a condition of development. The absence of a staple condemned a

community to underdevelopment: ‘staples ... permit the pioneer community to come into close contact with the commercial world and leave behind the disabilities of a pioneer existence’ (Mackintosh 1967, 4). For Mackintosh, France’s North American colonies were less successfully

developed than were the British colonies because they lacked a staples trade with the colonial metropole. And, for him, geography was more important in Canada’s development than were the factors of political economy privileged by Innis: “The simplest factors of American geography are of primary importance in understanding the developing life of the people of this continent’ (p. 2). Rather than its dependency on a remote dominant metropole it was Canada’s geography that principally inhibited its industrial development: ‘The Laurentian barrier making impossible the commercial connection of the St Lawrence with the north central valley continued to be the solid dominating fact of Canadian development. There could be no Canadian Chicago because there was no meeting of waterway and prairie to the north of the lakes’ (p.12). To

be sure there is an important emphasis on geography and climate in Innis’s work. He characterizes the economic development of North America in terms of three zones: the northern, based on the fur staple (Canada); the southern, based on cotton (the southern states of the United States): and middle zone with a diversified economy (New England and the u.s. Mid-west). But it is not Innis’s classification based on fixed characteristics of climate and geography that has been taken up

166 Culture, Communication, and National Identity in Canadian dependency theory. Rather it is on the political-economic relationships of, first, imperialism, then, international capitalism, and, latterly, the transnational information society that dependency theory has focused. Because priority in making these relationships is ceded to human agency rather than geography and climate, it follows that such

relationships can (and should) be changed by human agency, by changed international political relationships following from a new Canadian political order. Dependency theory asserts cultural, social, and political factors to be decisive, not those of geography and climate; it

is in these terms that Innis’s work has underpinned much EnglishCanadian nationalist political economy and an influential current in Canadian communication and cultural theory. It can be argued that only exploitation of the fur trade offered a possibility of economic development in Canada and that lamentation of

the imbalanced and dependent economy that stemmed from the fur

staple is simply mischievous. For such an argument ignores the advantages of the longer growing season, ice-free ports, and fertile soils south of the Canadian border. Such factors of climate and soil, of course,

differentiate regions within Canada and go far to explain the relative prosperity and diversity of the economy of southern Ontario compared to that of Newfoundland or Nova Scotia (Ontario has close to half Canada’s first-grade agricultural land). Indeed, in a later work, The Cod Fisheries (1940), Innis cites an anonymous writer of 1706 testifying to the advantages of New England (which apply a fortiori to Pennsylvania and

the south) over Canada: If anyone gives concerned attention to the progress the English have made in the case of their New England colonies, he will have good reason to tremble for our colony in Canada. There is no single year but sees more children born in New England than there are men in the whole of Canada. In a few years, we shall be facing a redoubtable people, one to be feared. As for Canada, her people will not number many more than they do today. Whether we must seek the reason in that mildness of climate which is so favourable to agriculture, stockraising and all the year round navigation, or whether we must seek it in the desmene of specialized industry, this is certain: on those shores

: the colonies of England have become as solidly established as England herself. (1940, 137)

Towards the end of The Fur Trade in Canada, Innis presents a positive

Dependency Theory and Television in Canada 167 version of the legacy left by the fur trade: ‘In eastern Canada industrialism was following the path of the fur trade. Directors of the Grand Trunk

planned the extension of the railway to the prairies and to the Pacific Coast. The centralized organization of the Hudson’s Bay Company made possible the acquisition of control by other interests in 1863 as it had in 1811 by Lord Selkirk’ (1956, 337) Here Innis argues that the Hudson’s Bay Company, the central agency of the staple relationship between the notionally dependent periphery and the dominant metropole, had became an instrument of, not a brake on, economic development for Canada. In his conclusion to The Fur Trade in Canada (see especially pp. 339-400), Innis sketches the positive impact of the wheat

staple and the extractive industries in creating a burgeoning and diversified Canadian economy. But, in spite of his qualified optimism, his testimony to the developmental role of the Hudson’s Bay Company and enumeration of the benefits mutually enjoyed by the fur merchants and hunter/trappers through their trading relationships, the dominant arguments in The Fur Trade in Canada support dependency theory and rebut the suppositions of classical political economy (that the spread of free-market relationships necessarily led to an integrated world market

in which division of labour on the basis of comparative advantage maximized benefits for all concerned). Overall, in Innis’s view, Canada lost through fur-staple-based development. Dependency theory and staples theory are not synonymous. Though Innis’s staples version of the dependency thesis (but not his qualifications) has been extremely influential in English Canada, its contradic-

tions (notably its inability to explain Canada’s industrialization and urbanization) have led some Canadian political economists to seek to separate the staples theory and dependency theory and to develop a post-staples version of dependency theory. Post-staples Dependency Theory In 1981 the Canadian journal Studies in Political Economy published a special issue on ‘rethinking Canadian political economy.’ The theme of the issue was critical interrogation of dependency theory. It proposed that dependency theory falsely equates development with manufacturing (Schmidt 1981, 76), that foreign ownership does not, as dependency

theory asserts, lead necessarily to a loss of national control (Panitch 1981, 25), and contained historical analyses demonstrating that the underdevelopment of manufacturing in Canada in the nineteenth

168 Culture, Communication, and National Identity century, relative both to the United states and to Europe, was not a consequence of ‘dependency,’ but, rather, was because of Canada’s high-wage proletariat, which commanded real wages higher (in some cases substantially higher) than were paid by European and North American firms (Panitch 1981, 16). Indeed, Panitch argued (p. 18) that

the size of the Canadian domestic market for manufacturers was

sufficiently large to attract American investment in ‘branch plants’ to serve that market (and also gain access to British Empire markets that would otherwise be closed to them by Imperial tariffs). Panitch persuasively argues that the relation of Canada to the British metropole created an environment in which, in spite of the high-wage proletariat, manufacturing in Canada was attractive to U.S. capital. This is a thesis that is hard to reconcile with a notion of dependency either on Britain or on the United States. As MacDonald (1966) argues, foreign ownership of Canadian firms is by no means necessarily against the interests of Canadians. However, success in attracting inward invest-

ment is customarily taken by dependency theorists as evidence of dependency. Smythe cites (1981b, 91) both Canada’s status as the country with the highest direct u.s. investment (31 per cent of all foreign

u.s. direct investment in 1964, 22 per cent in 1978, with the United Kingdom in 1978 the next-largest recipient of u.s. investment, with 12 per cent) and Canadian investment in the United States (p. 92) — 1978 $6.2 billion — as evidence of Canada’s dependency.

Smythe and Panitch share a view that staples theory is useless in understanding Canadian dependency. For the history of Canadian industrialization is one in which the surplus from exploitation of the primary staples (lumber, fur, and especially wheat) was diverted under the National Policy of the nineteenth-century Macdonald governments

to finance development of manufacturing. Producers of the primary staples were compelled by National Policy tariffs to pay higher than world prices for manufactured goods. The tariff barrier protected Canadian manufacturers and encouraged inward capital flows so that the growing Canadian (and British Empire) market for manufacturers could be exploited. The staple, in fact, provided the surplus whereby a diversified economy was established. However, emancipation from a staples-based economy is perceived by Smythe and others as entry into a new, non-staples-based, dependency. Panitch (1981), Schmidt (1981), and McNally (1981) argue that dependency theory displaces radical analysis of Canadian social relations away from class conflict within Canada to a macrocosmic arena of

Dependency Theory and Television in Canada 169 intentional conflict. This, they argue, enables radical nationalism to cloak itself in a Marxist vocabulary, the price paid being in a plethora of category errors. (Though they do not use this category, they point to a

structure of thinking that designates Canada as a ‘proletarian nation’

engaged in class struggle in an international arena against ruling nations.) Contemporary Canadian political economy is, they argue, a conceptual dustbin in which three heterogenous intellectual systems are thrown together: ‘Contemporary Marxian Canadian political economy,

on the other hand, is an eclectic melding of at least three major intellectual influences: (1) bourgeois political economy/nationalist themes and issues, (2) third worldist/dependency theory concepts, and (3) classical Marxist language’ (Schmidt 1981, 66).

After passage through two models of dependency theory (the staples theory and the foreign-ownership theory), each of which is discarded as conceptually and empirically faulty, a new focus for dependency -— culture — is identified: It is not the state that primarily sustains American imperialism within Canadian society. The imperial relation is secured and maintained more fundamentally within civil society itself — in the integration of all the dominant fractions of capital under the hegemony of the American bourgeoisie in a continental labour market and international unions, and above all in our culture — not so much the ‘haute culture’ of the intellectuals but the popular culture which is produced and reproduced in advertising, the mass media and the mass educational system. Just as it is by virtue of cultural hegemony in civil society that bourgeois domination is made compatible with liberal democracy in advanced capitalist societies, so Canadian dependency remains compatible with liberal democracy by virtue of the penetration of civil society itself by American culture. (Panitch 1981, 26-7)

Cultural Dependency Dallas Smythe’s (1981b) Dependency Road: Communications, Capitalism,

Consciousness and Canada well exemplifies tertiary-stage dependency

theory, which proposes that the Canadian dependent relation on the dominant u.s. metropole is constituted through the pervasive presence of American mass communications in Canada. Arguments such as these now form the dominant paradigm in Canadian communication studies (see, inter alia, Lorimer and McNulty 1987) and are homologous with

170 Culture, Communication, and National Identity the long-established concern about transborder spill over of American radio and television signals manifested in Canada’s broadcasting policy. Dependency Road begins: This is a study of the process by which people organized in the capitalist system produced a country called Canada as a dependency of the United States, the center of the core of the capitalist system. Rooted in the realistic history of how monopoly capitalism was created in the United States and Canada simultaneously it focuses on the role of communications institutions (press, magazines, books, films, radio and television broadcasting, telecommunications, the arts, sciences and engineering) in producing the necessary consciousness and ideology to seem to legitimate that dependency. (1981b, ix)

Smythe’s thesis is hard to characterize other than in his terms, but the core of his argument is that the mass media constitute Canadians as an ‘audience commodity.’ The commodity (and thus Canadians) is sold by broadcasters, newspaper proprietors, film distributors, and the like to advertisers who wish to influence the audience to ‘buy’ either ‘consumer goods and services’ and/or ‘political candidates and public policies.’ So far Smythe’s argument is a familiar motif of critical theory. The

originality of Smythe’s argument inheres in his abolition of the distinctions between ‘base’ and ‘superstructure.’ He states explicitly, ‘in

the North American core area, the distinction between base and superstructure has disappeared’ (pp. 272-3) and argues that audiences work in their consumption of mass media messages. Indeed, he affirms that the process of audience interaction with media messages is not consumption at all but a productive transformation, the surplus from which is appropriated by capital. Audience work is ‘learning to buy goods and spend income accordingly’ (p. 39).

Smythe’s argument for the active role of the reader does not recognize — and this is one of the major potential flaws in his argument —

the possibility of variant decodings of messages. For example, Canadi-

ans may well make different sense of American television than do Americans. Nor can it be assumed that all Americans make the same sense of television programs. Katz and Liebes (1985) demonstrate the difference in readings and appropriations of ‘Dallas’ by different ethnic groups in the United States and Israel. Smythe’s argument designates the media messages consumed by audiences not as a ‘free lunch’ but as the equivalent, in the bargain struck between the working audience and

Dependency Theory and Television in Canada 171 capital, to payment for productive labour in the wage bargain. The gratifications enjoyed by audiences in their consumption of television and their production of themselves as a commodity — the audience sold to advertisers — are, for Smythe, wages. (Jhally [1987] refines Smythe’s argument and points out that advertisers don’t always get the audience to work. What they purchase is the viewers’ time and the possibility that

the viewers will ‘work’ for them.) Smythe’s discussion focuses on broadcast messages, though his argument can be extended to products such as newspapers and cinematograph films (which audiences pay to consume) because these goods are generally sold at less than their unit

cost of production ‘subsidized’ by revenue from advertisers. This analysis leads to some absurd conclusions: notably that audiences are now the major opposition to capitalism (not the working class, whether organized in political parties or trade unions): ‘In creating the massproduced audience, monopoly capitalism produced not only its own chief protagonist (and agenda setter) but its major antagonist in the core area, displacing organized labour from that role’ (Smythe 1981b), xiii).

However, Smythe’s argument does deal with a major problem for Canadian scholars who wish to argue that the relation between the American media and Canadian audiences is an exploitative one in which (as in other economic spheres in which the relationship of ‘dependency’ exists), yet again, the nice guys lose. The problem is that posed by the flow of American television signals across the Canadian border and their

consumption by Canadians at zero cost. How can a service widely consumed and valued by Canadians — 81 per cent oppose Canadian government control on U.s. Tv signals (Hoskins and McFadyen 1984, 4)

and 68 per cent think the United States makes the best television programs (House of Commons 1988) ~ be regarded as disadvantageous? To be sure, Canadians pay, as do Americans, for the cost of television in

their consumption of the commodities it advertises, the retail price of which includes the cost of advertising. But Canadians pay none of the cost of regulation of u.s. television; often they pay none of the cost of advertising (for the products advertised may not be sold in Canadian markets, e.g., the advertising of Reagan/Bush and Mondale/Ferraro) and consume a product financed by advertising revenues (or, as Smythe would put it, the sale of the audience commodity) in a market ten times the size of the Canadian market. The product thus possesses values beyond those the smaller Canadian market could finance. If the lunch is

bigger than Canadians alone could finance, how then can this be a dependent or exploitative relationship? Smythe offers a way around this

172 Culture, Communication, and National Identity vexing challenge in arguing that the act of viewing is a form of waged labour in which viewers are caught in an exploitative wage bargain. Innis’s essay “Technology and Public Opinion in the United States’ (in Innis 1951) describes the nineteenth-century u.s. publishing industry, which distributed a similar free lunch to American readers and printers

at the expense of British authors and publishers. Because American copyright law did not recognize intellectual-property rights in works outside the United States, British novels and other publications were pirated in the United States. This case suggests that ‘dependency’ ona foreign metropole for cultural goods is by no means incompatible with robust national identity or the successful pursuit of interests that are not those of the metropole. Panitch (1981) makes a similar argument that the locus of contemporary Canadian dependency resides in the mass media: It is not the state that primarily sustains American imperialism within Canadian society. The imperial relation is secured and maintained more fundamentally within civil society itself — in the integration of all the dominant fractions of capital under the hegemony of the American bourgeoisie, in a continental labour market and intentional unions, and above all in our culture — not so much the ‘haute culture’ of the intellectuals but the popular culture which is produced and reproduced in advertising, the mass media and the mass educational system. (p. 26)

Panitch’s use of the category ‘civil society’ gives a clue to understanding

the analytical distinctions Smythe makes in terms less confusing than Smythe’s (and less provocative to European political economists: see Murdock 1978: Garnham 1979). When abolishing the distinction between

base and superstructure (1981b, 272-3), Smythe is arguing that the audience is engaged in a process of production rather than consumption and is selling its labour of analysis and learning to the broadcaster for resale to advertisers (pp. 22-51), and he invests the audience with the role of ‘major antagonist’ (p. xiii) to capital. Smythe is effectively stating that the television audience is participating in the reproduction of the conditions of existence of contemporary capitalist production and the social relations that flow from it. Implicit in his argument is a view that the sphere of reproduction is just as much (or, as he argues, more) an

arena for struggle as is the sphere of production. Reformulating Smythe’s thesis thus helps to integrate elements of what otherwise

Dependency Theory and Television in Canada 173 appears an eclectic and incoherent book in which the problematic appropriation of categories from the base and their application to the superstructure (or for at least some readers: Murdock and Golding 1978; Garnham 1979; Bruck 1983) fails, and integrates a classic post-staples analysis of dependency (ownership of Canadian productive capacity by

foreign capital) and a novel and provocative view of the television audience. If audience activity is seen as the reproduction of the conditions of existence of metropolitan domination of the dependent Canadian economy, then much of Dependency Road (but not all — it remains an eclectic book though its eclecticism permits many provocative and fruitful insights to surface) falls into place for consideration and challenge. The core of the challenge to Smythe is that he neglects the institution(s) of the state. Bruck (1983; see also Murdock [1978]) points out how

difficult it is to reconcile Smythe’s theory with the highly developed range of state communication institutions in Canada — notably the csc: ‘The case of the csc would, on the other hand, warrant a significant expansior/alteration of the audience commodity theory. The csc has to be understood as a massive although meandering intervention by the Canadian state in the production of audiences in this country. Consider-

ing this intervention, Smythe would have to let go of a general materialist culture theory under monopoly capitalism and concentrate on a local theory of the production of Canadian audiences and culture’ (p. 99).

Bruck further criticizes Smythe for his neglect of the cultural works produced in Canada and the absence of analysis of cultural practices and

media texts. Smythe is not alone in neglecting analysis of texts and effects and, although the notion of cultural dependency is pervasive among Canadian commentators on television, there are, as I discuss below, few analyses of television programming produced by Canadian cultural nationalists to sustain their theories. Wolfe’s (1985) study is the closest approximation to an analysis of the programming through which

‘the hegemony of the American bourgeoisie’ (Panitch 1981, 26) is exercised.

In none of its modes — staples, manufacturing and ownership, and culture — can dependency theory claim to have decisively demonstrated

its contentions. Staples theory does not demonstrate that there were alternatives to staples-based development not taken because such developments, though advantageous for Canada, would not have served the interests of the dominant metropole. And the development

174 Culture, Communication, and National Identity TABLE 6

Manufacturing industries in Canada

Salaries Value Value of

and wages added shipments Establishments Employees ($000) ($000) ($000)

1920) = .22,532 998,893 77,494 = 1,621,273 3,706,545

1980 835,495 1,861,395 33,145,313 65,959,136 168,017,406

SOURCE: Canada (1984), 208

and diversification of the Canadian economy is not easily reconciled with the staples thesis. Accordingly, a new mode of dependency theory was articulated that argued that dependency inhered in the non-Canadian ownership and control of manufacturing in Canada. Panitch characterizes this second-stage model of dependency as giving a central status to ‘the dominance of the financial fraction in Canada, established by the

original mercantile linkage with the British metropole, which was understood to determine Canadian dependency. This fraction suppressed an indigenous class of industrial entrepreneurs, maintained a course of extensive staple exports over the last century, and induced the enormous branch plant manufacturing production of American multinationals in Canada’ (1981, 10). But the second, “branch plant’, stage of dependency theory demonstrated neither the equivalence of ownership

and control nor that control of branch plants is exercised disadvantageously to Canadians (and to Canadians’ advantage in Canadian-owned and -controlled enterprises). In the manufacturing sector, notionally blighted by the dominant metropoles’ interest in maintaining dependency, the indicators of number of employers, salaries and wages, value added, and value of shipments show increases between 1920 and 1980 (see table 6). (The only indicator to show a decline is that of the number of manufacturingindustry establishments, which peaks in 1955, declines to 1960, rises until 1967, falls to 1977, and rises again to a figure just below that of the mid-1950s peak.)

The Critique of Dependency Theory In fields other than communication and cultural analysis there are signs of a retreat from dependency theory. Richards and Pratt, in their Prairie

Dependency Theory and Television in Canada 175 Capitalism (1979), offer a brilliant critique of dependency theory and the

political conclusions drawn from it. They analyse political-economic development in the western provinces of Alberta and Saskatchewan and the role of the successive western staples of wheat, natural gas, oil, and potash. At numerous points in their study, Richards and Pratt affirm the typicality of the western provincial experience for Canada asa

whole, pointing to the symmetry between the nineteenth-century National Policy using the wheat-staple surplus for the development of

manufacturing in Canada (essentially Mackintosh’s thesis that the ‘staple primed the pump of Canadian industry’ [1967, 14] and the twentieth-century provincial strategies using the resource-staple surpluses for either diversified secondary manufacturing or ‘forward linked’ staples-based manufacturing. Richards and Pratt’s use of the provincial economies as a microcosm of

the Canadian economy leads them to return to a classical theory of comparative advantage and pull the rug out from under Canadian dependency theory and its sanctification of the role of the state: ‘We find

no confirmation of the thesis that provinces heavily dependent on the

exploitation and sale of staples are thereby placed in a permanent position of political dependency vis-a-vis eternal capital’ (1979, 8). Both

the western provinces examined by Richards and Pratt and the Canadian state as a whole are customarily viewed by their respective

political élites as ‘underdeveloped’ and ‘dependent’ on a central metropole, respectively, central Canada (particularly Ontario) and the

United States. For Canada within North America, and Alberta and Saskatchewan within Canada, dependency theory sees the absence of a diversified economy caused by ‘market forces [which] have created a

division of labour between an industrialised core and the hewers of wood and drawers of water of the periphery’ (Pratt 1977, 158). In Prairie Capitalism (1979) Richards and Pratt reject dependency theory (and the response it calls up of compensatory state-fostered

activity) and argue that the operation of market forces and concentration

of economic activity in fields in which (Canada’s or the prairies’) comparative advantage exists is preferable to the alternative strategies

adopted by the western provinces (and by Canada). They see the industrial-development strategy of the west to be serving not the public interest but ‘the desire of a peripheral political, cultural or ethnic group

to possess and enjoy an industrial core of its own where wealth, attractive careers and power are located’ (Pratt 1977, 158). This analysis is applied to both the social-democratic, public-sector, route to economic

176 Culture, Communication, and National Identity independence of Saskatchewan and the conservative private-sector route followed by Alberta. Each province assumed that the local absence

of non-staples, particularly manufacturing, economic activity in the west, was the result of the west’s dependency and ‘underdevelopment’ by the east. The successive appropriation of the wheat-staple surplus to finance the National Policy, the federal policy (redressed by Mulroney’s

1984 budget in whose governments western interests have been far better represented than in the Liberal governments of the preceding two decades) of maintaining the Canadian domestic price of hydrocarbons at below world price, benefited central Canada at the expense of the west and lent credence to the underdevelopment-by-the-east thesis. Richards and Pratt argue that the failure to establish manufacturing in the west was not the result of the west’s dependent relation on central Canada but of the region’s comparative disadvantage: As with Saskatchewan’s first experiments with economic diversification after the election of the ccrF in 1944, underlying the development policies of the Lougheed Conservatives in Alberta is the assumption that there exists considerable untapped potential for manufacturing in the West. The validity of this assumption, and the rationality of the development policies that flow from it, are matters seldom debated in any of the prairie provinces. Those who suggest that the low percentage of manufacturing employment in the prairies is a logical consequence of the region’s comparative advantage in other sectors, and national cost minimizing location decisions are a distinct minority. (1979, 233)

The logical consequences of dependency thesis is, as Richards and Pratt point out, political autonomy. The Canadian west has the Independence Association of Alberta and sporadically elects independentist members to the legislative assembly in Alberta. But political independence is, as the case of Canada shows, no panacea — the symptoms that economic nationalists diagnose as ‘dependent underdevelopment’ may persist in the economy of a sovereign state, in spite of countervailing statist strategies. Canadian nationalists tend to see provincial initiatives and demands for control over the provinces’ economic and cultural destiny as, in the words of Frank Underhill, a prominent left nationalist, ‘camouflage put up by our industrial and financial magnates’ (cited by Richards and Pratt 1979, 6) to weaken the power of the bearer of Canadian nationalism, Ottawa.

Dependency Theory and Television in Canada 177 From such a perspective, Alberta’s cultivation of alliances with foreign governments and finance capital in order to circumvent what the

then Alberta premier Peter Lougheed called the “Toronto-Montreal

establishment’ is only marginally less threatening than the Parti Québécois’s intention to achieve ‘sovereignty-association.’ It is clear that the economic interests of Alberta and Saskatchewan have not been

served by central Canadian domination of the Canadian state; it is equally clear that Canadian nationalism can find little place for what, in its view, are fissiparous distractions from the central task of ‘closing the 49th parallel.’ Quebec forced an accommodation on Canadian nationalists; the Liberal party and its ideology of bilingualism and biculturalism has been the bearer of that accommodation. But Alberta (and to a lesser

extent its neighbours, British Columbia and Saskatchewan) and its demands are seldom seen as legitimate. But Alberta’s policies of ‘balanced development’ using the surplus from the staples to capitalize

the development of manufacturing are really no different from the historic policies of Canadian nationalism. What is in dispute between the

‘have’ provinces (led by Alberta) and the federal government and the ‘have not’ provinces is apportionment of the surplus from the staples. For Richards and Pratt, the geographical and climatic disadvantages of Alberta relative to other Canadian, let alone North American, locations point to the necessity of an economic policy different from that enjoined by nationalists. Following their theories of underdevelopment. Indeed, for Richards and Pratt, the successive failures of manufacturing on the prairies have wasted one of the scarcest factors of production — human capital. They argue that Alberta’s main ‘forward linkage’ project — its petrochemicals industry — is unlikely to be different: The chances of Alberta’s petrochemical ventures requiring subsidies, at least in the initial stages, appear rather high. Sarnia dominates the Canadian industry with close to 50% of total plant capacity, and Alberta has little competitive advantage, save that of access to plentiful and slightly cheaper feedstocks. Relative to the large Gulf Coast plants which dominate the North American market, the Canadian petrochemical industry was, as of 1976, estimated to be at a competitive disadvantage of at least 10%. Measured against the capital costs of Gulf Coast plants, Canadian projects were higher by 20% in Sarnia, 30% in Montreal, and 35% in Alberta owing to factors such as higher labour costs, severe winters and a lack of existing services and infrastructure. (1979, 245)

178 Culture, Communication, and National Identity Accordingly, they urge recognition of the prairies’ (and by extension Canada’s) comparative advantage in staples and a basing of economic development on them: ‘Any a priori presumption against staples is suspect. Within the traditions and norms of North American capitalism, the choice of a staple led strategy of development may well be the most rational course — always provided (and it is admittedly no small provision) local entrepreneurial initiative and skills are available to exploit changing markets and to maximize the potential benefits that inhere in such development (p. 323). Richards and Pratt’s resolute dumping of dependency theory is more

persuasive than the sophisticated attempts of Panitch (1981) and Smythe (1978; 1981b) to transmute dependency theory into a tertiary, culturalist mode. There are, following Richards and Pratt, no economic

reasons why Canada should devote the resources it does to the production of information commodities. Indeed the economic impact of

the development under state tutelage of a cultural-goods sector in competition with foreign industries enjoying enormous competitive advantage may be very disadvantageous, diverting human and other resources away from sectors in which Canada enjoys comparative and competitive advantage. Like Panitch’s essay ‘Dependency and Class in Canadian Political Economy’ (1981), Prairie Capitalism represents a substantial rethinking of the classic dependency theory formerly articulated by Panitch and Pratt

in Panitch (1977). But whereas Panitch (1981) attempts to maintain a dependency model through re-articulating the theory in its tertiary, culturalist, mode, Pratt — with his new collaborator, Richards — abandons

it altogether. Richards and Pratt argue that political action cannot conjure into existence a diversified Canadian economy and that the conditions of Canadian ‘dependency’ and ‘underdevelopment’ have nothing to do with Canada’s social and political order but are essentially geographical and climatic. Hence, for them, ‘dependency’ theory has led to a damaging misrecognition of Canadian interests and an absence

of appropriate political and economic strategies to realize those interests.

Dependency Theory in Quebec There are important similarities in the articulation of ideas of ‘dependency’ in Quebec and in English Canada — and also important differences. Just as the nationalisms of the two Canadian language communities have

Dependency Theory and Television in Canada 179 similarities and differences, so too does the related notion of dependen-

cy. In both English and French Canada, nationalist ideas assume the interdependence of polity and culture and assert the necessity of their congruence. But in each community the starting-point of nationalism is different. In English Canada, the national culture is uncertain, fragile, and indistinct, and political institutions are firmly national. In French

Canada the reverse is the case. The core of the French-Canadian community, the Québécois, have a strong and self-conscious culture,

what it has lacked (from the nationalist point of view) is its own sovereign political institutions. Certainly it is possible to argue that the French fact in North America has survived better through confederation that it would have done in the United States (if speculation on historical might-have-beens makes any sense) and that francophone society in

North America has survived through, rather than in spite of, its enforced association with English Canada. Indeed, the flirtation with the integration of Lower Canada into the United States came from anglophones alarmed by French language rights. But that is not the way in which French-Canadian nationalists have seen the relationship. Rather the distinctive and durable French-Canadian identity and culture

have been a solid basis from which to assert claims to political sovereignty, for a state in which the nationalist program of making francophone polity and culture congruent could be realized. To be sure this nationalism has been articulated as much in terms of a Canada that delivered a national home ‘A mari usque ad mare’ as in terms of an independent Québécois state, but it has been asserted from the basis of

a strong identity and culture towards a new political order. The English-Canadian experience has been one of attempting to equalize the nationalist equation from the other direction, from political institutions

to culture, rather than the Québécois version, going from culture to politics. Thus many of the intellectual motifs of English Canada are iterated in

Quebec but their significance there is different. This difference has created in French-Canadian intellectual life a different set of spaces and, particularly interesting for my purposes, a different attitude towards the

United States and towards television. Therefore some attention to the notion of dependency, 4a la francaise, is required; but because the notion

is not, predominantly, articulated in terms of culture (and does not therefore bear directly on ideas about television, as it does in English Canada) it is not considered as extensively in the French context as it has

been in the English.

180 Culture, Communication, and National Identity Historians of French Canada differ in their accounts of the effect of the British conquest of Nouvelle France. The Quebec school broadly views

the conquest as the bearer of a more advanced society; the Montreal school, as setting in place a regime that secured its legitimacy by retaining archaic social structures — notably the seigneurial system. However, there is substantial agreement that much of French-Canadian economic life remained outside the capitalist economy. The ‘petty producers’ of Nouvelle France, with their refusal of central authority, persisted, and Quebec identity and community remained identified with rural life — the small farm in summer, forest work or the fur tradein

winter. And, or course, the concuest was just that: a subordination by

force of an established society. Although a succession of political accommodations enlarged the power of francophones their society was,

as Trofimenkoff (1983) puts it, one that had been raped, or, as Cook (1966, 13) puts it, more politely: ‘The state had been for nearly a century

after the conquest an instrument of English domination.’ Though regularly used in public life, French did not become an official language

until confederation in 1867. Even then, and to this day, ‘French Canadians could enjoy their full religious and linguistic rights solely in

Quebec; beyond that they constituted merely one minority among others, subject like the rest, to the whims of a majority’ (Trofimenkoff 1983, 162).

Prior to the conquest, Nouvelle France was an authoritarian society

structured on feudal lines, with substantial power and influence enjoyed by the clergy as the secular authorities from the intendant down through the seigneurs. This formal structure was tempered by the open frontier of Nouvelle France, which meant that the ‘petit peuple’ could always vote with their feet and leave the sphere of effective authority exercised by the French crown. Economic activity was chiefly exploitation of the fur trade (largely by and for the ruling class who, of course, didn’t actually trap beaver themselves but traded with the Indians for furs) and petty production ~ subsistence agriculture and the production

of goods outside of commodity-market relationships. After the conquest, most secular rulers returned to France, leaving the “petit peuple’ and the priests. Until the mid nineteenth century, the French population of Bas Canada (Quebec) outnumbered the English population

largely settled in Upper Canada (Ontario). In order to rule this population and prevent the French majority from following the example of the thirteen colonies to the south that had successfully rebelled, the British permitted the French to retain their legal system, religion, and

Dependency Theory and Television in Canada 181 autonomy in ‘civil society’ (except for a period from the conquest to the

passing of the Quebec Act in 1774: the first significant political accommodation to the French fact). The pre-capitalist society of Nouvelle France/Bas Canada existed in parallel with a developing English capitalism centred in Montreal, but prevented from extending into the core ares of Quebec life by the French system of land tenure, the absence of a surplus to finance an infrastructure of roads and canals, laws that inhibited the development of credit, and so on.

After the defeat of the Patriotes’ rebellion (and the Upper Canada rebellion) in 1837, the two Canadas were united, and the legal obstacles to the development of a capitalist economy in Quebec were removed — a

brief period in the 1840s, when French ceased to be an accepted language in public life, was ended when the loyalty of French Canadians was again required as Canada was threatened from the south. Economic

power remained largely with anglophones. The traditional Quebec élites — the professional class and, particularly, the clergy — sought to maintain the relative independence of the indigenous Quebec economy from the anglophone hegemony. The leading Quebec ideologist of the inter-war years, Abbé Lionel Groulx, urged refusal of modernization, cosmopolitanism, and industrialism. It was with the widespread refusal of a traditional ideology following

the shift in Quebec towards urban and industrial life (by now almost complete — in 1978, 2.4 per cent of francophones were in agricultural occupations, 1.4 per cent in fishing and hunting, and 4.5 per cent in processing [Arnopoulos and Clift 1984, 237]) — that Quebec nationalism

was recast, shifting from a defensive conception of a way of life and culture outside the mainstream of North American life to a combative engagement with the mainstream and the demand for a better, less dependent, place within it. Rather than asserting that dependency is most importantly located and reproduced in the sphere of culture, as the most recent wave of anglophone dependency theorists have argued, the new wave of Québécois dependency theorists argue that Quebec's historical emphasis on the cultural has been mistaken and damaging.

The shift moved in the reverse direction to that in anglophone dependency theory (where Panitch’s writings of 1977 and 1981 mark a transition from a socio-economic to a cultural model of dependency). Moniére (1981) argues rather that the culturalist element in Quebec’s nationalism has been overemphasized: Perception of the Quebec question has been distorted by the ruling

182 Culture, Communication, and National Identity ideology and those who preach it. They take advantage of the absence of complete data and project their prejudices and simplistic explanations of Québécois political behaviour. This pretence is harmful to both Quebec and Canada, for it stands in the way of a mutually advantageous settlement of the constitutional crisis. As they persistently refuse to change the power structure and as persistently relegate francophone identity to one of culture, the Canadian political elites are acting against the best interests of the English-Canadian as well as the Québécois people. (p. vii)

Consciousness of the shift from an agricultural to an industrial economy lagged behind the change in reality. The traditional ethnic division of labour among élites in Quebec since 1760 was English predominance in the capitalist economy, finance, and business, and French predominance in the tertiary sectors of law, religion, education, and administration. But the conditions for this division of labour were

constantly changing and, as the twentieth century continued, came under increasing pressure. Moniére tracks occupational change in Quebec (pp. 178, 230) as follows: Manpower employed in Quebec by sector (percentages)

1901 1911 192] 1931 194] 1961 Primary 48.32 46.51 42.36 38.28 26.5 11.4 Secondary 295.20 22.67 21.77 21.42 35.0 34.5 Tertiary 26.48 30.75 35.86 40.30 38.4 51.1 There is a constant tendency for primary-sector employment to decline (rapidly after 1931) and for tertiary-sector employment to rise — always remaining above secondary-sector employment and, in 1931, rising above that of the primary sector. The Quebec profile, then,

roughly fits that of Canada as a whole - relatively underdeveloped manufacturing — and was perceived similarly by Québécois nationalists: In 1961 42% of manufacturing was foreign owned. Only 15% of the surplus value in the manufacturing sector was generated by FrenchCanadian businesses. Foreign concerns, chiefly American, were dominant in the key sectors with 59% of iron and steel, 77% of chemicals and pharmaceuticals, 72% of precision instruments, 65% of machinery, 80% of transportation equipment and 100% of oil and petroleum. In other industries foreigners owned 68% of tobacco, 55% of rubber

Dependency Theory and Television in Canada 183 and 85% of non-ferrous metals. As for the French Canadians, they were to be found in the traditional industries. The only one they dominated was wood,where they held 86%; they had 49% of the leather business and 39% of furniture. (Moniére 1981, 229)

The Quebec economy’s transformation in the 1960s and 1970s accelerated. However, the continental tendencies for power, wealth, and employment to move westward were amplified by the flight of the leading anglophone financial institutions from Montreal after the pq victory in 1976. Transnational and trans-Canadian manufacturers and

other businesses tended to do the same. In telecommunications

manufacturing, a sector employing more people in Quebec in 1980 than Hydro-Québec (itself one of the largest industrial groups in Canada), employment declined — in Northern Telecom, from 14,000 to 6,400 in a decade. Moreover the quality of products and work in Quebec relative to Ontario declined: ‘Au cours des années 60, le Québec abritait la majorité des activitiés de fabrication de Northern Telecom Limitée. Cinquantesix pour cent de tous les employés de la compagnie y travaillaient en 1970. Aujourd’hui ils sont a peine 20% dont plus de la moitié s’affairent a des produits dont la technologie n’est pas toujours de pointe’ (Québec 1983, 61).

The Quiet Revolution and the victory of the Parti Québécois augmented

employment in the tertiary sector (delivering substantial benefits to francophone intellectuals and white-collar workers who were major component of the pg’s power base). The creation of Hydro-Québec in 1944 and, even more important, the nationalization of electricity generation in 1962 by René Lévesque, while minister of natural resources in a Liberal government (the 1962 Quebec election was effectively a referendum on economic nationalism fought under the slogan ‘Maitres chez nous’), created massive opportunities for francophone administrators. The expansion of higher education — in particular the multi-campus Université du Québec — the cEGEPs, socialization of

medicine, and the resurrection of Radio Québec similarly opened careers to a substantial sector of the francophone population. However, the movement west of manufacturing and finance removed much of the province's revenue base; its spending policies to create a public-sector

infrastructure lowered the province's credit-worthiness and raised its cost of borrowing. Quebec responded by raising taxes — thus accelerating migration out of the province — and savagely fighting a series of strikes by public-sector employees on whom wage cuts were imposed.

184 Culture, Communication, and National Identity The material benefits of the Quiet Revolution were principally enjoyed by the francophone bourgeoisie employed in the tertiary sector — the absence of comparable benefits to primary- and secondarysector workers and the loss of support of many public-sector workers as a consequence of the high cost of money to the province and consequential squeezing of public-sector salaries made the Pq and its ‘independentist’ stance politically very vulnerable. The Pq’s loss of the sovereigntyassociation referendum in 1980 and the 1985 provincial election mark the

political consequences of this trajectory. If Moniére is correct in identifying the economy as the decisive element in the Québécois formation and the modality through which the province and the Québécois experience dependency, then rejection of the program of the PQ can be seen as a rational response to the party’s policies by voters. Nationalism, as Dominique Clift said (1982, vii), is sometimes inimical to Quebec’s interest. The statist solution seized on with such enthusiasm and confidence by nationalists, e.g., by Valliéres — ‘The struggle for freedom begun in 1960 by a handful of Québécois has now, to the amazement of English Canada and the United States, taken hold of the best political tool of all—a state’ (1977, 14) — failed to improve the relative

position of the Quebec economy vis-a-vis that of English Canada or the United States. Indeed the rq’s cultural policies, particularly the Charter of the French Language, or Bill 101 (1977) as it is more often called, have significantly weakened some of Quebec’s principal comparative economic advantages. There is no question that the combination (though a conjunction marked by bitter and intransigent enmity between federal

and provincial politicians) of Trudeau and the policies of ‘Pouvoir Frangais’ and the ‘francisization’ practised by the Parti Québécois has enormously improved the status, self-confidence, and power of francophones in Canada. But Quebec has paid a high price for these benefits; the costs have been borne mostly by the city of Montreal, the interests and traditions (though numbering about a quarter of the population of the province) of which are far from being those of the rest of the province and the core areas of PQ support on the Saguenay and around Lac St-Jean.

Montreal has about half its population with knowledge of English and

French and rather fewer than half the working population use both languages in and at work (Arnopoulos and Clift 1984, 233). Yet the policies represented by the Charter of the French Language have made it

difficult for Montreal to capitalize on the advantages its polyglot and multicultural composition might bring.

There are, then, points of contact, but also differences in the

Dependency Theory and Television in Canada 185 perception of dependency in English and French Canada — in particular in the role attributed to culture and communications in each community. In Quebec the most obvious level of dependency and subordination

was the political, Quebec’s integration into a Canada dominated by anglophones, and then the economic, where, as Cook states, ‘class lines and national lines tended to coincide’ (1966, 11). The cultural sphere remained almost exclusively the property of the Québécois, or rather the powerful group within Québécois society who had reached an accom-

modation with the dominant anglophones whereby Quebec would remain a coherent, but traditional society within a political and economic order dominated by anglophones. The coherence of Quebec society was a defensive coherence as a result

of a way of life centred on spheres that the English were largely uninterested in challenging — small-scale agriculture, the Roman Catholic church, and French law and culture. The industrialization of Quebec, the development of financial services in Montreal, and the launching of the railway empires were largely (though not wholly) the initiatives of

the anglophones. And during the crucial period of the mid-twentieth century Quebec was governed by Duplessis’s Union Nationale government, which cultivated its rural and traditional political base while permitting control of much of Quebec’s resources and manufacturing sector to pass into anglophone hands. This process, of course, antedated Duplessis (whose periods of office as prime minister of Quebec ran from 1936 to 1939 and 1944 to 1959). In the 1920s Groulx’s Action Francaise expressed concern about the growth in u.s. investment in Quebec. But the Union Nationale period was, to cite Cook (1966) again,

one where the ‘government’s public philosophy was a nineteenthcentury capitalist’s dream: foreign capital was invited to a province with

enormous natural resources, stable government, low taxes, cheap and largely unorganised labour’ (p.11). Quebec intellectual life was dominated by the church, which enjoined acceptance of the status quo and maintenance of the modus vivendi it had achieved with the dominant anglophone power. Many Québécois testify to the suffocation of cultural and intellectual life of this long moment (Raboy 1984; Valliéres 1971). Valliéres’s Négres blancs d’Amérique: Autobiographie précoce d’un terroriste Québécois (Montreal 1968; translated and published in 1971 as White

Niggers of America) was written while Valliéres was in an American prison. He was incarcerated on behalf of the Canadian government and, in circumstances of dubious legality, was extradited to Canada and tried

186 Culture, Communication, and National Identity for murder. The alleged murder was that of a worker at a shoe factory who been killed by a bomb placed during the aftermath of a strike. Valliéres was convicted, but he successfully appealed, was retried, and was found guilty of involuntary homicide; he was released after serving a few months of his two-and-a-half-year sentence. Shortly after release he (and numerous other separatists and political activists) was imprisoned under the War Measures Act invoked during the October Crisis of 1970, which was occasioned by the kidnap and murder of Pierre Laporte,

the minister of labour and immigration of Quebec, and the kidnap of James Cross, the British trade commissioner. The bombings that provoked Valliéres’s arrest and the kidnapping and murder were generally believed to have been performed by the FLQ, the Front de Libération du Québec, of which Valli¢res had been a prominent member. For Valliéres, the history of Quebec was one of the subordination and expropriation of the producers in a system of exploitation and unequal exchange. ‘Quebec, which is theirs, this country where they have always been the overwhelming majority of citizens and producers of the national wealth yet where they have never enjoyed the economic power and the political and social freedom to which their numbers and labour entitle them’ (1971, 17). In his testament, he describes the experience of his father, of continual immiseration, exhausting and unhealthy work, bad housing, political corruption, and suffocation of rebellious impulses. His own political development was spurred by the greater insecurity, fear, and habits of subordination of his mother. Valliéres’s evocation of working-class life in Montreal is extremely powerful and moving — it concretely exemplifies the lived experience of masses of Canadians. From this personal experience, Valliéres develops a political analysis that rejects the formal political procedures of Canadian electoral democracy (characterizing the provincial state as ‘a licensed instrument

of domination and betrayal’ [1971, 89]) and the accumulated cultural baggage of the Québécois past: For along time our watchword was ‘the past is our master’ and we idealized the bygone days when Catholicism, total resignation and misery for all formed the basis of our unanimity and guaranteed both our survival and our isolation. Today we must take for a watchword ‘our master is the future’ and going straight to the point affirm our presence in the world through independence and socialism, through revolution and the building of a society run by the workers for the workers, a society without exploiters or parasites, without colonialists or puppet rulers. (p. 201)

Dependency Theory and Television in Canada 187 To achieve this emancipation, the dependency of the Quebec economy on the United States has to be ended. Valliéres’s analysis exemplifies

the characteristic impulse towards economic autarky of Canadian dependency theorists, proceeding from a notion of Quebec as dependent and caught in trade relationships of unequal exchange with a dominant metropole and the view that trade is a zero-sum activity in which the gain of one party means a loss for another party. In one of the finest sections of White Niggers of America Valliéres recounts

his family’s move from Montreal Est to Longueil when he was age seven or eight. He describes the man from whom his father bought the house

that was to become the family home in Longueil as having ‘the broad toothy smile of a vegetable dealer who is about to cheat you’ (p. 93). He develops from that memory of a seven-year-old a theory of comprehensive

distrust for trade, and constitutes trade as a paradigm of economic activity. Unless, the implication is, the Québécois can be completely ‘maitres chez soi,’ completely in control of economic activity in Quebec and reliant on no extra-territorial relationships, then they will continue in the ‘tense snarling state of dependency to which we Québécois have become accustomed’ (p. 199). For the Valliéres of White Niggers, the instru-

ment of change was armed revolutionary force. By 1971, his political perspective had changed sufficiently for him to support the Parti Québécois as a necessary stage in the development of the popular unity that he saw as the pre-condition of political emancipation and popular power. The Parti Québécois achieved power in 1976. It was re-elected in 1981

in spite of having lost the sovereignty-association referendum, but its defeat in 1985 demonstrated that it has not been able to maintain consent for its policies from the intellectuals and administrators whom they have principally benefited or form the majority of Quebeckers. Nor was the PQ

able to reverse the continental trends towards the decline of eastern North America relative to the west. Its attempts to strengthen Quebec’s manufacturing sector did not enjoy great success. The Sidbec débacle is

perhaps the best example. Quebec tried, by establishing a provincial steel company, both to develop ‘forward linking’ from the resource base of the Canadian Shield’s iron ore and to retain more of the potential for added value represented by these resources in the province. By offering competition to the Great Lakes-based steel producers in Ontario and the

United States, Quebec hoped to lower the price of steel and thus stimulate manufacturing and construction within the province. The initiative was attended with the same lack of success as the prairie provinces’ unsuccessful attempts to ‘forward link’ and develop manufacturing (as described by Richards and Pratt 1979).

188 Culture, Communication, and National Identity The version of dependency elaborated in Quebec is then interestingly different from that developed by anglophone Canadians. The Québé-

cois begin from an experience in which their history was one of substantial autonomy in culture — and for long periods, in significant areas of economic life — but of political subordination. English Canada

has enjoyed political sovereignty (though one of the foci of the alienation of the western provinces has been central Canadian dominance in the federal government) and has located its dependency in the economic and cultural spheres. These differences in formation have led the intellectuals of Canada’s two language communities to approach television, and other instances of mass culture, differently. To be sure, Québécois intellectuals display the same North American snootiness towards mass culture as do their equivalents in Ontario and the United States, but Quebec has a stratum of intellectuals, virtually absent in English Canada, who do not disdain television. Their presence, and the

difference in their attitude towards mass culture (explored in the following chapter), are related to the different configuration of relation-

ships in francophone and anglophone Canada between polity and culture (and the difference in relative strengths in the national content of culture and political institutions). Panitch (1977) refers to the separation of nation and state in Canada and to the distinction between popular sentiment and official culture: ‘The nation and the state were not coterminous concepts in Canadian discourse. The concept of cultural nationality and the concept of political

or state sovereignty were distinct and analytically separate. The Canadian national state thus lacked one of the most powerful reinforcements known to the modern state — national sentiment and collective cultural identity. What weakened the Canadian state yet further was the fatal trap that every attempt to grasp such a collective definition only

drove the internal divisions yet deeper’ (pp 48-9). The internal divisions to which he chiefly refers are those between Canada’s two language communities. Monieére, too, refers to the distinction between the popular and the élite and the role of élites in misrecognizing the Canadian situation and the interests of Canadians: ‘Canadian political elites are acting against the best interests of the English Canadian as well as the Québécois people’ (1981, vii). Though Panitch and Moniére are concerned with politics rather than with culture, the division they identify between the popular and official

is pertinent to the cultural as well as to the political sphere. In both national communities in Canada the popular is perceived as a problem-

Dependency Theory and Television in Canada 189 atic divergence from the official as, in Porter's terms, ‘intellectuals project the image of their own class onto the social classes above and below them’ (1965, 6). Elites in Canada and Quebec share concern about

a ‘continental’ mass culture but the differences in their formation, crucially the degree of confidence each community has in its identity or culture, have significantly differentiated the responses to television of anglophone and francophone élites and the effect on television of élite opinion. I turn next to the related questions of the role of intellectuals and the behaviour and attitudes of Canadian television audiences ~ the screen on which intellectuals project their images of television.

The Intellectuals, Television, and the Two Solitudes

English-Canadian cinematographic production has absolutely nothing to do with those of French-Canadian/Québécois production. And yet in a fundamental political text the Minister of Communications realizes an extraordinary amalgam that simply does not exist when he talks of ‘Canadian film.’ (Godbout 1984, 21) A written review of academic studies dealing with Canadian television critics would result in ‘the shortest book ever written.’ (Surlin 1985, 80)

In 1945 Hugh MacLennan’s novel Two Solitudes was published; its title has become a standard metaphor for the relations of English and French Canada. Canada’s two language communities respond to television in striking-

ly different ways. Francophone viewers watch more Canadian programs than do anglophones, and French Canada has better television theory and criticism than does English Canada; for a significant stratum of its intellectuals take television, and popular taste, seriously. But there

are also important similarities in the two communities’, and their respective intellectuals’, responses to television. English and French Canadians share a perception of their societies as ‘dependent’ and of culture as a locus where national subordination is located, or threatened. This belief has produced a similar hostility to popular taste and mass-culture in both Canadas, which fits comfortably with the dislike of television found in many North American intellectuals (in the United

The Intellectuals, Television, and the Two Solitudes 191 States as well as in the two Canadas). For in both English and French

Canada mass-culture and popular taste is to a significant extent ‘continental.’ In contrast, the national intelligentsia of each Canadian society (with important exceptions in French Canada) strives to perform the stratum’s classical role of national leadership and national selfdefinition. For the intelligentsia to fulfil its destiny it must first reform the mass culture of its fellow nationals.

Gella (citing Seton-Watson) defines the intelligentsia as a nonpropertied intellectual élite committed to a nationalist project: ‘In Western societies the word [intelligentsia] is used mainly to denote a small inner elite or self styled elite of writers and cultural dignitaries’ (1976, 11). It is ‘a characteristic stratum whose members fundamental social role was to lead the nation to its destiny’ (p. 14). In both English and French Canada, intellectuals (though Gella and others distinguish between ‘intellectuals’ and ‘intelligentsia,’ I shall use

the terms synonymously) defend national culture and institutions against outsiders. Both communities identify the United States as a principal threatening outsider but many French-Canadian (and some English-Canadian) nationalists perceive the chief threat to their nation

and national culture to come from Canadians of the other language community. Susan Crean, in her provocative book Who’s Afraid of Canadian Culture?, makes a representative nationalist statement: The contradictory nature of whatever might be called our identity: bookstores, newsstands and movie houses where ‘Canadian’ is a foreign word; Hockey Night in Canada with Boston playing Philadelphia in the us; theatre directors and conductors who have to be coaxed to perform Canadian works which they judge for the most part to be immature or second rate; art galleries built to display imported art; university faculties where Americans outnumber Canadians - in short an entire culture and fine arts establishment dedicated to the worship and imitation of other people’s culture. (1976, 8)

In Quebec (as in English Canada), culture is seen as an arena of struggle in which collective identity is threatened by the pressures of assimilation. In Quebec (but not in English Canada — in spite of the efforts of Lieutenant-CommanderJ.V. Andrew car Ret’d: see, inter alia, Andrew 1979), language is a crucial bastion in the struggle for national identity — a bastion that is besieged but, as yet, untaken by the hostile anglophone forces.

192 Culture, Communication, and National Identity The 1978 White Paper on Cultural Development in Quebec defines for

Quebec a policy and program of sustaining ‘a distinct identity, or survival, of a specific patrimony, of a determination to preserve a language and certain values, of a country to be built, of great spaces to be

conquered, of dignity and pride, of devotion to the land’ (cited in Lévesque 1978, 180). The White Paper asserts that the cultural development of Quebec must be organized around the ‘focal point’ of the French language. As the White Paper states, ‘a language is not simply syntax or a string of words. It is an expression of the more meaningful aspects of community life’ (Lévesque 1978, 181). Lévesque identified the cultural industries as a key sphere of activity for the Quebec state and required ‘ownership of this sector to be well and truly rooted in Quebec with very clear rules of play’ (p. 48). Though language has undoubtedly been very important in maintaining Quebec as a ‘distinct society,’ language is not sufficient to maintain

the coherence and identity of a community. The fate of the North American francophones who were geographically separated from the ‘critical mass’ of Quebec, whether in Louisiana or Alberta, testifies to the

vulnerability of small communities distinguished by language from those surrounding them who speak a different tongue. Many in Quebec fear that modern communication technologies, particularly television, threaten the continued existence of their community, and thus francophone society in North America. They argue (and their fears are shared by many in metropolitan France who believe the world francophone community is vulnerable to the pressures of English) that Quebec’s anticipated fate is representative, and that larger and larger distinct societies will be threatened with loss of identity and assimilation as the ‘mass’ embraced by mass communication expands with technical change; as the mass embraced by modern communication media becomes larger and larger, so the critical mass required for a community’s linguistic and cultural survival also increases. The intelligentsia’s defensive assertion of Quebec’s authentic culture

necessarily involves an attack on popular taste, constituting the consumers of mass culture as passive victims, anathematizing the novel cultural syntheses engendered by the interaction between the traditional and the new, and identifying the market economy as the solvent of tradition: There has been an effort in recent years to resurrect the fete in Quebec. Over 160 popular festivals take place each year in municipalities of

The Intellectuals, Television, and the Two Solitudes 193 varying sizes. In many instances these celebrations are devoid of all inspiration and bereft of all meaning thanks to the overwhelming presence of commercial sponsors. Can a festival be called a community event when the participants are in fact merely spectators and consumers? Rather than turning to our own cultural resources for inspiration for our festivals and their rites, we tend to import customs and styles which have nothing to do with the past or present style of life in Quebec. Take for instance the proliferation of ‘Western’ and Bavarian festivals. What better illustration of our cultural disintegration? (Quebec 1978, 175)

To be sure the cultural development White Paper (from which this

quotation comes) points to positive appropriations of non-native Québécois cultural practices (e.g., in domestic architecture) and cautions against fetishization of the past and espousal of folklorism. But the

White Paper’s dominant motif is cultural conservatism, stressing the

necessity for cultural development from within and the need for resistance to forces from outside the Quebec francophone community. Language, though an important marker of the boundaries between

communities, is not the only one and - as the fate of francophones outside Quebec and adjacent locations suggests -— is not always sufficient to maintain communities’ identity and distinctiveness. Nor is

it always necessary to differentiate national communities from each other. The Republic of Ireland and the United Kingdom share a common

language, as does the ‘Arab world,’ and Chile, Argentina, Ecuador, Mexico, and the rest of the South American continent (Brazil excepted).

There are, patently, links between these communities that language forges (and that, in turn, foster others) but, though sharing common languages, the above-mentioned societies are separate and distinct from each other. Language, though potentially of enormous importance, is

only one of an ensemble of elements out of which communities and nations are defined. Language is neither necessary nor sufficient to establish or maintain a distinct society. The factor of language completely explains neither Quebec’s existence as a nation nor the precariousness of English-Canadian identity.

Television and the Intellectuals in Quebec Quebec, even after its transition from an agricultural and rural society to

an urban manufacturing and service economy, retained its sense of

194 Culture, Communication, and National Identity historical difference from other North American societies and an autonomy in its cultural (in the broadest sense) life and institutions. Its political, legal, and religious systems remained its own and, like other francophone communities in Canada, it experienced very little immigra-

tion. It was English Canada that became, as Porter states, a vast ‘demographic railway station’ (1965, 33). The resultant of these forces was a stronger sense of community identity in Quebec than in English

Canada. The involution of Quebec society after the conquest, its retention of its language, legal system, and religion, and the institutions that flowed from them, created an authentic national community bound

together in a communitarian shared culture based on spheres that the English were largely uninterested in penetrating or challenging. This social dynamic constituted the Québécois as an ‘ethnic class.’ Dofny and

Rioux refer to French Canadians as ‘a recognizable ethnic minority which plays the same role within Canada, regarded in its turn as a total society, as a social class plays within a total society’ (1964, 309).

The historical formation of francophone Canada, 80 per cent of the ruling class returning to France after ‘La Cession,’ and the development

of Quebec as a community rooted in the ‘petit peuple,’ affirming a distinctive collectivist ethos, go far to explain the interest of contempo-

rary Quebec intellectuals in popular entertainment and the cultural codes of everyday life. For some this is manifested in a vigorous defensive battle for preservation of the Quebec patrimony (one of the actions of the Parti Québécois government was establishment of shops to sell Québécois craft goods; for an account of the PqQ’s cultural policy,

see Handler 1988). Others eschew folklorism and manifest a powerful curiosity about contemporary mass culture (a culture in which intellectuals are as immersed as are the masses). Quebec identity, the formation of the intellectuals themselves, inhered in the activities and the patterns

of life of a national group subordinated to the English hegemony in Canada. For the Québécois there is less of the correspondence between cultural and social stratification characteristic of anglophone and big Western European societies. Rather culture, as it has been for the small nations of Europe, such as Czechoslovakia, Poland, Bulgaria, Denmark, and Sweden, isa common, relatively unstratified integrating experience. To be sure there are classes and social hierarchies in Quebec, and the culture of the island of Montreal is different from that of the Saguenay,

but relative to anglophone Canada, Quebec is a national community sharing a common culture. However, for many Québécois, the coherence of their society was an

The Intellectuals, Television, and the Two Solitudes 195 oppressive one and the long moment of Duplessisism that preceded the Quiet Revolution was known as ‘La Grande Noirceur.’ The mass media

played an important role in ‘The Quiet Revolution,’ the opening of Quebec to the modern world: The editor of Le Devoir, Jean-Louis Roy, for one, believes that the basis for change was established in the preceding period, between 1945 and 1960, when a ‘new social knowledge’ came into being. That new knowledge, Roy says, set the stage for radical questioning of the foundations of traditional Quebec society. According to him, a critique of traditional society developed during this period, a critique later passed on to the social body as a whole. What is of special interest is the importance Roy attaches to the role of communications in this process: ‘New magazines were created, their very titles demonstrated the break-through that was occurring: Cité Libre (1950), Liberté (1959), La Revue Socialiste (1959). Quebec experienced a “quantitative explosion” of information in both the regional and national press at the time. Radio and the new medium of television were enthusiastically welcomed by the Québécois, and “using these powerful tools of communication, between 1945 and 1960 numerous social groups proposed projects for renewal and modernization to the community”.’ In other words, communication media played a key role in establishing a modern society — that is, an advanced capitalist one — in Quebec. (Raboy 1984, 21-2; citing J.-L. Roy, La marche des Québécois: Le temps

des ruptures, 1945-60 [Ottawa 1976])

Pre-eminent among the media in challenging ‘La Grande Noirceur’ was television: ‘La Télévision, c’est la voie royale en communication. Dans le concert des medias, la télévision tient une place a part ot, depuis 30 ans, elle est cette fenétre sur le monde exterieur et sur nétre propre monde

interieur. Elle fut peut-étre le veritable moteur de la Revolution tranquille, y préparant les mentalités’ (Québec 1983, 35). Through interviews and news reports, television promoted the views, critiques, and programs of the Parti Québécois and other separatist parties, raising the public profile of individuals (René Lévesque is the best example)

who built their political careers on the foundation of their status as television personalities. In contrast to the destructive influence on national identity customarily attributed to television in English Canada,

television is claimed to have realized for the Québécois a collective identity that had hitherto been denied them, that was either latent or

196 Culture, Communication, and National Identity actualized only through the Roman Catholic church. Desaulniers (1985,

116) states: ‘television enabled the people of Quebec to recognise themselves as a totality for the first time in their history.’ For Desaulniers, this actualization of a collective Québécois identity was performed primarily by commercial television. For him, the intimacy and familiari-

ty of the mode of address of Tva, the French commercial network (particularly that of its Montreal flagship station Télé-Métropole), its use

of joual, and its concentration on Quebec events were decisive. For example, during the 1984 papal visit to Canada, Télé-Métropole’s coverage was almost exclusively of the Pope’s activities east of the Ottawa River. In contrast Radio Canada reported extensively on the Pope’s contacts with the federal apparatus in Ottawa, his visit to Edmonton, and so on. Commercial television uniquely created for the audience a sense of being ‘chez soi.’ In so doing it conjured into existence a self-confident and assertive collective identity for the Québécois. Desaulniers’s emphasis on commercial television is heterodox; it is customary to attribute the key role in the national awakening out of ‘La Grande Noirceur’ to Radio Canada, to public television. But, for Desaulniers, the different mode of address of public and commercial

television meant that public television lacked the impact on the collective imagination (and the collective identity) possessed by the more demotic commercial network. In his La télévision en vrac (1982), Desaulniers characterizes the first stage in the history of television in Quebec as one where television was captured by an élite: ‘La conception de la télévision fut, jusqu’en 1959, l’‘apanage d’une nouvelle élite (André Laurendeau, René Lévesque etc) qui eut maille a partir avec les politiciens et le clergé, mais qui tenait, sur le modéle de la BBc, a faire émerger le Québec de son terroir et de ]’étroit régionalisme dans lequel on le confinait’ (p. 38). Only with the advent of commercial television (in 1961), drawing its mode of address, program forms, and often programming from American television, did television in Quebec find a popular accent to knit the mass audience together in an ‘imagined community’: “Telemétropole allait immédiatement s’opposer

a la production élitiste, attirer a elle les auditeurs peu sensibles a l’enrichissement culturel et offrir une programmation plus simple, plus ‘commerciale’ basée essentiellement sur le modéle américain. La jeune entreprise allait tres rapidement connaitre le succés, a l’instar de ses voisins du Sud’ (p. 39). Desaulniers (1985) argues that ‘M*A*S*H’ created a world collective identity for ‘M*A*S*H’ lovers, each of whom took on the surrogate

identity of their favourite character, whether Hotlips, Hawkeye, or

The Intellectuals, Television, and the Two Solitudes 197 Radar. So, he argues, television in Quebec actualized the Québécois identity that had hitherto been latent by giving the Québécois a locus for identification and thus participation in a community of the imagination. Television has had a very different impact on francophone and anglophone Canada. In Quebec, television has been perceived as an

agency of national integration and unity; in English Canada, it is regarded as the pre-eminent threat to national integrity. The two factors of a relative absence of cultural stratification in Quebec and the positive role played by the mass media in Quebec’s self-emancipation explain

the positive attitude towards television of a stratum of Québécois intellectuals. However, as Desaulniers’s argument suggests, television is nota unitary phenomenon that produces an effect independent of the content and characteristics of its programming. Rather programming characteristics are decisive: it was commercial television in Quebec with its demotic and popular programming that, Desaulniers argues, focused the collective identity of its containing society, not, what he calls, ‘la complaisance snob du Radio Canada’ (Desaulniers 1982, 58). Desaulniers’s emphasis on Télé-Métropole and the Tva network is

perhaps overstated; Radio Canada continues to attract substantial audiences for its programming (‘Lance et Compte’ is a good example but far from the only one) and in the early years of Canadian television both had an enormous impact on the popular imagination (as the example of Lemelin’s ‘La famille Plouffe’ demonstrates; see also Laurence 1982; Ross and Tardif 1975; and Ross 1976), and crystallized opposition to the

established political order, described by Raboy as ‘clerico-nationalist conservatism.” As Raboy (1985) states, ‘Radio-Canada’s public affairs television played a leading role in airing ideas which could be discussed nowhere else, save in a few tiny-circulation intellectual journals’ (p. 73). Godbout (1984), in the statement used to open this chapter, refers to

the differences between English- and French-Canadian cinema. The differences to which he refers are representative of Canada’s two cultural solitudes, and are no less pronounced in television than in film. How are the differences in the impact of television, the nature of the

program offer, and the role of television critics and theorists, the intellectuals, in Canada’s two language communities to be explained? Why do television audiences in Quebec watch so much more native television than do viewers in English Canada? Why does Quebec have a vigorous television criticism and a stratum of television critics (and broadcasters) who do not regard popular taste simply as an obstacle to the achievement of their vocation? How are these factors connected? To be sure Quebec has its cultural élites who echo their anglophone

198 Culture, Communication, and National Identity equivalents in constituting popular taste as a policy problem. The solitudes are not total! Andre Guérin, when president of Quebec’s Régie du Cinéma et de la Vidéo, referred to the problems of introducing Bill 109 (licensing exhibition and distribution of cinema films so as to serve

Quebec’s cultural development), as follows: ‘the Québécois viewing public is used to American movies; it likes American movies and would not readily accept that a law which aims to rectify an abnormal situation would deprive this public, even for a limited time of the films it likes to see. This is only one aspect which illustrates that it is not easy to draft these regulations’ (1985, 33). And, as Raboy reminds us, broadcasting in

Quebec has been strongly marked by élitism and top-down political agendas: “These projects, however, were essentially ways to promote the system by using the ideology of access to mass media and the expectations they create. The lack of popular control over the orientation and use of Radio-Québec was denounced by, among others, the Institut

canadien d’éducation des adultes (Ick): “One thing justifies RadioQuébec’s existence: it must be an instrument serving collectivities and controlled by them, so that television can play a true social role. Radio-Québec must do more than bring élite culture into people’s homes’”’(1984, 73). But though there are commonalities in the formation

of television and its relation to viewers in the two Canadas, there are important differences. In Quebec, unlike in English Canada, television has been perceived as an agency of progressive change, calling into existence the Quebec of the Quiet Revolution: a secular, modern, and self-confident society experiencing itself as ‘chez soi’ (David 1974, 1979; Desaulniers 1982; Desaulniers and Sohet 1982; Raboy 1984, 1985). And

in Quebec there is both a repertoire of popular national television programming and intellectuals who share popular taste and complete the circuits between viewers and broadcasters that in English Canada are largely interrupted.

Here it is appropriate to distinguish between Quebec and French Canada. Confidence in the national community, its identity and culture, and the positive role of television is characteristic of Quebec. For, with

the possible exception of the francophones in New Brunswick and Ontario living in contiguous areas to Quebec, francophones elsewhere in Canada — the protestations of Liberal ministers about St Boniface in

Winnipeg, St. Albert in Edmonton, and Coquitlam in Vancouver, notwithstanding — are, if not substantially assimilated, very embattled. And of course Quebec is not wholly populated by francophones; it has a large allophone community and a large and long-established communi-

The Intellectuals, Television, and the Two Solitudes 199 ty of anglophones. The anglophones in and around Montreal number about 500,c00 and make Montreal the seventh-largest English-speaking community in Canada. In consequence important Québécois groups believe the achievement of francophone television in serving and consolidating the national community to be, by no means, secure. Indeed, there are echoes of anglophobia among independentists: the Parti Québécois government noted as a problem ‘une augmentation significative de l’écoute de la télévision anglaise par les télé spectateurs de langue maternelle francaise’ (Québec 1983, 40). The 1978 A Cultural Development Policy for (Quebec identified ‘outsiders’ as the source of

Quebec's cultural problems, asserting, as do anglophone dependency theorists, the economic disadvantages of the insiders and their consequential cultural dependency. It is characteristic of a so-called economically underdeveloped society that its priorities are determined by outsiders according to their interests rather than the interests of the community in question. The most common result is incomplete, unorganized development, a state of servitude for the local population which works less for itself than for others, increasing alientation and often a progressive erosion of the vital ‘tonus’ of the group. If we allow for certain nuances, such a thing as a culturally underdeveloped society is conceivable; a community which does not control its own means of expression, does not have the power to stamp its own original character on the country and the objects with which it lives and is more or less obliged to absorb imported culture at the expense of its own which is thus elevated to the level of family or local folklore. (Quebec 1978, 50)

But the fall from power of the Pq and Lévesque testifies to a shift in values in Quebec towards a view that Quebec’s problems were not all

created by outsiders. The pq itself, and in particular its leader René Lévesque, were seen by representatives of the cultural élite (before the PQ’s fall and Lévesque’s resignation as leader in 1985) as reincarnations

of the Duplessis era, maintaining personal power through cynical manipulation and adaptation to the sentiment of the non-separatist majority. (See Le Devoir Culturel 24 Nov. 1984, 23, 32; Denys Arcand

made a number of films and television programs that explored this parallel, for example Québec: Duplessis et aprés [1972]; see Chapter 11 fora

discussion of his ‘Duplessis.’) The political consensus that produced the victory of the pq in 1976 has now vanished. Sovereignty-association was

200 Culture, Communication, and National Identity rejected by Quebeckers in the 1980 referendum (though in 1981 the ra was re-elected) and, in 1984, in order to purge the party of the hard-line nationalists he perceived as electoral liabilities (the ‘turkeys petitioning

for an early Christmas,’ as they were called), Lévesque shelved the independence option for Quebec, provoked the resignation of a number

of ministers, and incurred the public wrath of the élite minority who remain intransigently independentist. Christmas inevitably came with the decisive rejection of the PQ in the 1985 Quebec election. The event anticipated by Dominique Clift came to pass: ‘One characteristic shared by the divergent proposals for sovereignty-association and for the acceptance of liberal values is that their endorsement by a majority would have very little prospect of rallying the minority. In other words, the victory of either of these propositions would have profound divisive effects on Quebec society. It is as if Quebec feared for the internal cohesion which the Quiet Revolution had restored and consolidated’ (1982, 149). The anticipated shattering of cohesion happened: From all appearances, nationalism remains strong and it survives as the dominant ideology in Quebec. However as the gap between personal expectations and public attitudes becomes wider, its character becomes increasingly rhetorical and it is no longer able to give voice to the original dynamic impulses that made it into such a potent political force. Since the re-election of the Parti Québécois, nationalism is no longer an instrument of collective mobilization. It is now in the service of conformity and even of repression. (p. 151)

None the less, though no longer articulated in general assent to the program of the pq, francophone Quebeckers (and a little less than 20 per

cent of the population of Quebec do not have French as their mother tongue) continue to share acommon inheritance and sense of community. Though the ancient trinity of Québécois identity — la foi, la langue, la race — has been ruptured — Quebec is now a profoundly secular society —

the ethnic and linguistic integrity of francophone Quebeckers remains. Monieére characterizes the shift thus: The defensive, cultural nationalism of the French Canadians became positive, progressive and political. We defined ourselves now more as Québécois than as French Canadians. The recurring theme of ‘our religion, our language, our laws’ gave way to ‘our state, our language, our natural resources’. The state replaced the church as the main

The Intellectuals, Television, and the Two Solitudes 201 institution of the collectivity. The issue of the nation became an issue of political power. Quebec’s new nationalism placed supreme emphasis on the collective will to find a source of power, a device by which to control and decide its own destiny. (1981, 289)

Québécois scholars writing on television are differentiated from their

English-Canadian (and from most of their American) colleagues by writing from within a community sharing elements of its taste and habits

of life, comprehending the whole in a way unavailable to anglophone Canadian cultural élites whose identity, whose nationalism, because predicated on resistance to Americanization (particularly American television), is alienated from the ‘Continental’ elements in popular taste. Since much of the daily life and cultural consumption of anglophones in

Canada is Americanized, a gap opens between élites and masses that has not been nearly so wide among francophones. It is important to qualify the achievement of francophone television in situating French Canadians ‘chez soi’ by noting that the comfortable national home it offers those of the French ‘charter’ group is one that excludes others from the national family hearth. ‘If we were to believe the picture that is

presented by TvA and Radio Canada television news, Quebec society would be exclusively composed of the founding nation. To find himself reflected on the Tv screen, the immigrant must watch English news, as on the French side not a single reporter born outside the great white French family can be found’ (Godbout; cited in Caplan and Sauvageau 1986, 535).

Television in Bulk Jean-Pierre Desaulniers’s writings on television (and on other elements of the Québécois quotidien experience explored in Mine de rien [Desaulniers and Sohet 1982] — a Québécois version of Barthes’s Mythologies) exemplify francophone intellectuals’ engagement with television and the differences between their perspective and that of anglophones of whose work Wolfe (1985) is representative. In his La télévision en vrac

(1982), Desaulniers asks: What do people do with television? What gratifications does it offer? It poses these questions without either assuming that consumption of ‘M*A*S*H’ is the same in Abitibi as in

Guelph or Oshkosh or that popular taste has to be deplored and

reconstructed.

Desaulniers’s project in La télévision en vrac is to identify the totality of

202 Culture, Communication, and National Identity the impact of television, to examine the social forms and practices its mode of distribution and consumption prescribe and the mechanisms whereby it creates collectivities in its audiences. For Desaulniers the

conduct of television research begins with the question of what audiences get from television: ‘a quoi tient l’attachment des téléspectateurs pour la télévision? Quelles sont leurs attentes, leurs concessions et leurs satisfactions possibles?’ (1982, 183). The conception of the audience that informs La télévision en vrac is of relatively undifferentiated individuals seeking, and finding, gratifications. It conceives the audience not as victims, on whom television is inflicted (with resistance to the baleful influence of television determined by the factors of social and cultural stratification that differentiate the elements of the audience),

but as humans who find in television an agency whereby they can experience themselves as part of a community. Television does not simply socialize the audience (a formulation that implies a passivity in those socialized before the forces of socialization), but is the agency

through which viewers become part of a collectivity. Desaulniers appropriates Geertz’s characterization of religion —’Religion is a system of symbols which acts to establish powerful pervasive and long lasting moods and motivations in men by formulating conceptions of a general order of existence and clothing these conceptions with such an aura of

factuality that the moods and motivations seem uniquely realistic’ (Geertz 1973, 90; cited — in French — in Desaulniers 1982, 190) — to describe the operations of television: ‘la télévision correspond alors tout a fait a la définition de la religion telle qu’établie par Geertz’ (1982, 188). The equivalence Desaulniers makes between religion and television is important. As the citation from Geertz testifies, religion is a powerful force in the lives of men and women. But, as we know from experience,

religious affiliation and belief can coexist with secular authority and

attachments to secular values with which religion has no direct connection. For centuries the dominant political doctrine in Europe was ‘Cuius

regio, eius religio,’ affirming the identity of political authority and religious belief. It was assumed that societies were incoherent and unstable if the religion of the ruler was not that of the ruled. The Hanoverian succession saw Britain adopt a German ruler (who spoke no

English) in order to secure a Protestant monarch and thus make congruent political authority and national religion. Clearly the doctrine of ‘Cuius regio, eius religio’ is not yet dead. Though it is particularly actively promoted in Islamic states (and in Israel), a formal connection

The Intellectuals, Television, and the Two Solitudes 203 remains in many advanced democratic societies between church and state (not least in England). But successful establishment of the United States with a decoupled religion and polity demonstrated that neither a common religion nor a connection between church and state was necessary for stable political institutions and a peaceful and prosperous polity.

Instead of shared religion, shared culture (and, for my purposes, television) is now stipulated as the necessary social glue and condition of existence of a stable state. ‘Cuius regio, eius culturo’ is the central nationalist precept and modern equivalent of the antiquated doctrine of ‘Cuius regio, eius religio.’ However, just as modern societies demonstrate that citizens’ affiliations to non-national religions can comfortably be reconciled with both support for national political institutions and embrace of a national identity, so too can consumption of exogenous culture, of foreign television, be comfortably reconciled with refusal of

the political goals and national identity belonging to the exogenous culture. Desaulniers’s conception of the relations between the audience and

televised spectacle is very different from that of classical effects and audience studies: Desaulniers constitutes the audience as engaged actively in a relationship with televised spectacles and experiencing them in a relatively undifferentiated fashion. This model of the audience

testifies to his formation in the Quebec of the Quiet Revolution and experience of television as a motor of national self-consciousness and -confidence, creator of a national collectivity experiencing itself engaged in the political project of becoming ‘vraiment maitres chez soi,’ through the personalities — notably René Lévesque — constituted as stars by the medium that addressed Québécois on terms of intimacy and community. ‘Cette introduction toute simple “Mesdames, messieurs, bonsoir” ne répresente pas une formule de politesse, mais permet plutét de préciser

le champ social dans lequel le discours s’établit. On avertit ainsi les téléspectateurs qu’on s’adresse a eux collectivement, qu’on considére dabord le groupe avant l’individu’ (Desaulniers 1982, 95).

Desaulniers’s analysis of television output is not differentiated; indeed one of his chief arguments is that television creates an autonomous world in which ‘real’ differences are elided: ‘Qui est Hua? Qui est Sylvie Garant? Deux questions équivalentes’ (1982, 22). And that it similarly unifies (just as does religion) audiences: ‘Ce nouveau médium — synthése allait confondre totalement les anciens rapports culturels en réunissant pour la premiére fois les différentes clientéles segmentées

204 Culture, Communication, and National Identity par les autres médias ... Accessible 4 un public beaucoup plus vaste que

les autres medias, la télévision court-circuita les champs culturels et leurs valeurs différenciatives’ (p. 14). He attends to all programming (rather than a particular genre such as news, drama, or sport), taking as his unit of analysis in La télévision en vrac one of the ‘natural unities’ of

television output, the week. His commentary and exegesis are evenly distributed over a week’s output of the two major Quebec broadcasters, Radio Canada and Télé-Métropole. Where he differentiates between programs (e.g., between Télé-Métropole’s ‘Les tannants,’ which offers an ‘ésprit de famille,’ and ‘Winston McQuade recoit,’ the ‘meilleur produit actuel de la complaisance snob de Radio Canada’), it is to assert that certain programs offer points of entry for audience identification and gratification and others do not — not that the audience is stratified and different programs address different audience sections: ‘II est ainsi

possible de déduire que certains codes assurent une surveillance (contréle) de la communication et que d’autres en contrepartie laissent davantage de latitude a l’engagement personel du téléspectateur’ (p. 111).

My purpose here is not to describe exhaustively La télévision en vrac, still less to offer a critique, but rather to appropriate Desaulniers’s fine

study in support of my argument that there is a radically different perception of television among (some) Québécois intellectuals than exists in English Canada. A perception that both decouples culture from politics — the identities called into existence by culture can, like those of religion, run in different directions from those demanded by politics — and is part of a virtuous circle in which Québécois cultural producers,

television viewers, and intellectuals participate where the signalling between consumers and producers — mediated by intellectuals - is effective.

Television in Quebec is the object of serious intellectual enquiry. Québécois scholars approach popular consumption of television with attitudes formed within a relatively unstratified national cultural community; anglophone scholars, with a pervasive suspicion and hostility to the tastes and consumption patterns of the masses. In English Canada there are no equivalents to Desaulniers’s La télévision en vrac or Méar’s Recherches Québécoises sur la télévision (1980), and still less enquiries into

other forms of popular cultural production and consumption such as Desaulniers and Sohet’s Mine de rien (1982). In Quebec, intellectuals perform a crucial linkage between the production and consumption of television.

The Intellectuals, Television, and the Two Solitudes 205 Television and the Intellectuals in English Canada Television, perhaps more than any other cultural form, has an extremely attentuated feedback loop between producers and consumers. Ratings,

newspaper criticism, and unsolicited viewers’ letters and telephone calls are the only indicators of consumption and levels of satisfaction. Ratings — the most important indicator — are designed and produced to

sell the audience commodity and not to inform producers of audience preferences. Newspaper criticism and unsolicited viewers’ letters and telephone calls are the main qualitative indicators of consumption. But newspaper criticism of television is, in anglophone societies, a lowprestige activity generally performed by journalists who see Tv criticism as either a stepping-stone to better things or a step down in a declining career. TV critics in the English-language daily press rarely command the expertise that sports journalists require. Le Devoir, however, regularly carries long intelligent reviews and discussions of television. The role of ‘intellectuals’ — the opinion-formers and agenda-setters

who have access to the pages of newspapers and journals where qualitative feedback to cultural producers is defined — is particularly important in television. This minority, the inner élite, to whom Gella (1976) refers, with the role of leading the nation to its destiny, channel and define the feedback (the crude quantitative signals sent through

ratings, excepted) of consumers to producers. There are obvious objections to be made to this thesis; not least that it overestimates the role of a minority stratum — the intelligentsia. Though, if I overestimate intellectuals, [am not alone in doing so. Their role is widely regarded as

being a crucial one in determining the success or failure of nationalist

social movements. Smith, for example, states: ‘One factor ... does appear to be a necessary condition of all nationalist movements. It is the factor glanced at last — the role of the “intelligentsia”’ (1971, 87). If communication and the dissemination of ideas are not simple processes

in which messages originate from a transmitter and circulate freely among an undifferentiated mass of receivers but rather are complex processes in which the receivers are stratified and the role of opinionleaders important (see, inter alia, Katz and Lazarsfeld 1955), then the absence of a mediating stratum in the circuit of information flow from transmitters (broadcasters) to receivers (audiences) and back again may be determining. Comments by the former vice-president of the csc and general manager of English-Language Services, Peter Herrndorf (inter-

view by author 5 March 1985), lend some support to this thesis.

206 Culture, Communication, and National Identity Herrndorf sees the absence of an informed group of television critics and

commentators in English Canada as important and an obstacle to the building of support for new programming (see also Miller 1987). In spite of the widely established anglophone consensus that television is important to Canada’s national identity and existence there is very little English-Canadian analysis of its output. Anglophone writers affirm the importance of television — ‘Without doubt the csc is our single

most important cultural institution. It is our greatest producer of films and our strongest agency for creating a national consciousness’ (Harcourt 1977¢c, 32) — but most follow the latter part of Harcourt’s argument

(which condemns the csc for its ‘compromise,’ its inseparability ‘from the failure of the cultural policies of our various Liberal governments’) and his example by ignoring the cgc’s output. To the impressive volume of political-economic study of Canadian broadcasting, to the excellent historical work of Peers and Ellis, can be added no more than fragments

of analysis of programming and two book-length studies in English (Wolfe 1985; Miller 1987). Dorland offers some very creditable analyses

in Cinema Canada (e.g., 104: 15-16; 94: 35-6), Feldman in Cinetracts examines one of the early works in the ‘For the Record’ series, The Tar Sands (in Feldman 1984), and Beale (1984) discusses ‘Duplessis,’ but these are the exceptions which prove the rule. Jolts Morris Wolfe was, from 1973 to 1980, the Tv critic for Saturday Night (edited until 1987 by Robert Fulford, under whose control it became a leading journal of comment on cultural matters in English Canada). Jolts (Wolfe 1985) was written in order to examine ‘the differences between

English Canadian and American culture as one can perceive them simply by “looking at Tv’”’ (p. 10) and to address the agenda (as Wolfe rightly remarks, unconsidered by other writers) implied in the Fowler Commission’s statement “The only thing that really matters in broadcasting is programme content; all the rest is housekeeping’ (Fowler 1965, 3). Wolfe contrasts American television, distinguished by its high Jpm (jolts per minute) factor, with Canadian television, which he characterizes as ‘about reality — the grey world as we actually find it’ (p. 78). Unfortunately no evidence is offered to support this interesting general-

ization. Wolfe’s analysis shares the dominant view of the Canadian anglophone cultural establishment that — following Frye (1971) — the Canadian creative preoccupation is with the question ‘Where is here?’

The Intellectuals, Television, and the Two Solitudes 207 and that it is documentary that is distinctively Canadian. But this notion founders on the empirical rocks of u.s. television documentary (Wiseman, Drew/Leacock/Pennebaker, and so on) and the invention by NBc and Time-Life of ciné-vérité documentary as a distinctive new product

for U.s. television; also on the multitude of examples of low-Jrpm television produced in the United States (‘St Elsewhere,’ ‘Cagney and Lacey,’ ‘Cheers,’ ‘Nova,’ ‘Hill Street Blues,’ etc.). For Wolfe, consumption of high-jrm television is self-destructive: ‘A process, I suspect, is not unlike that which occurs when rats who've had electrodes implanted in the pleasure centres of their brains continue to stimulate themselves at the expense of doing their bodies harm’ (p. 119). He makes other silly and unsubstantiated statements about television consumption that, for him, engenders a ‘mindless passive appearance we often have when sitting in front of a television set’ (p. 118). Wolfe’s behaviourist assumption is that appearance is reality; but he is inconsistent in his behaviourism. Part of his critique of television is that it blocks intellectual development: ‘One doesn’t graduate from “Sesame Street” to reading Victorian novels’ (p. 18). (How does he know? And why is

Victorian-novel-reading — any or all of them - an index of cultural accomplishment?) But he does not reflect that the appearance of those reading Victorian novels, or of massed scholars in the reading-rooms of

the library of the University of Toronto or the British Library, is not unlike that of television viewers. Wolfe’s book has no pretensions to scholarship. He cites uncritically and glancingly Gerbner’s cultural-indicators research without considering the objections raised by, inter alia, Hirst and Wober. He erroneously refers to the sBc as the producer of ‘Coronation Street’ and contrasts the

csc’s children’s programming favourably with that of pss and, in particular, ‘Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood’ without acknowledging the origin of Rogers’s children’s shows on csc Radio. His program analyses are asserted in a few lines and his account of audience behaviour and the effects of programming are adequately represented by the behaviourist assertions cited above. But Jolts: The Tv Wasteland and the Canadian Oasis

was the sole book-length anglophone work that essayed analysis of programs and effects until publication of Miller’s (1987) historical evaluation of cBc drama. False or unsustainable though many of Wolfe’s assumptions are, they circulate promiscuously in English Canada’s nationalist rhetoric, which invokes statist nostrums and public-sector institutions to roll back the baleful continentalizing high-jpm tide. Wolfe cites Hardin’s (1974) A

208 Culture, Communication, and National Identity Nation Unaware to define Canada as a ‘public enterprise economy’ in which public-sector broadcasters are deemed inherently appropriate instruments for the Canadianization of the imagination of television viewers. There are obvious empirical objections to the public-enterprise thesis: not least, that Canada is overwhelmingly a capitalist privateenterprise economy. Hardin's (1985) recent Closed Circuits: The Sellout of Canadian Television, no more than Wolfe, delivers analysis of television

programming. But Hardin, writing from British Columbia, finds less than does Wolfe to applaud in Canada’s public-broadcasting culture, which he sees as a system of exclusion of the interests of the Canadian periphery as well as a bastion of the Canadian garrison resisting the tide of continentalizing barbarians (I discuss elsewhere Hardin’s critique of the crrc and regulation of Canadian broadcasting). Closed Circuits testifies to a weakened faith in the “public broadcasting culture’ of Canada, for which Hardin evangelized in 1974 in A Nation Unaware and Wolfe in 1985. Closed Circuits testifies to contradictions invisible to the Torontonian myopia of Wolfe. For Hardin the public-service broadcast-

ing vocation — service of the needs and interests of minorities, in particular those outside the magic circle of Toronto, Ottawa, and Montreal — is unrealized in Canada. But fine though Hardin’s bitter western account of eastern chicanery is, no more than Wolfe does he reflect on the conflict between the minoritarian public-service role of broadcasting and its majoritarian nationalist commitment.

Canada’s National Theatre

My comments on English-Canadian television criticism were first written before publication of Mary Jane Miller’s (1987) path-breaking Turn Up the Contrast (which refers to csc television drama as Canada’s

national theatre). Her book is marvellously refreshing, written by someone who obviously likes television, who recognizes the variety and

excellence of American television drama, who sees clearly enough to describe ‘The A Team’ as a ‘goofy’ comedy, and who can testify to the mythic stature of ‘M*A*S*H’ hero, Hawkeye!

Miller blazes the first trails through the woods of the history of ‘Canada’s national theatre’ assisted by the recognition that identity can be plural (and contradictory) and that to watch an imaginative fiction

does not necessarily produce a permanent rearrangement of the viewers’ synapses on the pattern of the authors of the fiction. Until her

book there was effectively nothing in English Canada to educate

The Intellectuals, Television, and the Two Solitudes 209 audiences and critics, place in historical context the programming they consume, and thus improve the quality of their response and of their feedback to producers. Turn Up the Contrast both falsifies and confirms my general arguments

about intellectuals and television in English Canada, falsifies them in

that English Canada has in Miller the author of an important and original book on television — its commentators on television are thus less

the prisoners of their intellectual inheritance than J have suggested — and confirms them in that Turn Up the Contrast supports a number of my basic contentions. Miller too argues that there is a crippling absence of

intelligent commentary on television programming by EnglishCanadian intellectuals. She sticks a telling barb between the ribs by observing in an end-note that The Oxford Companion to Canadian Literature

neglects television dramas, which it deems unworthy of attention. And

she is well aware of the difficulties made by an absence of critical feedback to producers: ‘to do the best possible work, our creative people

must recover a sense of their tradition. It is not good that our scriptwriters, directors, producers, designers, technicians work (with a few honourable exceptions) in a critical vacuum’ (pp. 16-17). Miller argues that the established cultural reflexes of élite opinion in English Canada are inimical to successful realization of the nationalist

vocation for television drama in Canada. Television producers are disadvantaged by the lack of educated response to their work which follows from English Canada’s deep-seated suspicion of mass culture, a suspicion that is North American and present in the United States and

Quebec as well as in English Canada, but is uniquely debilitating for English Canada because of the absence there of the forces that elsewhere

countervail North American high-cultural snootiness. She instances a plethora of examples of the csc’s disinclination to create television of mass appeal. The csc was late in adopting the cop-show format (p. 24), it has never had a soap opera (p. 119), it refused (in contrast to Radio Canada) to build Canadian stars (p. 28). She cites Eric Till’s judgment that ‘the reason why the csc did not try to create Canadian variations or imitations of the huge successes of Dragnet or Perry Mason in the 1950s or

even the critical success of the less formulaic Naked City (1958-63) and The Defenders (1961-65) in the 1960s was that the corporation basically distrusted popular genres and particularly those originating in America’ (p. 27).

The message of Miller’s history is that, though there have been outstanding achievements to the credit of Canada’s ‘national theatre,’

210 Culture, Communication, and National Identity not all its patrimony is positive. Established Canadian cultural traditions have to be abandoned if a Canadian television drama, connected to the imaginative experience of the mass of contemporary Canadians, is to thrive. Miller (1987) cites Robert Fulford’s (p. 375) argument that Canada has to destroy the documentary reflexes of its culture if it is to capture the imagination of a ‘national mass audience.’ Although the judgments that she makes in the course of her evaluative history are more nuanced

than are Fulford’s, Miller concurs that much in English Canada’s cultural baggage and mental set is ill fitted to successful creation of mass-audience television drama.

English Canada does not give television drama the right kind of attention. Miller states (p. 3) that ‘television drama in particular is rarely

taken seriously in Canada,’ which is not quite right, because policymakers do give drama a very high priority. Miller cites a fulsome hype by Flora MacDonald (when minister of communications) to the effect that ‘television, more than any other medium, provides a mirror for the society. And fiction and imaginative works can offer the truest reflection’ (p. 376). But from Miller’s point of view, and I concur, government’s attention to drama has not been the right kind of attention. Government's interest is in increasing the volume of television drama; it is a quantitative interest. It denies attention to programs as specific

cultural practices, and gives attention only to broad-brush policy initiatives and institutional politics. Such quantitative attention to television drama is of little use unless more, and better, qualitative attention is given to actual program output (and the assumptions that underpin programs). Here the solitudes approach each other. Like Miller, Jacques Godbout (a prominent Québécois film-maker, novelist, and intellectual) attacked the quantitative and instrumental emphasis of federal audio-visual policy, which, for him, addressed the cultural industries rather than culture: ‘One no longer speaks of literature or music, but of books or records; one no longer speaks of cinema and television, but of film and video, two industrial materials that have in themselves no cultural value. One no longer speaks of content, one speaks of plumbing’ (1984, 21).

Miller’s study does speak of television, of literature. Its author recognizes that both the commercial success of television dramas and satisfaction of the domestic television audience depend on the articula-

tion of complex cultural codes; that neither a successful national audio-visual industry nor a pervasive national audio-visual culture can

be created without a clear-eyed assessment of the nature of cultural

The Intellectuals, Television, and the Two Solitudes 211 tradition and the potentially fructifying impact of exogenous cultural flows; and that a continuous dialogue is required between the consumers and producers of the complex cultural forms that we know as television dramas. For signs are arbitrary; the attribution of meaning, the making of a significant relationship between sense and referent, is a social exchange between meaning-makers. In this relationship the producer and consumer (as they are conventionally called) both create

meaning through a social process of negotiation. That process is complex enough in the straightforward case of face-to-face dialogue

between native speakers of a natural language but in the case of television meaning making is a very highly mediated process. The social

structures through which these mediations are performed are different in Canada’s two language communities, and so, in consequence, there are different possibilities for creation of a national popular culture in each community. Herein lies the importance of Miller’s book, which clarifies the nature of the English-Canadian tradition and establishes

that core elements of it are not well fitted to achieving the goals prescribed for it.

Turn Up the Contrast maps, for the first time, the development of English-Canadian television drama and marks the first trails across a varied and unfamiliar landscape. Doubtless revisionists will follow Miller and reorientate her initial surveys but their task will be easier for

her work and their achievements, even when challenging her judgments, will owe much to her pioneering study. There is much in it to repay attention, to provoke thought, and to guide the reader along hitherto unblazed trails. But Miller, no more than most other writers on Tv drama, solves the problem of doing justice both to the immense output of even a small broadcaster (as the csc is in terms of international

comparisons) and to the complexity and aesthetic challenge of its individual productions. She offers a series of brief sketches and apercus on individual dramas — interesting and thought-provoking — but neither

detailed and extensive enough to do justice to the texts nor ruthless enough in generalization to offer a panorama of the csc’s output. Perhaps the least-worst solution to such dilemmas is the extensive discussion of a number of landmark dramas. Miller essays this in her ‘critic’s album of favourites,’ one of Turn Up the Contrast’s rich plurality of excursions into the forest of the cBc’s output. One vexing problem, to

which Miller offers no solution, is reconciliation of ‘elite’ judgments (such as those ventured by the well-informed and clear-headed author of Turn Up the Contrast) with the responses of the television audience.

212 Culture, Communication, and National Identity Miller registers the incompatibility between some of her likes and dislikes and those of the audience. She states, for example: ‘I find Danger Bay derivative and improbable. However the ratings and overseas sales for Danger Bay are good’ (p. 339). But she doesn’t attempt to define what in ‘Danger Bay’ stimulates contradictory evaluations or how discrepent

élite and popular responses are to be related to matched élite and popular responses (such as to ‘Anne of Green Gables’). There are analogous shifts in register between Miller’s ‘academic’ discourse (for instance, her useful content analysis of ‘Beachcombers’ based on 221 episodes of the series) and her enthusiast’s voice (regretting the writing out of the Molly character from ‘Beachcombers’). On balance, more is gained than lost through the author's pluralism; for cultural history is a discipline in a pre-scientific stage that calls on the skilled judgment of its practitioners rather than on a set of procedures that can be systematically and reliably (in the social-scientific sense, whereby a second analyst will achieve the same findings as the first, using the same data) applied.

Miller’s is by far the best book in English on Canadian television programming. Her analyses are informed by a sophisticated sense that viewers’ identities are not unitary and that it is quite possible for the viewer of ‘For the Record’ to enjoy “The A Team.’ Moreover she demonstrates how long-established (and how productive) the csc’s participation in international circuits of cultural exchange has been, instancing the trans-Atlantic flow of personnel between Canada and the United Kingdom, and the international repertoire from which the csc built its drama schedules. Important though the North Atlantic triangle was for the development of Tv drama in the United Kingdom, Canada, and the United States (and Miller’s book does much to document the contribution of the Canadian corner), there was a fundamental differ-

ence in the response of the United Kingdom and Canada to the third term in the relationship — to the United States. ‘American’ production methods and program forms were refused by Canada but adopted in Britain. Miller eloquently testifies to the detrimental effects of the csc’s refusal to adopt ‘American’ methods. Its appeal to popular taste was weakened, and the gap between Canadian television’s Canadian output and the Canadian audiences’ consumption of American programming widened. The csc’s refusal to develop a star system is probably the most important instance of the pervasive and damaging Canadian snootiness about popular entertainment but not the only one identified by Miller. The contrast between the signal contribution Sydney Newman made to television drama in the United Kingdom and his lack of impact in Canada after his return is another case in point.

The Intellectuals, Television, and the Two Solitudes 213 Turn Up the Contrast is thus an important step forward in knowledge

and understanding of Canada’s ‘national theatre’ and materially increases the possibility of English-Canadian television drama’s achieving

the relation between cultural consumers and producers that characterizes French-Canadian television. Culture versus Popular Taste English Canadians have not enjoyed the experience of either a shared and confident culture or television as an emancipatory influence, as have French Canadians. Rather, English Canada has fallen victim to the temptation defined and cautioned against in the Quebec White Paper on

cultural development - of ‘catering to “culture” and not to human beings’ (Lévesque 1978, 181). In his excellent book on the National Film Board (1981), David Jones

points to the tendency within the nrs to direct resources and grant esteem to the projects of the famous Unit B, which had ‘a sense of wholeness [that] was cautious, exclusive and élitist’ (p. 79). Jones reports the alienation experienced within the NrB by those outside the ‘inner circle’ (centred on Unit B) - among them, the French unit.

When Sydney Newman was film commissioner, he described the majority of NFB films as ‘stinking with probity’ and sought to make the

Film Board more ‘commercial,’ forcing it to regain contact with the

audience it had substantially lost. The probity anathematized by Newman was exemplified in Guy Coté’s (a member of the ‘outsider’ French unit) description of the NFs’s reification of Canada as fossilized by respectability: The concept of the ‘small town’ and its community pride is one long dear to our film programme. In Nrs films, the citizens of the community all buy the local newspaper (because it has editorials about civil liberties) and dutifully support the Town Council in its welfare work ... they are full of admiration for the suburban supermarket and will vote for the new recreational center at the next elections. They recognize the place of the Postman in their community and may even wave to him as he gaily goes down the street. (p. 91).

Unfortunately, Newman was unable to make much impact on the Film Board; the very experiences that enabled him to recognize the nature of the NFB’s problem and the need for a change of diction and reorientation to the tastes of Canadians had left him out of touch with Canada.

214 Culture, Communication, and National Identity Newman went to England in the 1950s in the wake of the success with British audiences of the thirty-five cBc-Tv dramas the ssc purchased in

order to claw back audiences that had overwhelmingly been lost to commercial television. In working successively for the commercial sector and for the spc, Newman virtually invented Tv drama in Britain.

He was able to draw on the positive elements of competition for audiences’ attention (that the advent of commercial television introduced) to initiate a television drama that was popular and rooted in the concerns and experiences of its audiences, and had a very high aesthetic value. It is essentially on Newman’s groundwork that contemporary British popular entertainment has been constructed, entertainment that has engaged acutely with the central issues of life in the contemporary United Kingdom such as ‘Out’ (Thames), ‘Harry’s Game’ (Yorkshire), ‘Driving Ambition’ (BBc) and ‘Edge of Darkness’ (BBc).

When interviewed in Cinema Canada (no. 15, 1974) Newman was given a very rough ride for his plebeian insistence that ‘the cost of art in our kind of society has to be in relation to the number of people whose imagination it will excite’ (p. 46) as well as his suggestion that Canadian films’ lack of success with the Canadian public was not wholly explicable by the economic advantages enjoyed by competing American products

but was also the result of lack of audience appeal of Canadian productions.

Innis on Communication The mental reflexes that closed off the space in Canada that Newman might have occupied are long established. The Massey Report in 1951 is

an early instance of Canadian concern about popular taste and television. However, in attitudes to television as to dependency, the work of Harold Innis has been of enormous influence in English Canada —though not among francophones, to whom Innis is little known (only Minerva’s Owl [1983] has been translated into French). A representative example of Innis’s appropriation is Crean’s remark: The United States and Canada have become each other's best and biggest trading partners, but the trade has never been equal, following the classic imperial pattern whereby the colony functions as a resource hinterland for the metropolis by exporting cheap raw materials and importing them again as expensive finished goods. Not much has changed since the days of the fur trade, and Harold Innis’s famous

The Intellectuals, Television, and the Two Solitudes 215 staples theory, published in the 30s, describes the present as aptly as it did the past. It was Innis’s argument that the staple-producing economy will never be transformed by industrialization but will remain a net exporter of resources and importer of manufactured goods, continuing to de-

| pend on borrowed capital and technology. He demonstrated in his exhaustive study of staple industries in Canadian history that the use made of resources, capital and labour has always been determined by absentee imperial powers — first France, then Britain and now the United States. It wasn’t long before Innis’ unconventional ideas were pushed aside (though his reputation as an important and original scholar survived) in the headlong rush of Canadian academics to embrace the tenets of American scholarship. (Crean and Rioux 1984, 30)

Crean’s view exemplifies a characteristic English Canada appropriation

of Innis to buttress long-established concerns about the influence of broadcasting on collective identity and popular taste and use of Innis to theorize Canada’s disadvantaged relation to the United States in the sphere of communication. Cooper (1982) similarly argues for Innis’s importance: ‘Among the least studied and most underrated thinkers of

our century ... Innis’s achievement is as the first comprehensive historian of communication technologies and institutions and [as] a pioneer who both questioned and expanded the borders of social science. No less than any other author of the 2oth century his work constitutes a significant context for the study of communications’ (p. 196). Not only is there an Innis College at the University of Toronto, but the commemorative plaque outside describes Innis fulsomely as ‘one of Canada’s great scholars’ whose work contains ‘a wealth of information

and theory that has significantly influenced the study of economics,

history, geography, politics and communications in Canada and beyond’ (and see also Christian [1985]; Gough [1985]; and Godfrey [1986]).

The two major categories through which Canada is understood as disadvantaged in its communications relationship with the United States come from Innis’s work. They are the notions of dependency and, as Innis says, ‘of empire as an indication of the efficiency of communica-

tion.” These concepts are the transhistorical categories that English Canadians have used to understand the development of their country, and Innis’s major economic historical studies on the cpr, the cod fishery, and the fur trade combine both concepts in their exegeses.

216 Culture, Communication, and National Identity Innis’s work has fed and sustained the ideas behind the central state broadcasting strategy of Canada — to assert a Canadian presence in the face of the dominance of American media — and Canadian anglophone

discourse on communications. But the inheritance of Innis has produced an interpretative paradigm in which anglophone communication scholars in Canada customarily give no critical attention to public-sector

cultural institutions, are united in their hostility to the commercial sector of Canada’s cultural industries (and particularly the cable industry and commercial broadcasters who are viewed as compradors tout court), and neglect study of audiences preferences, reception of television programs, and the reasons for Canadians consistently choosing to consume non-Canadian television. Canadians have been able to assume that dependency is an integrated transhistorical experience largely because Harold Innis integrated in his life’s writings analysis of primary, secondary, and tertiary dependency. This contingent connection in the work of one author of analysis of the effects of the fur staple on Canada, of the effects of the construction ofa physical communication infrastructure (the Canadian Pacific Railway), and of the production of a general theory of symbolic communications and their social power has led to a perception of continuity in Canadian dependency. Plus ¢a change, plus c’est la méme chose. The evident scholarship of Innis’s early work, notably The Fur Trade in

Canada, has lent credence to the extraordinary farrago of assertion and inaccuracy that passes as theory in his last works (handled very gingerly by his biographer Donald Creighton 1957, 1978), The Bias of Communication (1951) and Empire and Communication (1950). These works are now

sanctified icons in the post-modern Canadian nationalist pantheon of irrationalism. McLuhan (in his introduction to The Bias of Communication

[1977]) sanctifies Innis’s opaque late prose in terms of its affinity to

modernist poetry; Godfrey (1986) in his introduction to a recent illustrated edition of Empire and Communications celebrates Innis’s ‘cryptic style.’ Whitaker even suggests that Innis’s writings are in a cabbalistic code: ‘if he was typically cryptic it was because he had a secret message both to convey and to conceal’ (1983, 819-20).

Innis’s communication theory, the credence his work on the primary staples commands, and the consequential exclusive emphasis Canadian nationalists have placed on the agency of the state as defence against the dominant metropole have produced in the English-Canadian policy discourse a real blind spot — not that identified by Smythe (Smythe

1981a), but a blind spot that equates popular taste, the preferred

The Intellectuals, Television, and the Two Solitudes 217 consumption of American television by Canadians, with a kind of national serfdom and produces a remorseless hostility to both foreign influence and the popular imagination. (In francophone Canada, as I have suggested, a more nuanced account is required.) In The Bias of Communication (1951), Innis reads the development and

rise and fall of human societies in terms of their technologies — principally their communication technologies. A characteristic of Innis’s later writings (and his work directly addressing the question of symbolic communications is of this period) is his gnomic and lapidary style. The kernel text of Innis’s writings on communications — Minerva’s Owl — is studded with assertions: that ‘Western civilization has been profoundly influenced by communication and that marked changes in communica-

tions have had important implications’ (1951, 3); ‘successful imperial

organization came with the dominance of force represented by the Pharoah in Egypt though the Egyptian Empire depended on cuneiform

for its communications’ (p. 6); ‘Alexandria broke the link between science and philosophy. The library was an imperial instrument to offset the influence of Egyptian priesthood’ (p. 10); ‘Christianity exploited the

advantages of a new technique and the use of a new material. Parchment in the codex replaced papyrus in the roll. The parchment codex was more durable, more compact, and more easily consulted for

reference ... Christianity based on the book, the Old and New Testaments, absorbed or drove out other religions such as Mithraism and lent itself to co-operation with the state’ (p. 14); ‘the effect of the discovery of printing was evident in the savage religious wars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Application of power to communication industries hastened the consolidation of vernaculars, the rise of nationalism, revolution and new outbreaks of savagery in the twentieth century’ (p. 29); ‘mechanized communication divided reason and emotion and emphasized the latter’ (p. 30). The unifying element in these writings is an attempt to construct a unicausal technological-determinist account of human history. Innis’s is a materialist history in which technology determines both being and consciousness. In his account of ‘cultural development in the West’ in ‘Industrialism and Cultural Values’ (1951) Innis spills out a chain of connected

observations spanning an enormous geographical and temporal range originating from a single cause (though he covers his bases with the qualification ‘in part,’ no other forces are addressed in his argument). The success of organized force was dependent in part on technologi-

218 Culture, Communication, and National Identity cal advance, notably in early civilizations, in the use of the horse, the crossing of the light African horse with the heavier Asiatic horse, the introduction of horse riding and cavalry to replace horse driving and chariots and the use of iron as a substitute for bronze. The Hittites, with the use of iron, succeeded in building an empire with a capital which emphasized sculpture and architecture, but was checked on the south by Babylon and on the North and West by the Greeks with their control over the sea at Troy. They were followed by the Assyrians who exploited technological advance in warfare and made fresh contributions to its development. With a new capital at Nineveh, they succeeded in offsetting the prestige of the Nile and of Babylon and establishing an empire to include the civilizations of both. Prestige was secured, not only by architecture and sculpture, but also by writing. (1951, 134-5)

Statements are subject to challenge by either criticism of the quality of their argument or objection to their empirical content. But propositions of this degree of generality elude challenge through their very generality, their refusal to advance judgments specific enough to be tested, and their characteristically descriptive syntax that implies rather than states analytical propositions. Thus, Innis will state that ‘the Hittites with the use of iron succeeded in building an empire with a capital’ (1951, 134)

with the key element for his argument — ‘with the use of iron’ — introduced as an interesting fact about the Hittites rather than as a determinant of the course of their history, as would a formulation like ‘through the use of iron.’ Hence, the course of Innis’s arguments is hard

to follow or to test stage by stage; they slither through the text unarrested by the reader's interrogation and present themselves at the end for acceptance or rejection in toto. So comprehensive is Innis’s range of references that any single reader

will find it difficult to assess the quality of the evidence or the conclusions Innis draws from them. Empirical objections to more than

fragments of his propositions would require a lifetime of study embracing an eclectic set of topics ranging from the life of the beaver to ancient civilizations. But so wide-ranging are Innis’s references that, for most scholars, he will set foot briefly on territory about which they know

something. And when this happens, I more often vigorously dissent from Innis’s judgments than cede assent to his version of fields about which I know something. There is, in The Bias of Communication, a paragraph that runs:

The Intellectuals, Television, and the Two Solitudes 219 In England the absolutism of the Tudors involved suppression of printing but encouragement of the Renaissance and of the Reformation. Abolition of the monasteries and the disappearance of clerical celibacy was followed by sweeping educational reforms. The printing press became ‘a battering ram to bring abbeys and castles crashing to the

ground’. Freedom from the Salic law made it possible for women to | ascend the throne and encourage the literature of the court. Restrictions on printing facilitated an interest in the drama and the flowering of the oral tradition in the plays of Shakespeare. (1951, 54-5)

A number of key arguments here are, at best, misleading and, at worst, false. Printing was not suppressed by the Tudors — indeed by the end of the sixteenth century it was impossible to police effectively and a variety

of unauthorized tracts were in circulation. It’s hard to see how the ‘suppression of printing’ could coexist with the use (metaphorical, I assume) of the printing press as ‘a battering ram to bring abbeys and castles crashing to the ground.’ Court literature was not dependent on female royal patronage but thrived under the monarchs (Henry vii, Edward vi, James 1) who preceded and followed the Tudor queens. And itis highly misleading to regard Shakespeare’s plays as either representative of the Tudor drama or as drawing only on an oral tradition. Again in The Bias of Communication there are extraordinary statements

about nineteenth-century Germany and the interrelationship of printing, radio, the Treaty of Versailles, and European nationalism: ‘The great pioneers of intellectual life in Germany left a legacy of leadership assumed after 1832 by the state culminating in a deadening officialdom’ (p. 60). The Kultur Kampf, the Frankfurt Parliament, 1848, the creation of the Zollverein, and German unification? The Treaty of Versailles registered the divisive effects of the printing industry in its emphasis on self-determination. The monopoly of knowledge centering around the printing press brought to an end the obsession with space and the neglect of problems of continuity and time. The newspaper with a monopoly over time was limited in its power over space because of its regional character. Its monopoly was characterized by instability and crisis. The radio introduced a new phase in the history of western civilization by emphasisizing centralization and the necessity of a concern with continuity. The bias of communication in paper and the printing industry was destined to be

offset by the bias of the radio. (p. 60) |

220 Culture, Communication, and National Identity The treaty was selective in its application of the principle of selfdetermination, while the Austro-Hungarian Empire was broken up on broadly national self-determining lines (but with significant exceptions, as with the German-speaking populations in Italy and Czechoslovakia).

The occupation of the Rhineland, the creation of the boundaries between Poland and Russia, and Germany, France, and Belgium were not instances of self-determination. Nor, of course, was the parcelling out of the German and Turkish empires to the victorious allies done on the basis of self-determination. Second, Innis’s remarks about newspa-

pers and radio do not correspond to the differentiated European experience. Radio did not necessarily centralize (see the radio regime in

the Netherlands and the organization of the German network on a regional basis), nor are newspapers necessarily regional (vide the British press and the genesis of international newspapers such as the Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times). Similar absurd and ignorant generalizations permeate other essays in the The Bias of Communication collection. ‘A Plea for Time’ in Innis 1951 repeats the Treaty of Versailles canard (p. 80) and adds: ‘The rise of Hitler to power was facilitated by the use of the

loudspeaker and the radio. By the spoken language he could appeal to minority groups and minority nations. Germans in Czechoslovakia

could be reached by radio as could Germans in Austria. Political boundaries related to the demands of the printing industry disappeared with the new instrument of communication’ (p. 81). Hitler did not rise to power through the use of the ‘loudspeaker and the radio’ — the Nazis had no control over radio until after their ‘seizure of power.’ Their rise to power was based on popular discontent with the Weimar Republicand a successful combination of terror applied to opponents and rewards to

supporters. German printed works circulated readily outside the boundaries of Germany, and central-European national boundaries can never be described as ‘related to the demands of the printing industry,’ nor have they changed so substantially from their range (certainly a very fluid range) between Gutenberg and Marconi so as to justify Innis’s verb

‘disappeared.’ Can the Alps, the Oder Neisse line, the Elbe, and the Rhine really be regarded as boundaries related either to the demands of the printing industry or to radio? A Canadian, of all people, should

know that national boundaries do not correspond very often to linguistic or cultural boundaries or to the circulation areas of newspapers and broadcasts. In Empire and Communications (1950) Innis gives a characteristically discursive account of successive ‘civilizations’ or ‘empires’ — Egypt,

The Intellectuals, Television, and the Two Solitudes 221 Babylon, Greece, Rome — and the ebb and flow of power within post-medieval Europe and its empires. He proposes ‘using the concept of empire as an indication of the efficiency of communication. It will

reflect to an important extent the efficiency of particular media of communication and its possibilities in creating conditions favourable to creative thought’ (p. 11). While pages of Empire and Communications are full of interesting perceptions and ideas — for example, on the effects of ritual purification ~ Innis’s accounts of empires and their communications are neither systematic nor particularly well focused. Rather than examining the particular impact of communications systems, technologies, and practices on successive empires, Innis includes observations

on their communication systems in a discursive account of their agriculture, organization of political rule, legal and familial systems, and

military organizations. The impact of communications as such is not sufficiently differentiated from the effect of other factors for Innis to

argue, or do more than assert, that the structure and nature of communications have been any more decisive a force in the life of empires than any or all of a number of other factors. Thus his chapter on post-Roman Europe, titled ‘Parchment and Paper’ (in Innis 1950), while

describing the technologies of production and modes of use of paper and parchment, also treats the interaction between Islam and Christianity and the dissemination of Arab thought throughout Europe, and sketches a connection (not particularly originally) between the rise of religious dissent, intellectual life, and the book trade. In the final chapter ‘Paper and the Printing Press’ (In Innis 1950), Innis is simply engaging in an accumulation of (interesting) facts, any or all of which might or might

not be relevant, might or might not support his general propositions. Empire and Communications exemplifies Innis’s characteristic mode of

grand assertion of relationships and identifications of major causes yoked together with an enormous accumulation of facts, some of which,

shotgun fashion, hit the target and can be appropriated to support his argument, others being simply irrelevant to it. In Innis’s work the crucial

mediating stage of argument is missing; he does not link his magpie collection of fascinating facts with his major propositions, does not demonstrate to the reader the necessity of his conclusions when x, y, or z items of evidence are considered. Consequently there are, for the sympathetic reader, some attractive and engaging conclusions and a mass of information, some of which (if only because of the quantity and

heterogeneity) can be grabbed to support the conclusions. For a sceptical reader, Innis offers only a set of take-it-or-leave-it dogmas, the

222 Culture, Communication, and National Identity arbitrariness of which is camouflaged by a thick frosting of sparkling

information — facts lining the nest of an intellectual magpie and concealing the fundamental intellectual disorderliness of Innis’s system. His major propositions may well be true, but he offers no argument that will convince a sceptical reader that his ordering of events is to be preferred to alternatives.

After Innis The film and television culture of anglophone Canada has very little place for popular taste and for the mass audience — the exclusion of them

as significant concerns is the result, I believe, largely of the vigorous

presence of dependency theory in the mental baggage carried by anglophone intellectuals and their belief, learnt from Innis (who, of course, was also an important theorist of dependency), that the durability of political institutions depends on communications. Consequently the consumption of American television is anathematized. A very large baby is thrown out with this bath water and few recognize the

existence of the baby. One of the essays in Canadian Film Reader (Feldman and Nelson 1977), in which there are hints of a developing interest in television, begins with an anecdote about the cgc: “Iwo years ago Jack Darcus was in Toronto with his first time features, Great Coups of

History and Proxyhawks. After making the trek to Mecca (the csc) and projecting Proxyhawks on the film buyer's office door, he was painted a picture of the Average Canadian Worker who goes home to his Tv set

and beer and told “we couldn’t do that to the Canadian worker”’ (Ibranyi-Kiss 1977, 268). The anecdote passes without further comment. It is clearly deemed to be transparent to the reader who, it is confidently

anticipated, will shake her or his head and tut-tut yet again about the

horrors of the csc. It is a surprising anecdote since the csc is not remarkable for its concern for the Average Canadian Worker — were it

more so Newman and the unknown but clearly admirable film buyer would not be voices crying in the wilderness. The contrast between the dominant assumptions of anglophone and francophone audio-visual cultures and the place each gives to the popular can be signalled by comparing the Ibranyi-Kiss anecdote with one of Denys Arcand from

the same volume. Arcand testified, in the course of an extremely interesting interview, to the NFB’s unresponsiveness to the Quebec experience; to the necessity, when making fictional rather than documentary works, to attend to aesthetic questions of structure, narration,

The Intellectuals, Television, and the Two Solitudes 223 emotion, and audience response; but, most interestingly, to his respon-

siveness to popular taste and feeling of affinity with the Average Canadian Worker: Do you think people go and see documentaries? ARCAND: Not much, that’s the basic problem. The people who go see

documentaries are the intellectuals and students. Is it a matter of accessibility? ARCAND: Exactly. While we were making On est au coton we were hav-

ing a drink with the main character, and he asked us: ‘Do you think that you people would be able to make a real movie?’. We said: ‘What do you mean, what are we doing here?’. ‘No’, he said: ‘I mean a real movie that I could go to ona Saturday night with my wife’. This always stuck in my mind. (1977, 268)

The concern with audience gratification, with a refusal to work solely

for an élite audience of students and intellectuals, is very evident in Arcand’s television work such as ‘Duplessis’ (Radio Canada 1977) and ‘Empire Inc.’ (cBc 1983). In this he is, I think, ‘typical’ of Québécois culture, as Newman is untypical and marginal in anglophone Canadian culture. To be sure, Newman has occupied a decisive position as film commissioner, but his inability to command support for his campaign against the films ‘stinking with probity’ and for works that would speak to the Average Canadian Worker is indicative, I think, of his isolation in

the film and television culture of English Canada. It is one of the permanent losses of Canadian television and film that Newman was unable to return to his home and transfer to it some of the dividends from his achievement and experience in England. There are some signs that the csc is now finding a more popular accent and that the demands of the Average Canadian Worker are being successfully integrated with

discourses that engage with Canadian experience and concerns. But

these signs are provisional and, even when popular drama that successfully treats Canadian reality is forthcoming, the absence of an informed and sympathetic stratum of critics, a responsive television culture, may lead to the failure and premature termination of promising ventures such as ‘Vanderberg’ (cBc 1983). The imperatives of cultural nationalism contain contradictions. If to be a Canadian novelist, film-maker, or television producer is to be defined

224 Culture, Communication, and National Identity in terms of the passport held by the author, then within Canadian culture we have to embrace First Blood (1982) and Life at the Top (1965)

— Kotcheff’s Rambo film, made in the United States, and his English

social-realist film. If a Canadian work is one made in Canada, then Porky's, Black Christmas, and Atlantic City are Canadian, though they have no distinguishing Canadian content. If a Canadian work is one that is distinguished by Canadian concerns or Canadian cultural markings,

then Canadian culture becomes effectively defined by works that are concerned with political institutions and identities and/or the conventions defined in the cultural practices and productions of the past. None of these definitions alone or in combination makes much sense. To implement a state policy that is not simply industrial (were the criteria only industrial there would be no concern in Canada that ‘Toronto was New York [on film] almost more than New York was New York’: David Plant, Toronto film liaison service, quoted in Philadelphia Inquirer 26 May 1985, 3H) but expresses and strengthens national culture in order to call into existence a stronger national identity is still less easy, particularly

when no consensus exists on the nature of the nation and its identity. _Federal-government policies, particularly during the Trudeau period, promoted cultural production that presented Canada as a bilingual,

bicultural society, while those of independentist governments of Quebec have had quite different intentions and effects.

Those Canadians who attempt to think beyond the industrial and economic dimensions of nationalist cultural policy are compelled to try to define an essence that is to inform national cultural production. The

search for the national centre (and, in the more intelligent cultural nationalists, the search is for a particularly elusive non-prescriptive centre, a multivalent cultural nucleus) has led to contradictory and mutually exclusive definitions (that seek to include or exclude the French fact or, from the point of view of the Québécois, the federal or English fact) and even to a definition of the centre as absent. Feldman’s ‘The Silent Subject’ (in Feldman 1984) is a clearly defined

systematic attempt to identify an essence, a centre for audio-visual culture. Atwood’s Survival (1972) is its corollary and predecessor in the field of literature. These historical analyses produce normative definitions of English-Canadian culture as distinguished by silence, absence,

passivity, victimization, or femininity (see Joyce Wieland’s work in particular), definitions that do not deliver the goods desired by cultural nationalists whose project requires a robust and positive national self-image. To conclude that the Canadian identity (and here there is a

The Intellectuals, Television, and the Two Solitudes 225 characteristic elision that makes ‘English Canadian’ and ‘Canadian’ equivalent, though Houle [1980] argues a similar thesis for Quebec) is to be passive is an unacceptable conclusion for nationalist politics in that it

does not offer a basis on which a national political identity can be constructed. No nation, it is assumed, that is capable of standing up to the Americans and declining assimilation can be constructed around the national symbols of the maple leaf (nationalists report that Canada and

Lebanon have the only national flags with vegetable matter as their motifs) and the beaver (a creature whose defence mechanism is selfcastration in the face of predators) or can recognize the winning answer to the contest to complete the simile ‘as Canadian as ...’ to be ‘as Canadian as possible under the circumstances’ (Crean and Rioux 1983, 17). Cultural nationalism demands national cultural] productions that will

strengthen and construct Canadian national identity on the classic nineteenth-century model. It will remain unsatisfied by a culture of doubt, self-consciousness, resignation, and concern, and by productions in which the national is not strongly and explicitly foregrounded. The contradictions between industrial/economic and cultural policy for the national film/rv industry and those between the historical practices

of Canadian cultural producers of the silent subject or the surviving victim and the demands of cultural nationalism for a culture that will sustain a strong and self-confident national identity continue to mark the main fields of force in English-Canadian cultural nationalist discourse. Happily there is evidence that a new generation of intellectuals and

cultural producers are attending to popular taste; Mark Starowicz (executive producer of cBc’s news/current affairs show ‘The Journal’) refers to British television’s fortuitous combination of the serious and the popular as a model for Canada: This country must produce at least 400 hours of drama a year to even pretend to be a national dramatic culture. Without our own Newharts, our own mystery programs, without our continuing serials, without our own made for Tv movies, we lose much more than identity. We need comedy and drama to mediate our social problems and to reflect the changing character of our society, to ascertain our values. Nowhere is this more apparent, for example, than in Britain, where their racial issues, their social issues, their economic issues are the very stuff of their popular comedies, serials and serious dramatic production. (1984, 33)

226 Culture, Communication, and National Identity For him, drama is the arena in which the struggle for Canadian cultural

sovereignty will be fought, not just because television drama is paradigmatic of the problems of Canadian television and national culture, but because drama fictionally mediates an understanding of people’s place in the world. If the agenda and resolutions offered are foreign, then national identity and sovereignty will, he assumes, cease to exist in Canada. Starowicz’s judgment is shared by the former minister of communications, who stated: ‘a nation’s fictional repertoire is the lifeblood of its culture’ (Flora MacDonald; cited in Globe and Mail, 10 Feb. 1987, 12). Starowicz recognizes the cultural stratification that

distinguishes the relationship between producers and consumers of Canadian television by refusing the pss model - implicitly one that argues a strong stratification of cultural tastes and abandons the mass audience to U.s. programming: ‘Canadian intellectuals who advocate a ‘pss North’ model for csc are essentially advocating abandoning the public to American viewing completely and addressing only a small, high education, high income elite. The very antithesis of the Broadcast-

ing Act’ (Starowicz 1984, 26). Though Canadian audiences clearly strongly value élite American television — the Edmonton Journal (7 Feb. 1985, A6) states that 63 per cent of donations to the Washington State PBs funding drive came from Alberta (28 per cent from Washington State) —

it is not only the popular audience that Canada loses to u.s. television. Starowicz’s positive argument is for taking the medium of the masses seriously and for using television to sustain a national community in Canada. To achieve that end he recognizes that some accommodation between the serious and the popular (which requires the cultural élite to abandon its contempt for popular taste) must develop. We cannot afford to find solace in contempt for the television medium, any more than a writer — or a reader — can afford contempt for the paperback. The finest and the most contemptible artifacts of our world appear through the television screen. The stark reality is that anyone who owes allegiance to science, to art, to wit, to music, to history, to discourse instead of conflict, to analysis of our condition, will have to demand that those values we want transmitted will appear on the medium that has become the theatre and the forum of the nation — and that has become television. (1984, 11)

Starowicz’s argument suggests that anglophone intellectuals are developing an understanding of and program for television that

The Intellectuals, Television, and the Two Solitudes 227 recognize the popular imagination and popular taste as indices of value rather than as policy problems. Miller’s book (1987) is a symptom that supports his thesis. His speech is a hopeful straw in the wind, indicating

a shifting of anglophone attitudes and thus, perhaps, a growing convergence between the Canadian intellectuals’ two solitudes. But the

possibility of convergence remains heavily outweighed by counterindications. It is hard to imagine Morris Wolfe sharing Desaulniers’s view that ‘partout la télévision séme des éléments de critique. Elle stimule le jugement et l’affine’ (1982, 175). The solitudes remain.

The Television Audience

There is little information available on the behaviour and attitudes of the

television audience in Canada. A striking example of this surprising lacuna is the Caplan/Sauvageau Report (1986). The 731-page report contains only a single chapter on programs and audiences. This chapter is replete with information on program offer but contains little information on consumption, beyond tables that show viewing behaviour in terms of type of program, nationality of program, and type of transmitting station. Caplan/Sauvageau is representative of other Canadian

studies of the television audience in that it concentrates on consumption behaviour rather than on audience attitudes and response.

Other sources on which I have drawn are Canada/Québec (1985), which,

unusually, is concerned with viewer response rather than simply with viewer behaviour (and contains interesting information on the response

to Canadian programming of francophone viewers); Hothi (1981); Goldfarb Consultants (1983); Harrison, Young, Pesonen, and Newell (1986); and Williams (1986). Harrison, Young, Pesonen, and Newell (1986) (the most recent study) is particularly interesting in that it challenges a number of nationalist assumptions. It is perhaps for this reason that it received little attention in the Caplan/Sauvageau Report, for which it was commissioned. Hothi (1981) points out that North American audience research is principally a matter of rating studies. These provide important (some-

times the only) information about audience behaviour but have a restricted usefulness because they are generally confidential to their commercial sponsors. Moreover they may mislead because ratings give a distorted representation of viewer behaviour; all viewers do not use

The Television Audience 229 television in the same way or consume the same amounts of television.

However, ratings studies assume that viewers are equal and do not compensate for the differential television consumption of light and heavy viewers. Consequently ratings are skewed towards the viewing choices of heavy viewers. Hothi’s study for the crtc, Light and Heavy Viewers, examines television viewing in the main anglophone and francophone Canadian television markets, in Toronto and francophone Montreal. It asks: Who are light and heavy viewers? What programming do light and heavy viewers consume? Light and Heavy Viewers points out that ratings are a measure of the time audiences expose themselves to television and that, because some individuals (‘heavy’ viewers) consume more television than do others (‘light’ viewers), ratings are skewed in favour of heavy viewers. The

1977 Bureau of Broadcast Measurement survey on which Hothi’s analysis is based showed that television viewing by extreme quintiles of the Canadian television audience (that is, by the lightest and heaviest viewers) varied between 5.5 hours per week and 48.0 hours per week. Thus, given the ‘heavy viewer’ skew in ratings, there are grounds for doubting whether ratings are an adequate index of audience

behaviour or satisfaction. Other possible measures (though not considered in Light and Heavy Viewers) are ‘reach’ and ‘appreciation.’ ‘Reach’

is a measure not of viewing of a particular program but of a channel.

A particular program stream, a channel, over a period of time may be composed and scheduled so as to optimize its reach (aiming to attract, at some point during the period, each and every member of a potential audience) rather than its rating (aiming to capture the largest possible number of viewers but accepting that some potential viewers may never be reached). Thus, a schedule of programs attracting relatively small audiences (low ratings) might have a superior reach toa schedule of high-rated programs, each of which attracted many viewers

but which in aggregate failed ever to attract some sections of the potential audience (restricted reach). ‘Appreciation’ is concerned not with the quantity of viewing, but with the degree to which audiences value the programs they do watch. A highly rated program may have a low appreciation index; many viewers may find it acceptable but none outstanding. It can be seen that ratings, reach, and appreciation assess television consumption using different criteria and that a program (or program mix) that achieves high ratings may (in part because of the heavy-viewer

skew inherent in the rating system) have modest reach and relatively

230 Culture, Communication, and National Identity low appreciation. A mix of programming optimized for maximum appreciation may attract relatively small audiences, low ratings, to each

individual program. As Himmelweit states: ‘The relation of size of audience to enjoyment of a programme by those who viewed it [is] low.

Audience size [is] therefore an inadequate measure of the public’s satisfaction’ (1980, 144-5).

In North America, audience measurement is principally concerned with ratings, secondarily with reach, and seldom with appreciation. The priority given to the different indices reflects a broadcasting order orientated to maximization of consumption in order to serve the needs

of advertisers. In this system, described by Hothi as one where ‘programs are made to appeal to the largest possible audiences, resulting in the lowest common denominator programming thus restricting or minimising variety and diversity’ (1981, 1), a mutually reinforcing circuit has evolved between quantitative audience research (which sends good signals about ratings but weaker signals about reach and appreciation) and programming. The aim of the television system is to maximize consumption rather than satisfaction. If a program (or program schedule) can achieve a rating of, say, 60, then (assuming production or acquisition costs are equivalent) a commercial broadcaster

will prefer it to a program that may achieve a rating of 50; the second program will not be transmitted and the component of the audience that

would prefer the second, 50-rating program will be deprived of its preferred program. Indeed, many viewers of the 60-rating program — even if preferring the 60-rating program — may have wished to consume

the excluded 50-rating program and will have been deprived of the opportunity to do so.

Such a system of audience measurement (the most important feedback circuit sending information to program producers and sched-

ulers about audience preferences) is value laden and serves the commercial interest of broadcasters and advertisers. An interest that is not necessarily the same as the consumer interest. In contrast, public broadcasters have argued that audiences are differentiated ‘publics,’ not a unitary ‘public,’ and that the programming offer of a public-service

broadcaster, though attracting smaller audiences than the offer of commercial broadcasters, better maximizes consumer satisfaction by offering each distinct ‘public’ at least some of its preferred, first-choice, programming rather than much, second-choice, acceptable programming. However, although the public broadcasters’ critique of audience maximization is powerful, realization of the theoretical advantages of

The Television Audience 231 the public broadcasters’ reach- and appreciation-based programming philosophy is seldom easy. How are the separate ‘publics’ that make up a differentiated audience, and the intensity of each public’s desire for, and satisfaction with, particular programs and schedules, to be identified? The television programming and schedule mix offered by broadcasters customarily rest on the intuitions of broadcasters, rather than on scientific knowledge of viewer preferences. For, as Hothi observes, there are few studies of the audience for Canadian television that offer better information than do ratings. Hothi’s own study begins with a review of previous North American audience studies. He observes that ‘none of the Canadian studies

analyse actual viewing’ (1981, 8). However, they do offer some pertinent findings, including: ‘one of the television’s main appeal [sic] is that it helps people relax’ (p. 8); ‘the largest single criticism seems to be

that television “conditions people”’ (p. 19); ‘American programs are considered to be better than Canadian programs in a ratio of three to one’ (p. 22); ‘watching television is proportionately less often consid-

ered to be the best way to relax by higher socio-economic status Canadians. Canadians with higher education, occupation and income levels also concentrate less on the programs they watch’ (p. 24). These findings about Canadians’ response to television are broadly similar to the findings of the u.s. studies reviewed by Hothi, which found that v.s. viewers exhibited responses to television similar to those of Canadian viewers: ‘television was perceived then, primarily as an entertainment medium’ (p. 7); ‘people of higher socio-economic status — the wealthier, better educated, white collar workers and professionals — were more apt to be critical of particular aspects of the medium ... But strangely enough

the survey revealed that they tended to watch it much more than their views would indicate and what they watched was rather similar to what everybody else was watching’ (pp. 7-8). These findings are hard to interpret with any degree of confidence and are to some extent contradictory. In both Canada and the United

States, television is considered to be entertaining and relaxing, a response that suggests that viewers do not generally consider television to be crucial in the formation of their value systems. However television

was criticized (albeit by a minority of viewers) for ‘conditioning’ viewers. Hothi interprets this term to mean not persuading or indoctrinating but rather distracting and inhibiting viewers from engaging in worthier pursuits, such as direct social interaction. Williams’s and her colleagues’ research (1986) supports the supposition that television has

232 Culture, Communication, and National Identity effects that are functions of the medium rather than its content. They noted television’s reduction of children’s outdoor activities. However, such effects of television seem to be relatively independent of the content of programming and are best regarded as primary effects. If we understand television to have a doubly articulated effect on viewers, then the primary articulation is simply an effect of the medium; the time spent using television is not available for other uses and television displaces other activities in viewers’ time budgets. Primary-level effects are on behaviour. The second level of effect is content-dependent and concerns attitude change (and perhaps, through such changes, behaviour change) and is much harder to demonstrate. Hothi’s own study (for the Research Directorate of the crtc) analyses Canadian viewing behaviour rather than attitudes and asks whether the skew in rating scores created by the light/heavy viewer phenomenon is significant. Is there a tendency to reinforce the offer of programs consumed by heavy viewers at the expense of those consumed by light

viewers? Hothi’s may seem a rather technical concern, given the admitted imperfections of ratings (which represent only audiences’ responses to the programming offer of an audience-maximizing system and not audiences’ desires and the intensity of their desires). But, imper-

fect though ratings-based research is, there are few other sources of information on the Canadian television audience available, and Hothi’s reflections yield interesting and informative insights.

Many of the conclusions reached in Light and Heavy Viewers are unsurprising: In general though, people who are old, less educated and have jobs with lower socio-economic status are more likely to be heavy viewers. Males and females have a similar number of viewing hours. Also Francophones and Anglophones have similar distributions of their viewing hours among various demographic and socio-economic groups. (p. 26) Light and heavy viewers are quite similar in their television viewing choices. The proportional distribution of their viewing time across various program types are essentially similar. This is true for both Anglophones and Francophones. There is not therefore any evidence that the light viewers are any less served than the heavy viewers ... the systems may very well be far more responsive to the viewing prefer-

The Television Audience 233 ence of the heavy viewers ... but since the viewing preferences of the light viewers are the same as those of the heavy viewers they do not appear to be discriminated against. (pp. 26-7)

Because Light and Heavy Viewers is concerned with actual viewing behaviour, it cannot be concluded that light viewers would remain light viewers with a different program mix (though it is certainly true that ‘there is not any evidence that the light viewers are less served than the heavy viewers’). No alternatives to the existing system and its program offer were presented to respondents. There is, therefore, no way of knowing whether a different programming mix would result in a greater or lesser aggregate consumption or would redistribute existing consumption. There is little evidence in Hothi’s study (or in the other Canadian and u.s. studies cited) of significantly differentiated consumption of different types of programs by different social groups, different Canadian publics, except that older Canadians tend to watch more news/current affairs programs (p. 27) than do other viewer groups. They therefore watch the csc, the principal supplier of such programs, more. Bettereducated francophones tended to watch Radio Canada more than they watched commercial francophone stations but there were no differences between better- and less-well-educated francophones in terms of the types of programs they watched (p. 29). Francophones watched more French-language programs, and English-language programs were watched more by anglophones. But otherwise, ‘the viewing habits of the French-speaking Canadians for different age groups are just about the same as those of the English speaking Canadians’ (Hothi 1981, 125).

Otherwise, Hothi found few variations in consumption between different groups. This suggests that the model of the television audience

as made up of various ‘publics’ with different interests may be misleading (though Hothi [p. 30] cautions that this finding may be a result of

the way in which programs were categorized). If so, one of the rationales, that of ‘public service’ provision of program diversity, for public-sector television and public regulation of commercial television, falls. However, Hothi notes that though higher socio-economic classes do not differ much from other classes in their consumption of television

(if viewing opportunities are equalized) there is more dissonance between the actions of members of these groups and their attitudes than exists in members of other social groups. Higher socio-economic groups

234 Culture, Communication, and National Identity TABLE 7

Percentage viewing time by country of origin of program

Age Canada U.S. England France Other Total

2-17 15.98 81.04 2.28 0.35 0.36 100 18-24 20.44 77 23 2.20 0.10 0.03 100 25-34 23.65 73.00 3.06 0.14 0.14 100 35-49 =. 27.94 68.01 3.74 0.04 0.27 100 50-9 30.44 66.33 3.07 0.04 0.12 100 60+ 38.85 57.51 3.12 0.16 0.36 100

2+ 26.43 70.24 2.96 0.14 0.23 100 source: Hothi (1981), Table 49, p. 95

tend to deplore the services they consume. Hothi stresses: “This study observing actual patterns of behaviour is necessarily constrained to the present broadcasting system’ (p. 31). We do not know whether a more varied program offer (or a different system of classifying programs) would suggest different conclusions.

On the sensitive question of Canadian consumption of foreign programming, Hothi found that Canadian audiences migrate to programs of u.S. origin (whether delivered by Canadian or u.s. broadcasters). Table 7 indicates viewing-time distribution by age and country of origin of program. Hothi’s study is concerned with behaviour, not with

attitudes. No conclusions can be drawn from this study about why audiences distribute their viewing time between Canadian and American programming as they do. However, an earlier study (Senate 1970) found a clear majority of Canadian viewers preferring American television and American television programming (American shows).

To the questions ‘Which of the following do you prefer on Tv? Canadian shows. American shows’ and ‘Which do you prefer, Canadian

or American Tv? respondents answered as follows: prefer Canadian shows, 35 per cent; American shows, 60 per cent; did not state, 5 per cent; and prefer Canadian Tv, 43 per cent; American Tv, 54 per cent; did

not state, 3 per cent. The reasons given by respondents for their preference for American programs were: 1/ ‘All the best talent including

Canadian has gone to the States’; 2 / ‘They’re more professional’; 3 / ‘Canadian shows with their high ideals are too self-conscious in their presentation. American shows at their worst are pretty slick’; 4 / “There

The Television Audience 235 isn’t too much choice’; 5 / “More varied programmes’; 6/ ‘cBc shows are boring and uninteresting’; 7 / ‘They have a better view of what the public

wants’; and 8 / ‘That’s where most of the movies come from’ (Senate 1970, 131).

Hothi questions whether television is a suitable instrument for the achievement of the goals prescribed in the Broadcasting Act, whether it has ‘a potential for fulfilling many of the objectives, ideals and goals which this society aspires to fulfil through its use? Can it strengthen our social, economic and cultural fabric or is it an unsuitable instrument to achieve these goals? Are all of these goals simultaneously achievable? If

not should the effort not be to make it an excellent instrument for fulfilling an entertainment or practical role rather than striving to make it what it cannot be?’ (pp. 33-4). Williams and her colleagues (1986) affirmed the effect of television on

behaviour and human skills in the British Columbia settlement they designated ‘Notel.’ For example, they state, with proper social-scientific

caution (aware that correlation is no evidence of causation), that ‘television may slow down the acquisition of reading skills’ (p. 71); and, more firmly, when assessing the effect of television on attitudes, that the

sex-role attitudes of children who had grown up with television were more strongly typed than were those of children who had not grown up with television. But their comparison of Notel, Unitel, Multitel (the names given to the settlements studied, which had, respectively, no

television, one channel, and several channels of television) did not demonstrate the effect of television on viewers’ perception of national identity (nor can it be concluded that a demonstrated effect in respect of, for example, perception of sex roles will be replicated in respect of other attitudes, including perceptions of national identity). Indeed, Williams concludes that the effect of television is relatively independent of the degree of Canadian content in programming: “The effects of television

have more to do with its presence versus absence than whether one channel of csc or four channels, including the three major us networks are available’ (p. 396). This finding is hard to reconcile with the priority

given in Canadian broadcasting policy to augmenting the flows of Canadian programming to television audiences in order to foster and sustain the development of a strong Canadian national identity. Indeed Hothi hints that the insistence on an ideological role for broadcasting in Canada has been at the expense of serving viewers’ desires, and cites an attitude study commissioned by the crrc (Attitudes of Canadians towards Advertising on Television, Market Facts of Canada Ltd [1977]): ‘Four out of

236 Culture, Communication, and National Identity five Canadians agree that television is their cheapest form of entertainment ... Slightly more Canadians do, than do not, believe that television fails to meet the same quality as alternative media which one pays to experience. As well, more than one third feel that most television shows are boring. Also American programs are considered to be better than Canadian programs in a ratio of three to one’ (p. 22). This statement is somewhat ambiguous. Although it states that audiences prefer American programming (as did the Senate study of 1970) it also implies that

the American programs screened are found boring by a significant minority. If most programs consumed are American, then they too must

be perceived as boring. However, the suggestion that Canadian programs were found boring and American preferred was supported by a survey of francophone viewers for the Canada/Québec study L’avenir de la télévision francophone (1985).

The return of the Mulroney Conservative government in 1984 opened a window for renegotiation of provincial/federal government relations in Canada. The ending of the domination of federal politics by the Parti

Québécois’s (PQ) main political antagonists, the Liberals (and the withdrawal of Trudeau and a generation of francophone Liberal politicians whose close knowledge, and long-nurtured mutual antagonism, of Quebec politics and politicians had overdetermined relations between the Canadian and Quebec governments), made possible negotiation of a new rapport between the federal Conservative government and the short-lived PQ government, based, not least, on a mutual interest in outmanoeuvring the Liberals. The publication of L’avenir de la

télévision francophone under the joint imprint of the ministries of communication of Quebec and Canada in 1985 was an event unimaginable during the long Trudeau era. Though the Pq’s hold on office was of

brief duration and the recommendations of the report are now of uncertain status, its research methods and findings remain of interest. The report describes francophone consumption of English-language television, pointing out that although French television is popular with francophones: Les télévisions francophones ont réussi, plus que les télévisions canadiennes-anglaises, a imposer un produit canadian pdpulaire auprés du public: les émissions d'information et d’affairs publiques, les émissions variétés et les dramatiques produits au Québec sont en effet, plus populaires auprés des francophones (40% de I’écoute totale des francophones québécois) que ne le sont les mémes genres produits

The Television Audience 237 du Canada auprés des anglophones (15% de l’écoute totale des anglophones ontariens). Les francophones du Québec sont ainsi de tous les téléspectateurs canadiens, ceux qui écoutent le moins d’émissions étrangéres: 45% de leur écoute, a l’automne 1983, allait a des émissions produits ailleurs gu’au Canada en majorité des émissions de fiction. (Canada/Québec 1985, 27)

There is also an augmenting consumption of English-language television by francophones: Avec la montée de bilinguisme (25% des Québécois en 1961 et 34% en 1981) et l’importance croissante du nombre d’abonnés au cable (37% des Québécois en 1979 et 48% en 1984), l'écoute anglophone n’a cessé de marquer des points. La part de l’écoute totale consacrée aux stations anglophones est passée chez les francophones de Montréal, de 14% en 1976 a 28% en 1983. L’année 1984 a vu baisser la popularité des canaux anglophones puisque l’écoute qui leur était consacrée tombait 4 20% a Montréal. Chez les francophones habitant dans le reste du Québec I’écoute anglophone qui était de 6% en 1976 poussait a 11% en 1983 puis tombait a 7% en 1984. (p. 26)

Canada/Québec (1985) observes that both 1983 and 1984 may be exceptional years; a strike at the major francophone commercial broadcaster Télé-Métropole in 1983 and the u.s. presidential elections in

1984 might have produced, respectively, exceptional increases and declines in watching of English-language television. The report accounts for consumption of English-language television, and particularly American television, in terms of the difference perceived by viewers in the content of American and Canadian television. Pour le majorité des participants la télévision francophone est une télévision qui présente la pauvreté et rabache les oreilles avec la misére québécoise (Bonheur d’Occasion, Maria Chapdelaine, Entre Chien et Loup). C'est une télévision axée sur le passé (Le Parc des Braves, Le Temps

d'une Paix). C’est une télévision centrée sur le noyau familial, témoignant d’une dynamique sociale restreinte et non d’horizons ouverts sur le monde. Enfin, c'est une télévision viellissante. Au début de la télévision, c’était des jeunes artistes et créateurs; ceux-ci sont devenus

238 Culture, Communication, and National Identity vieux et se répétent. Il faudrait renouveler le bassin des vedettes, d’animateurs et de créateurs. A l'opposé, la television américaine apparatt comme une télévision véhiculant la richesse (Dallas, Hotel, Dynasty) le réve et l'éspoir (The Price is Right). On la dit axée sur le futur: “Les horizons sont ouverts’ et on lui donne Ja charactéristique de pensée positive. (p. 47)

Hothi criticized Canadian audience research for drawing evidence not

from consumption but from attitudes, not from a study of viewing behaviour but from what interviewees said about themselves and about television. Canada/Québec (1985) is vulnerable to this criticism (though there is less audience research of the kind anathematized by Hothi than

Hothi’s remarks would suggest). But both attitude and behaviour studies are required, for there are no a priori grounds for preferring audience statements or audience behaviour as indices of audience preferences. Each type of research tends to yield different (and sometimes contradictory) insights. The attitude surveys conclude that television, particularly Canadian television, is boring but that Canadians support nationalist broadcasting policies and practices. Consump-

tion studies demonstrate that Canadians consume a good deal of television (in 1984, an average of 23.6 hours weekly — Caplan and Sauvageau 1986, 85) and prefer American programming.

Caplan and Sauvageau (1986) and Harrison, Young, Pesonen, and Newell (1986) are the most recent studies of Canadian television audience behaviour. Caplan and Sauvageau find that ‘Canadians watch Canadian performance programming in proportion to its availability’ (p. 128). This important conclusion has underpinned broadcasting policy in Canada. The geographical extension of broadcasting services, establishment of public-sector broadcasters, and development of a combination

of incentives and regulation to promote Canadian programming by commercial broadcasters have been directed towards increasing the availability of Canadian programming to Canadian audiences. However, the correlation between viewing behaviour and programming offer asserted by Caplan and Sauvageau (see table 8) does not exist in either anglophone or francophone services. Overall, anglophone Canadians prefer foreign programming. But in certain areas — news, public affairs, sport — they prefer Canadian products. However, for drama/music/variety (which tend to have high production budgets and are the most-watched programs in the sched-

ules) foreign offers are preferred. The absence in table 8 of any

The Television Audience 239 TABLE 8

Percentages of broadcast time and viewing time for various types of Canadian/ foreign programming, 1984

Broadcasting time Viewing time

$$$ —____ Program $$$ —$—_—___—__—_—

Canadian Foreign type Canadian Foreign

28 72 All programs 29 7] 46 54 News 89 11 52 48 Public affairs 62 38 68 32 Sports 71 29 Anglophone television

2 98 Drama 2 98 25 75 Variety/music/quiz 18 82 57 43 All programs 68 32 99 1 News 100 0 78 22 Public affairs 99 ] 92 8 Sports 96804 10 90 Drama 20 Francophone television

66 34 Variety/music/quiz 87 13

NOTE: The categories ‘drama’ and ‘variety/music/quiz’ together constitute performance programming (Caplan and Sauvageau 1985, 95).

weighting for time spent in viewing particular program forms tends to underrepresent Canadian audiences’ consumption of foreign programming. For francophones the situation is different: there is amore marked

tendency for them to prefer Canadian product (although table 8 is misleading in that it does not consider francophone viewers’ consumption of English-language programming). The snapshot of 1984 differs from a similar snapshot of five years earlier (see table 9).

Comparing the snapshots of 1984 and 1979, we find that for both Canadian language communities the proportion of Canadian broadcasting time available has declined, as a consequence of greater penetration of U.S. services via satellite and cable. But for both language communi-

ties viewing of Canadian programs has increased (as a proportion of viewing foreign programs). Francophone viewers have maintained the proportion of viewing time they give to Canadian drama, in spite of the

240 Culture, Communication, and National Identity TABLE 9

Percentages of broadcast time and viewing time for various types of Canadian/ foreign programming, 1979

— Program $$. Broadcasting time Viewing time

Canadian Foreign type Canadian Foreign

33 67 All programs 26 74 62 38 News 89 11 67 33 Public affairs 71 29 60 40 Sports 79 21

Anglophone television

4 96 Drama 3 97 31 69 Variety/music/quiz 20 80

64 36 All programs 62 38 100 0 News 100 0 Francophone television

97 3 Public affairs 98 2 89 11 oports 96 4

12 88 Drama 20 80 78 22 Variety/music/quiz 82 18

SOURCE: Johnson 1981a

increase in foreign-drama offer, although their consumption of variety/ music/quiz has become less Canadian in spite of the increased Canadian offer in these categories. English-Canadian viewers’ consumption of

Canadian drama has declined in proportion to their consumption of foreign drama, as has their consumption of variety/music/quiz. But at least one puzzle remains. Though the basis for comparison between the 1979 and 1984 statistics is not perfect (1979 is based on the ‘sweeps’ weeks of October/November, and 1984 on the whole year) it is hard to understand how Caplan and Sauvageau (1986) show an increase in Canadian viewing in the ‘all programs’ category (relative to Johnson 1981a) while in individual program categories the proportion of Canadi-

an programs viewed has at best remained constant (news) and has elsewhere declined. The same proportional discrepancy is evident for francophone services (though it is possible that the increase in consumption of Canadian public affairs more than compensates for the

The Television Audience 241 decline in proportional consumption of Canadian variety/music/quiz programming). Prima facie it would seem that it is in program categories

other than those shown in the tables that Canadian programs have displaced foreign programs. If so, it would be interesting to know in which categories, and why Canadian policy-makers continue toregard | the (unspecified) program types that are attracting Canadian viewers as

less important than those that are losing them. Public policy (here Caplan and Sauvageau are representative) has foregrounded performance programming — drama and variety/music/quiz — as the crucial sites where American influence must be contested. Insofar as conclusions can be drawn, tables 8 and 9 suggest that between 1979 and 1984 Canadian television programming became more attractive to audiences,

resulting in a shift of viewing to Canadian from foreign, in spite of greater availability of foreign programming. But the proportional increase in consumption of Canadian programs has not been in the category of performance programming nor has English-Canadian viewing become predominantly Canadian. The audience research on which Caplan and Sauvageau’s findings are based was performed by the csc, and much of the material in the task force’s report is reproduced from the csc’s application for renewal of its television network licences (cBc 1986). Research commissioned by the task force (Harrison, Young, Pesonen, and Newell {Hypn] 1986) does not appear to have influenced the conclusions of the task force and is only

once cited in the report. HYPN suggest conclusions impossible to reconcile with those of Caplan and Sauvageau. HyPN found that availability of a greater variety of Canadian programming leads to a reduction in consumption of Canadian programs; that is, audiences discriminated against Canadian programming. ‘The ongoing decision by

Women 18+ to view or not to view Canadian programming is not a function of Canadian programming availability, it is a function of timing options. The more Tv system options available to women the less time

women spend with Canadian programming and this dynamic takes place in the face of the fact that a greater variety of Canadian programs are available to women with greater Tv system viewing options’ (p. 38). The HYPN’s study embraces three categories of viewer (women 18 and older, men 18 and older, and 2- to 17-year-olds), of which women 18 and

older are the biggest users of television. Men 18 and older, though consuming less television than women of the same age group, exhibit similar consumption patterns to those of women (though they consume more Canadian programming than women, as a consequence of their

242 Culture, Communication, and National Identity higher viewing of live sport, much of which is Canadian). HyYPN’s finding that increased availability of Canadian programming does not produce greater consumption of Canadian programming is an important one. It suggests that there is no unsatisfied demand for Canadian programming among the Canadian television audience. The finding of HYPN that I have highlighted should be treated with caution. It is but one

interpretation of a ‘snapshot’ of audience behaviour. But it, together with the curious elements is Caplan and Sauvageau’s own presentation of increased Canadian viewing, suggests that more research should be

done to explore the hypothesis that Canadian audiences are not dissatisfied with the television programming offer (albeit, overwhelmingly non-Canadian) in Canada.

There are other findings in HypPn’s study that challenge central assumptions in nationalist broadcasting policy. They find, for example, that in Ontario (pp. 35, 36) the most-watched television ‘system’ is the U.S. commercial system (in all other provinces the Canadian commercial

network ctv or TvA has the largest viewing share). Given Ontario's ‘overconsumption’ of u.s. television, one would expect to find (were the suppositions of nationalists about the influence of television viewing on

national identity and consciousness well founded) Ontario the most ‘Continental’ of the Canadian provinces, whereas Ontario has more vigorously opposed the free-trade treaty with the United States than any other province. HYPN draw further conclusions that challenge dominant

nationalist precepts. Among the most challenging is the finding that ‘there are significant numbers of women who avoid Canadian program-

ming on any one English language Tv system’ (p. 41). Even if it is granted that there is an unfulfilled demand by Canadian television viewers for Canadian programming (and HyPNn’s research challenged this view) avoidance of the existing Canadian program offer suggests that only programs different from the existing ones would satisfy the notional unfilled demand. An interesting suggestion is advanced in the report, which further challenges conventional wisdom (which has prioritized drama programming in the nationalist battle for the television audience in Canada) and which again was not adopted by Caplan and Sauvageau: ‘Entertainment represents the one program type that could develop into a major source of tuning to Canadian programming’ (HYPN 1986, 29). The argument for entertainment rests on the relatively low cost of entertainment productions in the ‘game/quiz/variety/song/ talk category’ and the existing ‘even balance of Canadian vs. non-Canadian tuning’ in the ‘entertainment program’ category.

The Television Audience 243 However HYPN’s report is not wholly iconoclastic. Among the findings

that support conventional wisdom is the judgment that francophone viewers in Quebec do not avoid Canadian programming and that relatively large numbers of Canadian viewers watch Canadian programming in the news and sport categories.

Hothi (1981, 33-4) questions whether television is an effective instrument for the achievement of ideological goals, Canada/Québec (1985) suggests that francophone viewers dislike the content of Canadi-

an television, HYPN (1986) propose that anglophone viewers avoid Canadian programming. The findings of these studies of the Canadian television audience suggest that the nationalist optic, through which television consumption in Canada is viewed, is flawed. They suggest

that the signals sent by audiences, admittedly through the highly imperfect signalling system of the existing Canadian broadcasting market, are ignored by broadcasters at their peril and that the nationalist view of television unfortunately misrecognises important factors in the attitudes and behaviour of Canadian viewers. Some of the cracks in the glass were identified by Watkins (a leader of _ the ‘Waffle’ group, which advocated socialist nationalist policies, at first within the NppP and, after expulsion from the NbP, as a separate, and declining, group) who judged the nationalist vocation for broadcasting in Canada to have been mistaken and to have compromised the cBc’s

public-service vocation: ‘Radio and television have been used or misused in a largely futile attempt to foster nationalism, with a consequent failure to exploit adequately the potential of public ownership of the media to offset commercialism and provide free education’ (1966, 295). Watkins speculated that the roots of the csc’s failure lay in the conflict between audience tastes and nationalist imperatives: ‘Radio

and Tv piping American programmes into Canadian homes, have created mass taste on a continental basis. The Canadian response has been to force the burden of nationalism on to the new media. The csc is hailed by the Committee on Broadcasting as “the most important single instrument available for the development and maintenance of the unity

of Canada”; it is hardly surprising that the committee then finds csc wanting’ (p. 297).

Such evidence as exists, concerning the attitudes and behaviour of Canadian television audiences, is partial and contradictory. But there is much to suggest that the assumptions of nationalists that there is an unsatisfied desire among Canadian viewers for more Canadian programming, that consumption and supply are closely related, and that

244 Culture, Communication, and National Identity Canadian viewers are satisfied with Canadian programs are unfounded. However, the evidence is contradictory and far from perfect. The contradictory nature of the Canadian broadcasting order and the desires of Canadian viewers is well exemplified in The Culture of Canada, a research report by Goldfarb Consultants, delivered to the Department of Communications in July 1983. The report is based on analysis of 1,600 telephone interviews (1,000 anglophone and 600 francophone Canadi-

ans) in which respondents gave their views on Canadian culture, the role of the state, and the performance of public-sector cultural institutions. Canadians were found to be ‘hard pressed to single out one factor out of a list of many as being more important or influential to what makes Canada distinct from other countries and rather put a fair amount of importance on all the factors. The implication here is that the distinct Canadian culture is not perceived as being a function of a single factor but rather from the mixture available in Canada of such things as historical buildings, National Film Board, csc, artists and performers and content regulations for the media’ (1983, 6). There were distinct

differences in the extent to which Canadians in different regions supported federal government cultural interventions. However, a majority of Canadians in all regions favoured federal government subsidies: “Quebeckers are most adamant in agreeing to all the areas mentioned while British Columbia residents and westerners are least concerned about our culture, its implications and development in Canada today. A clear majority of Canadians (78% ranging from alow in

British Columbia of 70% to a high of 85% in Quebec) feel the federal government should be involved in providing financial assistance to

support arts, culture and heritage in Canada’ (p. 7). Of the major cultural agencies supported by the federal government respondents were most familiar with (though not most satisfied by) cBc television (see table 10).

Overall, csc television secured a high combined level of familiarity and satisfaction among Canadians. Respondents, once told the nature of the csc’s mandate from government, gave support (albeit, qualified) to the nationalist mandate defined for the csc in the 1968 Broadcasting Act (though residents of British Columbia were less likely to do so than were other Canadians). Most Canadians agreed, to some extent, with the operating guide-lines for the csc once they were familiar with them. Fewer supported making the csc predominantly Canadian in content than agree that the csc’s programming should

The Television Audience 245 TABLE 10

Familiarity and satisfaction with Canadian cultural agencies (per cent of respondents)

Veryorsomewhat Satisfied

familiar with and familiar with

National Film Board 36 74

Canada Council 15 31 National ArtsCentre = 17 67 National Gallery 19 68 cgc television 67 67

csc radio 56 76 souRCE: Goldfarb Consultants 1983, 8

provide for a continuing expression of Canadian identity. contribute to the development of national unity. One in two (51%) of Canadians feel that csc should function only in part to develop a strong Canadian identity, as a secondary role of the company. One in three (33%) do feel however that developing a strong Canadian identity should be the primary role of the csc ... Concern about a lack of a ‘Canadian’ focus in media programming is most acute in Quebec and is least evident in British Columbia paralleling other response data. (pp. 9-10)

Goldfarb Consultants found there was a slightly more marked tendency to support increased Canadian programming content than there was for

a positive nationalist role for the cpc. However Goldfarb reported a decisive rejection of interference with u.s. television signals, even when respondents were advised of the favourable consequences for Canadian broadcasters that would follow restriction of access to American signals (see table 11). The Goldfarb study reveals broad support in Canada for the present

broadcasting regime of tolerance of imported signals, subsidy for public-sector television, and a nationalist mandate for the csc. Insofar as the study reveals demand for a change, it shows a substantial minority

demand for more Canadian content in programming and performers accompanied by uncertainty about the nature of Canadian culture and identity.

246 Culture, Communication, and National Identity TABLE 11

Too much or too little Canadian material on television? Amount of television

AmountofCanadian programming featuring programming on Tv Canadian performers (% of respondents) (% of respondents)

Too much 9 6 Too little 42 48 About what

there should be 42 41

No opinion 7 5 Should American Tv signals be restricted?

Total advised of consequences

Total of restriction

} (% of respondents) (% of respondents) Federal government should restrict

American TV signals 15 21

Viewers should be free to receive whatever signals

they can 81 71

soURCE: Goldfarb Consultants 1983, 10

There are reasons for scepticism about how far patterns of television consumption indicate popular preferences and values. The Goldfarb report suggests Canadian audiences express contradictory satisfactions and preferences. (In this they are of course not alone.) There is little explicit public dissatisfaction with Canadian public-sector broadcasting.

Canadians watch substantial quantities of Canadian television even though most of their viewing is of American television. Starowicz (1984) estimates that 66 per cent of programs offered to Canadian audiences are

American and that 75 per cent of Canadian viewing hours are of American programs. They assent to state support for Canadian television (but not to restricting Canadians’ access to American television). The imperfect nature of the broadcast-television market means that

The Television Audience 247 viewers’ consumption of non-Canadian programming is not necessarily

an indication that such programming is what consumers want. The (well-founded) belief that the television market imperfectly responds to and expresses the desires and sovereignty of consumers is the principal justification advanced for the Canadian state’s role in augmenting the supply of Canadian programming (whether through regulation, subsidy, or public-sector broadcasting). But though the signalling system of the television market is imperfect, the signals sent by viewers may still be valid indications of preferences; they may be, though distorted, the least-worst indices of preferences available. Moreover, the administered system, created by the state in order to compensate for the deficiencies of the market, is driven by two potentially contradictory imperatives,

the public-service imperative being the service of minorities having distinct and different interests, and the nationalist imperative demanding the agglomeration of the mass audience into a community sharing a single, national, imagination. If the television audience is (as advocates of public-service broadcasting customarily argue) composed of publics, and satisfaction of the desires of one public is to be performed by supplying programming tailored to its distinctive tastes, then that same programming is likely to have fewer gratifications to offer to other ‘publics’ (that may, in aggregate, exceed the size of the satisfied public) than will programming orientated to the lowest common denominator of the audience. If those dissatisfied with public-service programming orientated towards one distinct public have the opportunity to consume programming that is not tailored for a specific public, but instead is intended to be acceptable to a wide variety of taste publics, then there will be a tendency for such widely acceptable, non-exclusive, programming to attract higher aggregate audiences and better ratings than the programming tailored for specific publics. None the less it is clear that there are publics and interests that are not served in an audiencemaximizing broadcasting system, which can, at best, be as representative of viewer choices as first-past-the-post voting systems are of citizens’ political preferences. A broadcasting regime that combines public-service elements with a mass-audience, lowest-common-denominator alternative may best maximize audience satisfaction and enables us, when considering Canadian broadcasting, to reconcile Canadians’ high consumption of American mass television (whether transmitted by American or Canadian broadcasters) with their continuing financial and political support for the public sector — notably, the csc, but also pss. (Williams [1986, 36]

248 Culture, Communication, and National Identity confirms that American public television receives substantial financial support from Canadians. In 1983, she states, pss in Seattle raised 50 per cent of its funds from Canada.) It seems that it is public broadcasting’s ability to deliver variety in programming rather than national content that is most valued by audiences. Even so Hothi (and others) have found relatively little evidence of audiences migrating back and forth between mass and minority channels and programming. Public-service broadcasting that addresses a variety of publics is hard to reconcile with nationalist broadcasting. For a national service must

achieve a mass audience in order to knit the nation together into its imagined community. But, in what Caplan and Sauvageau label ‘performance programming,’ particularly drama, the nationalist broadcasting project in Canada has not enjoyed very much success. Canadian audiences obdurately consume less Canadian programming than they are offered. The economic advantages enjoyed by u.s. producers have undoubt-

edly been important factors in Americans producing television programming that has proved consistently attractive to Canadian (and international) audiences. But the textual, cultural, characteristics of U.s.

programs may have been more important than has hitherto been supposed. American television is successfully sold internationally, and successfully induces Canadians to watch it, because (political advertising, the news, the State of the Union message excepted, which are, in any case, not much watched in Canada) the programming is not marked by an insistent national discourse. Of course ‘Magnum P1,’ ‘General Hospital,’ ‘Night Court,’ and so on, are distinctively American (and programs such as ‘Ellis Island’ are nationalistic) but they are not marked with the ideology of nationalism so explicitly (and, in terms of the 1968 Broadcasting Act, properly) as are such Canadian programs as ‘Duplessis,’ ‘Vanderberg,’ ‘Empire Inc.,’ ‘Sam Hughes’ War,’ or Every Person Is Guilty. Thus (questions of accessibility of French language aside), there

are fewer points of entry for American viewers to much Canadian programming than there are for Canadian viewers to American programming. Hence, to the disparity in production budgets between the u.s. and Canadian systems (which is generally perceived as the main factor disposing Canadians to watch American television and Americans to decline to watch Canadian television) should be added the distinctive textual characteristics of television in Canada when it fulfils its 1968 Broadcasting Act mandate. Canadian-produced programming such as “The Littlest Hobo’ and ‘Night Heat,’ which are not explicitly

The Television Audience 249 marked as Canadian, can enjoy international market success but also incur the opprobrium of Canadian nationalists who demand not simply a Made-in-Canada label but distinctive Canadian content. In Hoskins and Mirus’s terms a low ‘cultural discount’ attaches to American television programs. By ‘cultural discount’ they mean ‘a particular program rooted in one culture, and thus attractive in that environment will have a diminished appeal elsewhere as viewers find it difficult to identify with the style, values and behavioural patterns of the material in question’ (1987, 23). A major factor in determining ‘cultural

discount’ is language, and the lowest international discount factor attaches to the English language. (Hence the more successful penetration of English-language television programming into French or German language markets than vice versa.) But language is far from the only factor (in Quebec more English-language programming than programming from metropolitan France is watched), and it is possible that characteristics of the Canadian cultural tradition(s), which nationalist cultural policies and national cultural élites foreground in Canadian television programming, produce a ‘diminished appeal’ that generally

discounts the value of such works. The gap between the Canadian cultural élites and the Canadian television audience may be such that a

‘cultural discount’ applies to Canadian performance programming when consumed by Canadian audiences and that an effect of nationalist cultural policy has been to raise this discount factor. Trofimenkoff (1983) gives a nice example of the process (though her example comes from

Quebec, it is in English Canada that the process has been most _ pronounced): The fascination of American offerings even leaped over the language barrier as French speaking youngsters switched from an overly serious children’s program on Radio Canada to the guns and horses of an American western. But no one seemed particularly concerned. Only the budding Canadian nationalists of the Massey Commission on Arts Letters and Sciences in 1951 or the Fowler Commission on Broadcasting in 1957 raised some doubts. Canadian television and radio, they said, ought to be different; it ought to introduce Canadians to each other and present the world to them in a Canadian light. And yet it could not be too different from American programming or it would lose a good part of its audience. Nationalists never did resolve the dilemma. (p. 283)

National Culture; or, Where Is Here?

csc is not only the major instrument of Canadian culture but also of culture in Canada. (Caplan and Sauvageau 1986, 693) Culture is one of the two or three most complicated words in the English language. (Williams 1976, 76)

Television drama, although widely regarded as a crucial element in the

formation and maintenance of a Canadian identity, is a particularly problematic type of television programming to Canadianize. Its production costs are very high and its potential audiences are readily able to consume American television drama (distinguished by high production values and professional production competence). However, the establishment of public broadcasting and regulation of the private sector by state agencies such as Telefilm Canada, using the carrot, and the crrc, using the stick, have successfully created a ‘structural potentiality’ for

domestic television drama in Canada. The rationale for Canadian

television drama is similar to that given by André Guérin (president of Quebec’s Régie du cinéma et de la vidéo) for a national film-production industry: ‘A given population should from time to time be able to see

itself on the screen. That just seems fundamental and not even for nationalistic reasons but because of questions of identity. Having constantly to deal with foreign models, you end up rather deeply damaged by the never-ending exposure to foreign dramatic situations. One of the functions of cinema is precisely to be able to see yourself on

National Culture; or, Where Is Here? 251 the screen and that would seem to constitute a minimal definition of what a national cinema is’ (1985, 10). Guérin’s statement echoes the Jandmark Winnipeg Manifesto of 8 February 1974. Canadian filmmakers, including Peter Pearson, Don Shebib, and Denys Arcand, affirmed the necessity of national cultural initiatives: We, the undersigned filmmakers and filmworkers, wish to voice our belief that the present system of film production/distribution/exhibition works to the extreme disadvantage of the Canadian filmmaker and the Canadian film audience. We wish to state unequivocally that film is an expression and affirmation of the cultural reality of this country first, and a business second ... It is now clear that slavishly following foreign examples does not work. We need public alternatives at every level in the film industry. We must create our own system to allow filmmakers the option of working in the creative milieu of their choice. (cited in Verroneau and Handling 1980, 38)

Behind the categories ‘foreign examples,’ ‘identity,’ ‘foreign models,’

‘foreign dramatic situations,’ ‘cultural reality of the country,’ and ‘seeing yourself’ are a series of knotty problems turning on whether there are distinctive subjects or styles of representation that can be designated as Canadian (and differentiated from American, British, or Brazilian representations). At stake is the question of whether a political category — Canada - is applicable to the cultural sphere. Intuitively the coupling of the two terms ‘Canadian’ and ‘culture’ makes more sense than do, for example, the couplets Canadian science (though Guillet [1966] claims a distinctive Canadian science) and Canadian medicine. In

the scientific and medical spheres an absence of correspondence between scientific (or medical) knowledge and the national, and between the political community of the nation-state and the medical (or

scientific) community, is readily accepted. Though we recognize the distinctiveness of Western medicine vis-a-vis Eastern medical practices and conceptual systems, we do not differentiate Irish from Danish medicine or Canadian from German medical knowledge. Proud as Canada is of the achievements of Banting, Best, and others, there is little insistence on the national particularity of Canadian medical

science; rather what is emphasized is its place in an international scientific and therapeutic project. Yet, in the cultural sphere, the notions

of nation and a national culture remain potent, although political stability is no more dependent on a national culture than it is on a

252 Culture, Communication, and National Identity national religion. Though the doctrine of ‘cuius regio, eius religio’ was pervasive until the Enlightenment, the growth of religious toleration

and secularization has not damaged the political stability of states. Indeed, the United States demonstrates pre-eminently that the decoupling of state institutions from religion is compatible with national power and potency. However, Wolfe’s formulation of the Canadian situation, though extravagant in its rhetoric, is representative: ‘On the cultural front we’re

not just vulnerable to attack we’re under attack. Every hour of every day. Do we believe in cultural defence? And if so how much is our cultural defence worth? Our new minister of defence wants to improve our military defences by building six new frigates at a cost of $3 billion or $500,000,000 per frigate. Is the csc, the bulwark of our cultural defence, worth two and a half frigates a year?’ (1985, 131). Wolfe’s alarm is not,

of course, occasioned by the overconsumption of Mozart, Verdi, or Chopin in Canada. There is small concern (in Canada or in the United Kingdom or the United States) with the international circulation of high

culture. Indeed, when the oeuvre of particular composers has been excised from the performable canon on nationalist criteria (e.g., Mendelssohn in Germany between 1933 and 1945) it is widely judged

that such applications of political criteria to the cultural sphere are inappropriate. But in respect of mass, rather than high, culture, widespread concern exists (far from peculiar to Canada) about consumption of foreign cultural products. The maintenance of a community’s existence and integrity has as often been a matter of conscious directed activity as of spontaneous voluntary self-reproduction. Organized and self-conscious protective activity is necessary for a community to survive when an exogenous force, e.g., a military conqueror, imposes alien norms and/or when exogenous culture is so attractive to community members that the boundary markers between communities are elided. In the latter case the ‘collective right’ of the community to continued existence may conflict with the ‘individual right’ of its members to enjoy access and consumption of exogenous information. In Canada, the threat, if threat there be, is not of imposition of alien norms by superior force (though, as

Wolfe’s comparison of the csc and the maritime command of the Canadian Armed Forces suggests, such notions do exist in the conspira-

torial imaginations of some nationalists), but the attractiveness of exogenous culture to Canadians. But Canada is not Romania. Its democratic and libertarian political culture has rendered its inhibitory

National Culture; or, Where Is Here? 253 reflexes weak and slow. When conflicts arise between nationalist cultural policy and freedom of information, they are usually resolved in favour of freedom (the intensity of the controversy over Quebec's Bill

101 testifies to the unusual outcome of that conflict). The state both promotes Canada’s participation in an international high-cultural circuit

and attempts to maintain the authenticity and distinctiveness of Canadian national culture. It promotes consumption of Beethoven and inhibits consumption of Aaron Spelling, but does neither with an oppressive vigour. The agencies concerned with maintaining Canadian culture experi-

ence two principal difficulties. First, a central element that binds a community together is language. The two main communities in Canada

are divided from each other on linguistic lines, and each community shares its language — and, to some extent, its culture — with co-linguists

in other nations. Both English and French Canada are parts of separate transnational language communities. Second, each Canadian language community shares a continental North American culture in which it is a

minority partner. But the cultural and linguistic unities in which Canadians live have only a weak linkage to the political institution of the Canadian state, unless when we use the term ‘culture’ we mean an ‘anthropological’ culture or system, in which case clearly the apparatuses of the Canadian welfare state — which express a collective

value system very different from that of the United States - are intimately linked to Canadian political institutions. Though Canada has a distinctive anthropological culture that differenti-

ates it from its North American neighbour (parliamentary government,

no death penalty, health and welfare systems, progressive taxation, etc.), Canada has no national symbolic culture. But it has held together as

a political unit for more than a century without one. The separate English-and French-Canadian nationalisms that sought and seek to harmonize political institutions and national units have not succeeded, though it could be argued that the lack of success of the most recent and most serious separatism — that of Quebec in the late 1960s and 1970s — was the result of the successful attempt of the federal government to create a new national culture of bilingualism and biculturalism to fit the political facts. But bilingualism and biculturalism have (as the absence of ‘amphibious’ television suggests) made little impact on the symbolic culture of the two Canadas.

Nevertheless the Canadian state has fostered the (weak) linkage between political institutions and culture. Doing so has involved

254 Culture, Communication, and National Identity self-conscious development of the elements in Canadian culture that differentiate it from, rather than link it to, other cultures. Subsidy has been necessary both to provide the necessary conditions of existence for cultural production that would not be realized by profit-maximizing market allocations and to compensate the producers of cultural commodities for the potential revenues forgone from international sales (because of the distinctively Canadian characteristics that inhibit the sale

of products outside Canadian markets). The Nielsen Commission (properly known as the Task Force on Program Review, but usually known by the name of its sponsoring minister) reported that ‘the economic rationale for cultural programs is not strong’ (Task Force on Program Review 1986, 12). But Nielsen noted that the benefits of such

programs were unevenly distributed and tended to benefit already advantaged groups: ‘As the majority of programs do not support mass cultural events or amateur groups the consumer subsidy has a regressive income effect built into it’ (p. 13). The main positive externality of a program of cultural subsidy (other than job-creation) was a strengthening of national consciousness and identity: ‘cultural activities growing out of the Canadian heritage and experience will strengthen the sense of community in Canada. It is important that all Canadians be aware of their cultural heritage’ (p. 13). But in what does the Canadian cultural heritage inhere? A Canadian national culture and the representation of

Canadian experience require more than for cultural products to be labelled ‘Fait au Canada’ (Made in Canada). After all, what is a Canadian film? A film with a Canadian story? Any story with a Canadian producer? Any film with a Canadian director? Any film with a Canadian crew? Is an American television program like “V’ somehow Canadian because lead Marc Singer comes from Canada? Is an American film like Ghostbusters somehow Canadian because its producer/director, a Czech immigrant named Reitman, went to school in Canada before moving to Los Angeles? Does the fact that many Canadians live and work in Hollywood somehow Canadianize the American film industry such that its cultural production becomes metaphysically Canadian? (Dorland 1985, 11-12)

Dorland offers no answers to these rhetorical questions. The difficulties of developing a convincing answer are suggested by Desaulniers in an acute observation drawn from his brief but extremely suggestive article

‘What Does Canada Want? Or l'histoire sans lecon’: ‘in terms of

National Culture; or, Where Is Here? 255 nationality a person is either Canadian or not, but culturally one may be Canadian in varying degrees’ (1987, 151). The success or failure of the Canadian state’s cultural programs will depend on the extent to which consumption of the products it supports, including broadcasting, becomes general and not, as Nielsen suggested,

the customary prerogative only of élite groups. If consumption of Canadian content is not widely spread in the population, then the effect of state cultural programs will be to give cultural stratification in Canada a nationalist dimension. Broadcasting is potentially a promising instrument through which integrative cultural policies can be realized. It is cheap and available to virtually all Canadians, but whether its potentiality is or is not realized depends on the attractiveness of its programming

to all strata of the Canadian population. And though program forms such as news, public affairs, and sports have successfully attracted extensive Canadian audiences, drama (most concerned with what Guérin called ‘seeing yourself’ and Nielsen, ‘the Canadian heritage and experience’) has not. What are the characteristics of Canada’s ‘cultural heritage’ and the ‘Canadian heritage and experience’ as manifested in television drama?

Are there distinctively Canadian characteristics to television dramas

made in Canada, and how are these characteristics perceived by audiences? Maintenance and fostering of national culture, in Canada, form the raison d’étre of Canadian broadcasting policy; part of resistance to what Caplan and Sauvageau termed ‘obliterating cultural distinctions between countries’ (1986, 692).

The Canadian Cultural ‘Langscape’

Gaile McGregor, in her The Wacousta Syndrome: Explorations in the Canadian Langscape (1985), argues that Canada has a distinctive national

culture, and supports her thesis through a historical reading of Canadian literature (almost always novels) and, to a lesser extent, painting. McGregor’s extensive study requires to be assessed in terms of three

criteria. How far can generalizations about the consciousness and culture of a society be made on the basis of the society’s high culture? How representative are the examples chosen by the author? And are her ‘readings’ convincing? To deliver on her promise that ‘this book is about Canada ... not just about Canada but about being Canadian’ McGregor

must demonstrate that literature and easel painting are an adequate

256 Culture, Communication, and National Identity basis for generalization about Canada’s culture, that the texts she discusses are representative, and that her reading of the texts she chooses, and the characteristics she detects in them, are distinctively and particularly the property of Canada’s, and not another’s, culture. McGregor’s arguments are vulnerable once her commentary extends beyond critical exegesis of her chosen texts (on this she is rather good) to

the production of general cultural theory. She assumes, rather than argues, that culture and Kultur are synonymous, and that the Arnoldian

forms of literature and painting are adequate indices of collective consciousness. However, to establish that Canada has a national culture demands more than establishing whether or not Canada has a literary tradition. McGregor gives John Richardson’s novel Wacousta; Or the Prophecy (1832) paradigmatic status. She judges that its motifs of natural savagery and the threatened garrison (threatened from inside as well as from out) inform and animate Canada’s literary history. McGregor’s archetypes are similar to those identified by Frye (1971) and Atwood (1972); for

them the Canadian experience is one of the unrelenting harshness of nature, and the characteristic Canadian response is to turn inwards, back to the garrison. ‘The prototypical Canadian novel whatever its other features is thus very likely to have a shape resembling Sheila Watson’s The Double Hook where, having learned the dangers of ambition ... the impossibility of escape ... and the vulnerability of man

alone ... an aggregate of isolates come together and forms a new community ... the future is likely to bring new problems. We also have the sense, now the rain has restored the parched land, that these people united, will have a firm enough grasp on life to survive them’ (McGregor 1985, 443). The Canadian novel (and thereby Canadian culture) is thus differentiated from the American novel, culture, and consciousness. Americans, unlike Canadians, we learn, ‘have generally viewed nature

as a source of inspiration, natural wisdom, moral health, and so on. Canadian writers seemingly do not even like to look on the face of the wilderness’ (p. 47).

McGregor’s contention may or may not be empirically true of Canadian writers. Certainly it is a proposition that approaches the status of an orthodoxy. But it makes imperfect sense of American literature: yes, one can recognize Mark Twain there and perhaps de Crévecoeur — if he is not to be regarded as a Canadian author ~ but the generalization

does not, surely, make sense of the dialectical imagery of desert and garden in American representations of the west identified by Henry

National Culture; or, Where Is Here? 257 Nash Smith (1950) or of Hawthorne or Melville. More important it does

not make sense of much Canadian cinema and television drama.

Certainly Drylanders (1963) presents the settlement of the prairies as a tough business; its Canadian version of the west is certainly different from the mainstream of the Hollywood Western and can be understood

in terms of McGregor’s distinctions. But Drylanders is not the only Canadian representation of the west (or the Western) or of nature. For example, The Grey Fox (1982) is a much softer Canadian western. And if we take The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz (1974) we find a reverse

structure to that McGregor identifies. In the Richler/Kotcheff film, nature, the lake, and Yvette are presented as a ‘source of inspiration, natural wisdom, moral health and so on.’ If Richler doesn’t count in this

argument because he’s a notorious cosmopolitan (and supported the free-trade treaty), then we must consider further counter-indications such as ‘Beachcombers’ (1972-date), ‘Anne of Green Gables’ (1986), and even ‘Duplessis’ (where Duplessis’s vulnerability and defeats as associ-

ated with the outside, with nature, ‘moral health and so on’), none of which supports McGregor’s distinction. There are texts, both Canadian and American (literary and audiovisual), that support and challenge McGregor’s propositions. The question that, therefore, arises is: How are the examples, from which generalizations are derived, to be chosen? McGregor does not address this (difficult) question, for it is an unusual question to pose in literary criticism. However, even if it is granted that the texts McGregor uses to sustain her arguments are representative of literary production north and south of the forty-ninth parallel, it does not follow that, though representative of production, they are representative of consumption. McGregor does not attempt to show how the tropes and imaginative constructs, present in the works of the Canadian writers and painters whom she designates as representative of a tradition, as embodying a culture, are transmitted and appropriated by the Canadian public. Her lack of concern to explore and demonstrate the processes whereby Kultur becomes national culture is analogous to the evacuation in The Wacousta Syndrome of a social and political referent in Canadian literature. Anne Hébert and Hugh MacLennan write, it seems, the same kind of novels. For McGregor states ‘the novel of public life, of social forces, of political intrigue on the grand scale, the panoramic or epic form so beloved by the Americans ... is virtually unknown in this country’ (p. 173). This simply does not adequately characterize the content of the novels of MacLennan, Gabrielle Roy, Mordecai Richler,

258 Culture, Communication, and National Identity Robert Kroetsch, or Rudy Wiebe. To be sure their works are not about public life in the sense of being confined to politics (but neither are the

novels of Dos Passos and Steinbeck which McGregor instances as contrasts to the Canadian practice), but these writers are centrally concerned with social forces. And MacLennan, in particular, has attempted to present in his fictions a totalizing vision of the historical and political forces that have shaped Canada. Or to make the criticism another way, the three mini series I discuss below (‘Duplessis,’ “Empire Inc.’ and ‘Vanderberg’) attempt precisely that panorama of social forces

and political intrigue that McGregor claims is the prerogative of Americans and unknown in Canadian culture. Are they therefore to be regarded as un-Canadian? McGregor tries too hard to define a normative Canadian culture that is

both radically different from the culture of the United States and inclusive of the enormous variety of cultural productions that, even in the novel form she uses as an effective proxy for Canadian culture, have been produced in Canada. Not surprisingly Canadian culture fits her procrustean bed uncomfortably. However, in her explorations of the

Canadian langscape (a concept that she irritatingly never clearly positions relative to the related notions of landscape, nature, and place),

McGregor does deliver some illuminating analyses that substantiate, and more fully demonstrate, the definitions of Canadian culture and the embattled nature of the Canadian lot advanced by Frye and Atwood. McGregor fleshes out the bare bones ofa literary tradition established by Frye and Atwood but, like them, argues that this tradition constitutes, if not the whole, at least the core of a common Canadian culture. McGregor roots her definition of the Canadian psyche in nature and

an objective Canadian experience. ‘Nature seems more hostile to the Canadians because it is more hostile’ (p. 47). Her book is underpinned by the syllogism Canadian consciousness = Canadian landscape (or langscape). This central proposition requires to be interrogated in two ways, first by asking how far the historical experience of adversity intimidating space, poor land, and brutal climate — is present and a dominant element in the lives of highly urbanized and prosperous twentieth-century Canadians. Surely the successful passage of Canada into modernity has marginalized these factors in the lives of the majority of Canadian citizens? How far is the experience vicariously presented by John Richardson and Susanna Moodie a present reality? And second, by

asking (if McGregor’s propositions are granted) what consequences follow from a normative Canadian culture of misérabilism. Such a

National Culture; or, Where Is Here? 259 culture is unlikely to have more than a precarious grip on the leisure-time imaginative activity of wealthy urban Canadians.

This is not to say that there is nothing distinctive about Canada but rather that Canadian cultural producers’ insistent reworking of traditional motifs (the Wacousta syndrome), as cultural nationalists would have them do, is a process of reification that widens the gap between cultural production (by and for a self-referential nationalist élite) and mass cultural consumption. McGregor states, ‘all this seems on the whole to add up to a rather negative picture of Canada’ (p. 71).

It was just such a picture that Mark Blandford tried to challenge in ‘Empire Inc.’ ‘Blandford’s films are made precisely as a reaction to such images of Canadians as victims. “If we are to cease being colonial in our attitudes” he says “we have to show how power works from the inside”’ (Colapinto 1984, 12). McGregor’s arguments are open to challenge on both empirical (they don’t recognize the existence of significant texts that do not conform to

her normative description) and theoretical (the equivalence between high and anthropological culture that her argument demands is not established) grounds. But The Wacousta Syndrome has two kinds of

claims on the reader’s attention. It offers some penetrating and informative commentary on the Canadian literary texts it cites and exemplifies the pervasive modern attempt to make polity and culture coincide. Because there is a Canadian state, it should have a culture to

match. McGregor attempts to square this circle in the unpropitious circumstances presented by an international economy and culture and for a state constituted from at least two founding peoples, which has experienced enormous inward immigration and has an official ideology

of multiculturalism. Jt is not surprising that she enjoys an uneven success.

The Notion of Culture The category ‘nation,’ as [ have discussed above, is far from simple; no

less difficult is that of culture. Williams (1976) distinguishes three principal meanings: that drawn from husbandry and horticulture, signifying rearing or fostered growth; an anthropological notion signify-

ing the ensemble of practices and assumptions that distinguish one society from others; and that referring to the articulation of systems of symbols such that aesthetic responses are elicited in consumption. In the term ‘national culture,’ it is principally the latter two meanings that

260 Culture, Communication, and National Identity are in play. Neither is simple, and the two meanings intersect in ways that are variously contradictory and complementary. Culture in its ‘anthropological’ sense is a bundle of attributes that differentiate human social groups from each other. As Eliot wrote (of England), culture ‘includes all the characteristic activities and interests of a people: Derby Day, Henley Regatta, the dog races, the pin table, the

dart board, Wensleydale cheese, boiled cabbage cut into sections, beetroot in vinegar, nineteenth century Gothic churches and the music of Elgar’ (1948, 31). The social differences marked by culture are further

defined in formulas such as ‘popular culture,’ ‘mass culture,’ ‘élite culture,’ where differentiations are ‘horizontal,’ marking stratifications along cultural fault lines within a politically unified community; or in formulas such as ‘Islamic culture,’ ‘Black culture,’ ‘feminist culture,’ where the distinctions are made differently along vertical fault lines crossing political boundaries and constituting a community marked by a

shared culture out of groups separated by political and other distinc-

tions. Any individual is at the intersection of a plurality of such distinctions, which may or may not closely follow other indices of social stratification. The demarcation between élite and mass culture may, and often does, closely correlate with that between social classes, but it may

not; that between black and white culture closely but not perfectly breaks along a line of ethnicity; and so on. National cultures may, or may not, closely correspond to political demarcations. There are undoubtedly politically sovereign states possessed of strongly marked national cultures. In Western Europe national cultures have been produced by a long history (alas, not yet over) in which political authorities have successfully (if such a brutal process can

be graced with the honorific term ‘success’) constructed monoglot communities with a single dominant religion, shared ethnicity, and a self-sufficient economy within stable and geographically distinct boun-

daries. These nation-states have, it is often claimed, distinct national cultures, but even here a host of exceptions and qualifications spring to mind, not least a long-established international high culture for which ‘timeless’ and ‘universal’ qualities are claimed. Here the second of the two pertinent meanings of ‘culture’ becomes significant, where ‘culture’ is not a descriptive but an evaluative term, distinguishing not separate but equal social markings (some prefer cabbage boiled, others pickled; some their beer dark, others light) but ranking systems of moral values and human capabilities. If culture is the

_ ‘harmonious expansion of all the powers which make the beauty and

National Culture; or, Where Is Here? 261 worth of human nature’ (Arnold 1963, 48) or the ‘best that has been thought and known in the world’ (p. 70), then all anthropological cultures are not equal. Arnold variously located cultural excellence in classical antiquity and nineteenth-century England — his criteria were principally ethical and pragmatic and endure in customary contemporary usages of the term ‘culture.’ Behind, for example, Canadian nationalists’ advocacy of Canadian national culture and hostility to the influence of the United States is an ethical judgment that Canadian culture and its artefacts are morally superior. Wolfe, for example, compares ‘Sesame Street’ unfavourably to Canadian children’s television, contrasting the faults of ‘Sesame Street’ —~ ‘The programme is sexist; seventy-five per cent of the cartoon and Muppet characters are male. Other invisible lessons include the notion that learning is an activity grown-ups initiate and control and that children are passive participants in’ (Wolfe 1985, 19) — with the virtues of ‘The Friendly Giant’ - ‘a gentle slow-paced low-budget programme that has been on

the network for twenty-six years. The unabashed purpose of this fifteen-minute show is to teach children a love of books and music’ (p. 23). More generally, he constitutes Canadian productions as superior to American: ‘American commercial television, for the most part, aims

at the lowest common denominator in its audience; Canadian public television, on the other hand, aims higher’ (p. 103). Advocacy of the ethical superiority of the national culture is not a peculiarly Canadian trait. It is a strategy followed explicitly or implicitly

in most defences of national cultures from external influences. There would, after all, be little purpose in defending the national tradition from external change if the external forces were morally superior. A

common trope in such processes is the contest between different political interest groups within a state to appropriate the national as a badge for their values and to pin the label ‘foreign’ onto other rival systems. In Canada the national has been successfully appropriated for a broadly non-market, statist system of values differentiated from rival values labelled as ‘foreign’ and usually American, as in Hardin’s (1974) designation of Canada as a public-enterprise economy. However, the attribution of the honorific title ‘Canadian’ to such values neglects the

awkward empirical fact that Canada is overwhelmingly a market, private-enterprise economy.

The national culture is therefore not simply a given, historical presence, but a site of contestation in which rival value systems and political interest groups strive to legitimize their stance by labelling their

262 Culture, Communication, and National Identity position exclusively and authentically national. Since a nation must be

different from other proximate communities, a search for a national culture necessarily involves preferential identification of features of difference, even though such features may not empirically be preponderant. Nationalist cultural discourse therefore has the effects of inhibiting appropriation from, and adaptation to, external cultural influences and amplifies internal forces different from the external. French-Canadian film and television production is, because of the French language, clearly differentiated from u.s. production. FrenchCanadian cultural producers are therefore relatively free to appropriate cultural forms from outside, while, because of the French language, still retaining their national cultural distinctiveness. English-Canadian pro-

ducers, sharing a language with the United States, are less free to appropriate motifs and procedures from the United States because only by eschewing similarity with American cultural forms can they maintain and foster a distinctive national ideolect.

There is therefore, as one would expect, a greater willingness by French-Canadian, relative to English-Canadian, cultural producers to adopt popular forms that have been used in the United States. When English Canadians do so they incur odium or unease. For example, the judgment on the Kotcheff/Richler film The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, ‘the best American film made in Canada’ (Harcourt 1977b, 157),

is symptomatic. Nationalism requires the maintenance of difference from proximate communities. In English Canada this means amplifying unwanted cultural stratification within the putative national community as nationalist élites foster a culture different from that of the United States (and therefore national Canadian), while the cultural consumption of the masses is, in important respects, ‘continental.’ The process is one in which Cook’s distinction between ‘nationalistic’ and ‘national’ is very pertinent. Nationalistic cultural policy tends culturally to fragment

and divide the putative nation.

Thus far cultural value has been considered in terms of social

outcomes, and television fictions are assessed (in the same way as a political program or religious doctrine) in pragmatic terms. But not all cultural artefacts are representational, nor do they all have moral qualities. Music, and certain classes of literature and the visual arts, for example, have no referent. Their status resides in their capacity to arouse an aesthetic response in their consumers and they do so through articulation of a non-referential ‘language.’ Mayakovsky referred to literature as a mode of expression in which words were liberated from

National Culture; or, Where Is Here? 263 their function as ‘camels.’ That is, words no longer carried the burden of meaning but were solely combined for non-referential aesthetic effect. But the liberation of words from their role as camels is neither necessary nor sufficient to produce aesthetic effect. The aesthetic is not a property of the art object but of response. Kant argued that an aesthetic response

was one in which the respondent/consumer/audience experienced a ‘disinterested’ pleasure and that this distinctive faculty of humans ~ the

aesthetic — was called into play by the qualities of “‘purposiveness without purpose’ in the spectacle consumed. What distinguishes an aesthetic or disinterested response (or pleasure) from an interested or pragmatic response (which the same individual may experience in relation to the same object at the same moment of consumption) is an absence of consumption for use. To enjoy a sunset is an aesthetic, disinterested act; to say ‘red sky at night, shepherd’s delight; it will be fine tomorrow’ is an interested non-aesthetic response. Or to take

another example, an arrangement of fruit may be disinterestedly enjoyed for its aesthetic qualities in the juxtaposition of shapes, colours, and surfaces or interestedly if the respondent says, ‘I would like to eat

that apple.’ Non-representational art purges the art object of those elements that may obstruct an aesthetic, disinterested response by interested, pragmatic ones. Representational artefacts, whether novels, paintings, or television dramas, may yield information for use and act

as instruments of cognition (i.e., provoke an ‘interested’ response) and also exhibit the quality of orderliness — ‘purposiveness without purpose’ — that occasion disinterested ‘aesthetic’ response.

However, the shared human faculty of aesthetic pleasure may be stimulated in some individuals by events and objects that leave others cold. One person’s great art may be another’s daub. There are no grounds for disqualifying one individual’s aesthetic response as invalid; there is no authority that may decide that a novel is a proper object of aesthetic pleasure and a laundry list, improper. Different human communities and individuals at different moments constitute the same objects as art and not art (i.e., there are no immanent properties in objects that constitute them as art or ‘culture’). But such categorizations are not merely arbitrary and contingent; there is, at least potentially, a

historical sociology of culture. Seeing a bottle rack in the Duchamp collection of the Museum of Art in Philadelphia, one is more likely to see it as an art object, aesthetically, than to see it or its brother in a galvanizer’s shop. But whether in the museum or the galvanizer’s, the same object may be contemplated aesthetically or not.

264 Culture, Communication, and National Identity Shared aesthetic responses are one of the links that constitute individuals as groups and bind them together in an ‘anthropological culture.’ But aesthetic pleasure is a private event and no grounds exist for challenging an individual’s claim to experience of it — whether the object of that pleasure is a laundry list, an apple, or Don Giovanni. Terms such as ‘mass culture,’ ‘popular culture,’ or ‘high culture’ have therefore no evaluative significance — aesthetic experience is common to them all, though the objects that customarily invoke an aesthetic response differ

in each case. Rather they describe the social stratification of cultural production and consumption. Some social groups customarily enjoy aesthetic pleasure stimulated by one class of objects, others by another (see Bourdieu 1980). Evaluation of high culture as superior to popular and, particularly, to mass culture is a manifestation of competition for social status rather than a recognition that a certain class of objects — Kultur — can yield authentic aesthetic pleasure and another — kitsch —

cannot. Here I refer only to the aesthetic dimension; representations may properly be evaluated in terms of their heuristic productivity or their ethical content, but no more than erotic pleasure is aesthetic

pleasure a field in which the experiences of individuals can be challenged and ranked as valid or invalid. If a group experiences aesthetic pleasure in a hockey game (probably using such honorific terms as ‘exciting,’ ‘fun,’ ‘entertaining’), their judgments and choice have a comparable status to that of another group designating its experience of viewing Rembrandt’s The Night Watch (and using a different honorific vocabulary) as aesthetic. Such choices are eloquent social markers, though the boundaries of judgment and group demarca-

tion are always in flux. Whether or not object x can yield authentic aesthetic pleasure, is an art object, is real ‘culture,’ is fiercely contested.

There is a constant social process of negotiation as to whether, for example, the paintings of Cornelius Krieghoff or Atkinson Grimshaw are ‘good enough’ to be admitted to the canon of high culture or are inferior provincial genre pieces that inspire ‘interested’ pleasures such as those of recognition or sentiment occasioned by their subject-matter

rather than what Pater called the ‘hard gem-like flame’ of aesthetic experience.

The processes of social negotiation of cultural status have material outcomes (and are, in part at least, the result of material forces), not least those of social prestige attaching to claims such as that of appreciating Poussin and an augmentation of the cash value of the objects authoritatively designated as art. Itis, after all, not just anyone who can designate

National Culture; or, Where Is Here? 265 any old bottle rack as art. Possession and preferential consumption of Kultur differentiates a group from another that has kitsch as its property (and customarily acts as a marker of status and cultivation), but the movement of objects (the term is used as a convenient shorthand and

does not exclude non-material works such as music or television) between the categories of kitsch and Kultur suggests that there are no intrinsic properties possessed by objects that constitute some as kitsch and others as Kultur. Differentiation between kitsch and Kultur is nota socially neutral process but one that involves considerable resources of status and power. Certain characteristics (in advanced Western societies, at least) are customarily present in objects designated as being culturally valuable: age, hand-made, single-authorship — all of which make for scarcity — and complexity. The symbol system articulated, the language of the work, is one that requires skill and an educated consumer to read or decode. Cultivation is required in order to understand a Poussin but not to understand ‘Dallas.’ For the conventions used in ‘Dallas’ are widely generalized in the representations we have been educated to decode since infancy. Poussin is now remote (and therefore difficult), requiring expertise the acquisition of which cannot be the prerogative of all (for not all of us have the leisure and opportunity to familiarize ourselves with Poussin’s work and to learn how to unpack its signifying system). Film and television have few of the time-honoured markers of cultural value. They produce no unique products (no videotape or film print has a superior status as ‘the original’ over others), have no single authors to whom creative responsibility can exclusively be assigned (though there

are divisions of labour in production that privilege the inputs of one, ora few, individuals), and their products are characteristically marketed and are readily intelligible to large numbers of people. To understand prime-time television requires no special cultivation available only to a few. And the technologies on which the audio-visual industries are based have ‘deskilled’ production and removed the ‘aura’ from their producers and from the works themselves. There is a mismatch between the cultural assumptions and definitions of the past (which owe their origin to an era in which the leisure available for cultural production and

consumption was available to only a few) and those appropriate to contemporary culture based on ‘mechanical reproduction’ (to use Benjamin’s category though ‘electronic reproduction’ would be more exact) and mass consumption. The social division of labour that provided the leisure necessary for

266 Culture, Communication, and National Identity producers to acquire the skills for physical command over the factors of

artistic production (whether oil painting, playing an instrument, or sculpting), for coding the symbols articulated in artistic productions, and for consumers to acquire decoding skills constituted ‘culture’ as a minority prerogative. To be sure there was (and, in some societies, still

is) ‘popular culture’ (such as oral literature, song, and decoration of everyday objects) in societies that did not sharply differentiate producers and consumers of culture or constitute ‘culture’ as a commodity. But

this popular culture was and is customarily designated as inferior to ‘high’ culture, which was, necessarily, the property of élites who disposed of the time and wealth necessary to produce, acquire, and consume if.

In advanced Western societies, leisure is now universal; electronic and mechanical reproduction have reduced the cost of culture; and consumption of symbolic goods has become a major activity of the mass of people. ‘Mass culture’ and high culture similarly separate producers

and consumers and commoditize symbolic culture. Mass culture and

popular culture share a social pervasiveness, but mass culture is pervasive within a much larger community than those of popular cultures. The international character of high culture that has long been established, and that designated the consumption of symbolic goods of the élite as part of an ‘anthropological’ culture different from that of their

poorer neighbours, is now a property of mass culture. For Eliot, consumption of boiled cabbage and watching the Derby were elements in the anthropological culture of the English. But part of English society

was, and is, bound into an international cuiture of Verdi opera and eating foie gras. That international élite anthropological culture differ-

entiated them from other English whose cultural experience was bounded exclusively by the national (and was, in fact, unlikely to extend either to Elgar or to Henley). Now the other English similarly enjoy an

international anthropological culture but one that comprehends not Verdi but Aaron Spelling, and pizza and hamburgers rather than foie eras. The transnationalization of culture, for long the property only of élites, is now pervasive throughout advanced societies. This is the ‘cultural crisis.’ The internationa} character of culture that has long distinguished the culture of the élite now characterizes that of the mass. National cultures had the characteristic of a shared repertoire of symbols

that were the property of all within the nation. Such repertoires of symbols were not disseminated outside the national community and

National Culture; or, Where Is Here? 267 therefore distinguished it from other nations. But an international character was long evident in the culture of national élites. It is not accidental that the most honoured forms of Kultur are music and easel

painting, which do not require knowledge of a particular natural language in their consumers. Though I speak no Dutch I can appreciate Vermeer; though my Italian is absent I enjoy Verdi. And a significant factor in the preferential designation of the silent rather than the sound cinema as ‘art’ is surely the absence of natural language in its works. Murnau’s The Last Laugh (Der Letzte Mann) is, among other reasons,

constituted as art for its absence of words, whether spoken or in intertitles. National anthropological cultures existed too (though not all anthropological cultures were national), but the dominant characteristics of

advanced societies are far from the property of one nation. Much binds advanced societies in a common transnational culture: their family structures, agnosticism, industrial technologies, disciplines of labour, structure of the working day, and a shared repertoire of symbols

of mass culture. The crisis for national cultures extends through the anthropological and symbolic; there is a pervasive absence of fit between cultures and the political institution of the nation-state. As this fit becomes ever less perfect, more and more the term ‘national culture’ seems to be a category error. National élites adopting, whether through political or intellectual leadership, ‘the fundamental social role ... to lead the nation to its destiny’ (Gella 1976, 14) more and more frantically insist on the ‘cultural crisis’ as subordinate groups take their aesthetic pleasures in consumption of foreign cultural goods that offer more fun or entertainment than the home-grown products. There are no grounds for judging this pleasure to be inferior to that which attaches to the consumption of high culture, whether it is of national or international origin. If, then, no satisfactory definition of the nature of a national culture

can be drawn from theoretical deduction, it remains to investigate whether inductive enquiry will yield sufficient continuities and identi-

ties to invest the notion with substance. How Canadian is Canadian television drama? Procedures of Analysis The analyses that follow discuss representative drama productions of the csc — overwhelmingly the largest producer of television drama in Canada — and of one of the exceptional ‘against the grain’ productions of

268 Culture, Communication, and National Identity a commercial broadcaster. The examples chosen enable me to discuss

the construction of nationalism and the representation of Canadian identity and experience (to employ a useful, but necessarily imprecise distinction of Guérin), and the influence of ‘foreign models’ and ‘foreign

dramatic situations’ on Canadian television drama. ‘Duplessis,’ Je me souviens, ‘Vanderberg,’ and Every Person Is Guilty are explicitly about nationalism, one might say representations in the active mood. Slim Obsession, Ready for Slaughter, Chautauqua Girl, In the Fall, Dreamspeaker,

and Dying Hard are representations in the passive mood. And ‘Vanderberg’ and ‘Empire Inc.’ exemplify the influence of American models on Canadian television drama. There is more than a simple articulation of a single ideology at work in

any text, and it is therefore unsurprising that my ‘reading’ of these Canadian television dramas for their nationalist content does not exhaust them. Indeed, a surprising discovery is that the discourse of nationalism is often either implicit or absent in the works chosen for analysis. The programs produced for Canadian television by cac—Radio Canada are not as nationalist as might be expected from reading Section 3 of the 1968 Broadcasting Act, the nationalist aims of Telefilm Canada,

or the licensing conditions of the crTc. Such a finding is unsurprising within the terms of an influential thread in contemporary cultural theory

that argues that there is no necessary correspondence among the political, economic, and ideological/cultural. As it is put with the opacity characteristic of the tradition: “There is no necessary relation between

the conditions of existence of the means of representation and what is produced by the action of those means, no necessity that they represent those conditions’ (Hirst 1976, 411).

The solitudes in the study of mass communications of political economic and textual analysis have remained substantially separate. Implicitly (or explicitly in work such as Hirst’s) relations within the circuits of production and consumption of symbolic goods among the political, economic, and cultural have been constituted as adventitious,

except among a small cohort of Marxists persisting with démodé category systems of base and superstructure or expressive totality. It is

in such work that a concept of causality has been kept in use in the analyses of mass communications and of their production and consump-

tion. Without a notion of causality, studies can have only descriptive but not analytical power. It goes without saying that demonstration of causation in studies of mass-communications is difficult and that the processes of mediation through which causes and effects are linked are

National Culture; or, Where Is Here? 269 complex. Studies that are not to remain partial (whether by default or through rejection of the notion of causation under the banner of ‘no necessary correspondence’) have to essay integration of the solitudes of audience and effects study, political economy, and textual analysis. Prudently most scholars have specialized in a section of the field, and the boundaries between the assiduously cultivated strips of audience and effects studies, textual analysis, and political economy have become well established and seldom transgressed. Yet, if the full circuit of interaction among the political, economic, and cultural in mass communications is to be understood, trespassers across the field boundaries are required. It

is in this spirit that I stray between the cultivated areas of politicaleconomic and textual analysis and attempt a common cultivation of customarily divided fields in this study. Doubtless there are too many offences against well-established and good practices of husbandry, but the reader should know the trespass is intended and far from accidental. My analyses are impressionistic. I do not apologize for this; however, since the dominant current in literary and cinematic analysis over the last two decades has been one seeking more systematic and scientific analyses of discourse, an explanation of this choice is required. In the discourses such as television drama there are too many signifying codes in play to make systematic analysis of the usage of significant variables (and the combinations generated by their interactions) possible. More-

over the primary task in any such analysis - defining the important signifying elements — is not a straightforward procedure. Analysts of natural language have no a priori procedures that enable them to say whether a particular phonetic or lexical shift is significant in changing meaning. Varieties in the pronunciation of ‘baby’ (babby,’ “bebby,’ ‘pubby,’ say) will probably be interpreted by native speakers of English as insignificant — all mean ‘baby’ or ‘infant.’ However, if a phonetic shift to ‘bobby’ is made, native speakers will probably agree that a significant shift has been performed and the referent of the sound sign is no longer

‘paby’ but a specific first name (diminutive of Robert). I know of no constituency of television viewers that could be assembled and regarded as equivalent to the native speakers of a natural language to whom I, or other students of cultural production and consumption, could appeal to establish, let us say, whether dressing the sas man in Every Person Is Guilty in blue is insignificant but that dressing Sherry (the biker girl) in black is significant. Still less can one imagine the assembly of a sample of

viewers to pronounce on, say, a reading of colour coding in Slim Obsession. And why colour coding anyway? Potentially shot length,

270 Culture, Communication, and National Identity disposition of characters within the space of the image, relation of speech and image, and an infinity of other codes are significant. Drawing up a coding schedule for the possible articulations of these codes and assembling a sample of television viewers equivalent to native speakers of a natural language are goals virtually impossible to achieve. This is not to say that one reading is as good as another and there are

no grounds for preferring one hermeneutic to another. Only that there are grounds for scepticism as to the possibility of achieving systematic analysis of complex cultural productions such as television dramas. Literary and cinematic analysis have procedures whereby readings are negotiated and consensually produced. It goes without argument that the works of John Milton, James Joyce, Marie-Claire Blais, and Rudy

Wiebe are legitimate objects for study as are (and here one makes judgments somewhat less confidently) those of John Ford, Michael Powell, Gilles Groulx, and Ted Kotcheff. In these fields there are institutions through which consensual readings are produced: journals, books, academic conferences, university departments, festivals, and so on. No such institutions exist for the production of consensual readings

of Canadian tv dramas. A network of journals, conferences, and academic departments is coming into existence, but (with the important exception of Miller 1987) has produced virtually no work on reading Canadian television (I suggest elsewhere some reasons for this gap in Canadian intellectuals’ interests) — a task that is, anyway, constrained

by the inaccessibility of the material for study and, prior to the videotape-recorder, its ephemeral nature. Any choice of objects for study from the drama production of more than a decade will be somewhat arbitrary, and any analyses or readings that are not to be unreadably long will also reconstruct their objects for study selectively. My sample overlaps with Miller’s (1987) in that we both discuss ‘Empire Inc.,’ Chautauqua Girl, and Ready for Slaughter. There is therefore an example from-each of the three categories of drama

that I discuss — a mini series, a single drama, and a drama from an anthology series — common to Miller’s study and mine. Miller’s study emphasizes, as do I, the uniqueness, ina North American context, of the csc’s anthology-drama format and, in particular, the distinctiveness of the docudrama ‘For the Record’ series. However, not only is Miller's treatment of cBc drama much more comprehensive than mine (though

she does not venture, as I do in my discussion of ‘Duplessis,’ into French-language drama or, as I do with In the Fall, into commercial

National Culture; or, Where Is Here? 271 television drama), but she treats extensively examples of the csBc’s continuing series: ‘King of Kensington,’ ‘Cariboo Country,’ ‘Sidestreet,’

‘Seeing Things,’ and above all ‘Beachcombers,’ whereas I do not consider a continuing series. The overlaps between my selection and Miller’s will enable the reader to compare my ‘readings’ to hers (and

in a small way the shared choices constitute an advance towards the collective negotiation of meaning through ‘skilled readings’); the differences reflect chance and a different emphasis in our studies, mine to examine the notion of national culture in relation to television drama in Canada, hers to write history. I indicate below my reasons for choosing ‘Duplessis,’ ‘Empire Inc.,’ and ‘Vanderberg’ as mini series for discussion: Chautauqua Girl and In the Fall as single dramas; and Dreamspeaker, Dying Hard, Je me souviens, Every Person Is Guilty, Slim Obsession, and Ready for Slaughter from the

first decade of the anthology series ‘For the Record.’ The mini series is the most interesting dramatic form in contemporary television. It permits extensive representations, holds out the possibility

of attracting and building over the period of its transmission a large audience and of some ‘ensemble’ or ‘company’ synergy between the individuals brought together for its production. ‘Duplessis’ and ‘Empire Inc.’ were, at the time my research was carried out, the most successful

mini series on French and English networks of the csc in terms of audience ratings and critical esteem — favourable judgments, I think thoroughly merited. Now, perhaps, ‘Anne of Green Gables’ and ‘Lance et Compte’ would be chosen for analysis. ‘Vanderberg’ enjoyed no such

success but is interesting because of the unrealized possibilities its formula held (and partially realized) and because of its relationship to Take Over. Take Over was a single drama that, though not initially conceived as such, functioned as a pilot for “Vanderberg.’ Using single dramas as experiments in product development and taking the most promising

ventures as models for mini series is a common pattern in Tv drama. Chautauqua Girl demands attention because of its success with audiences

and, a characteristic shared with ‘Vanderberg’/Take Over, its westernCanadian location. ‘For the Record’ is unique as the only anthologydrama format in North America packaging single dramas (predominant-

ly with realist pretensions, often with close links to documentary or current-affairs television) into a series to better promote each individual program and build a regular audience for the series. I have chosen six of the fifty (1975-85) dramas produced as ‘For the Record’ programs, two from the periods of each of the series’ executive producers — Dreamspeak-

272 Culture, Communication, and National Identity er (1977) and Dying Hard (1978) from Ralph Thomas’s era (1976-9); Je me

souviens (1979) and Every Person Is Guilty (1979) from Sam Levene’s (1979-83); and Ready for Slaughter (1983) and Slim Obsession (1984) from Sig Gerber’s (1983—date). ‘For the Record’ dramas have also chosen the

basis of their representation of different regions of Canada: British Columbia in Dreamspeaker, the Prairies in Ready for Slaughter (though actually shot on the Bruce Peninsula, in Ontario, its theme is a Prairies

one), Newfoundland in Dying Hard, Quebec in Je me souviens, and Ontario in Slim Obsession and Every Person Is Guilty. Ralph Thomas, the

first executive producer of ‘For the Record’ (sharing that role in 1976

with Stephen Patrick when the ‘journalistic dramas’ were called ‘Camera 76’), wanted to produce a program each year from each of the major Canadian regions. That aspiration has been honoured more in the breach than the observance; Je me souviens is the only ‘For the Record’ drama from Quebec, and there is a tendency for settings to be those of Ontario (in part, because of the costs of shooting outside Toronto and

the decline in purchasing power of the drama budgets), but over the decade there have been programs set in each region. My choice has also been influenced by my interest in the creative personnel working on the dramas discussed. To some extent choice from ‘For the Record’ has been made on the basis of the auteur theory. Claude Jutra (Dreamspeaker), Paul Almond (Every Person Is Guilty), Allan King (Ready for Slaughter), Don Shebib (Slim Obsession), and Robin Spry (Je me souviens) are among the leading directors of films in Canada; they

are a goodly body of the acknowledged contemporary ‘auteurs.’ Dying Hard was directed by a less-well-known figure, Don Muldane (though a regular director in the early days of ‘For the Record’), but had as script

writer Bill Gough, one of the best examples of a talent who has developed through being able to work consistently in Tv drama through the csc Drama Department and who is now well known for, inter alia, ‘Charlie Grant’s War’ (1985).

John Hirsch (head of csc Drama 1973-8 and latterly director of the Stratford Festival in Ontario) had the policy of attracting the best Canadian directors to ‘For the Record’ and creating an environment in which new talent could develop. In Hirsch’s time, all except A Thousand Moons (1976) and the Peter Pearson (the first head of Telefilm Canada) productions (The Insurance Man from Ingersoll [1976], Kathy Karuks Is a Grizzly Bear [1976], and Tar Sands [1977]) were by first-time writers,

though Ralph Thomas was the only first-time director (Cement Head [1979]). The programs discussed are a representative sample of the work

National Culture; or, Where Is Here? 273 of the critical mass of creative personnel developed through the patronage of the csc, constituting the talent pool on which the Canadian government’s audio-visual strategy draws. Probably the best examples

of talent developed through the continuity of work and creation of a critical mass of creative personnel by csc Drama are Ralph Thomas and Mark Blandford. Both began their careers as journalists and publicaffairs producers, then developed as executive producers, directors, and scriptwriters through the csc, Thomas on ‘For the Record’ and Blandford in the English Services Division regional unit in Montreal, the base from which he launched ‘Duplessis’ and ‘Empire Inc.’ The dramas I discuss below are representative in quality (several other groups of half-dozen ‘For the Record’ dramas could have been chosen

that would have equally rewarded attention) and demonstrate the rightness of John Hirsch’s (and that of John Kennedy, his successor) policy as head of cspc Drama of fostering continuity and mixing production of serious single dramas (particularly in the ‘For the Record’

format) with popular series. Hirsch stated: I’m not so concerned about cutbacks or I’m not really concerned about a diminishing of volume which you know perhaps is only temporary. I'm very much more concerned about the general climate in which these things are happening. My main complaint concerns the inability of people who are in charge of funds to understand that to develop a field is an organic process. If you have no patience with growing things and if you have no confidence in the seed that you put in the ground and if, finally, you are not quite sure whether you even want to grow anything then there is no hope of any kind. This is much more serious than either money or volume. (Harcourt 1977b, 166-7)

‘For the Record,’ from 1975 to 1985 (fifty dramas), can be categorized

in terms of content (established from csc plot summaries and descriptions) into seven clusters of programs about politics, women, mental

illness, social institutions, farm life, native people, with a residual category for programs that fall into none of these clusters. Some programs (e.g., Dreamspeaker, which can be included in the ‘mental illness’ and ‘native peoples’ categories) may be included in more than one category. There have been twelve programs in the politics category (including Every Person Is Guilty and Dying Hard), of which Dying Hard

and Tar Sands aroused most public controversy (for an analysis of Tar

274 Culture, Communication, and National Identity Sands, see Feldman 1984); twelve programs about women (including Slim Obsession and A Matter of Choice [1978; retransmitted in 1979 and 1983] about rape and Kate Morris, Vice President [1984] about sexism in business); nine about social institutions (including Every Person Is Guilty, and Cop [1981] about a violent policeman, and Certain Practices [1979; retransmitted in 1979 and 1981] about medical malpractice); six about mental illness (including the two Jutra dramas Dreamspeaker and Ada [1977; retransmitted 1982] about a lobotomized woman, and One of Our Own [1979; retransmitted 1980] about a young man with Down’s Syndrome); six about farm life (including Ready for Slaughter and Someday Soon [1977] about the effects of the Garrison dam in North Dakota on Manitoba farmers, and Change of Heart [1984] a cac—National Film Board

co-production about the emancipation of a farm wife); three about native people (including Dreamspeaker and Where the Heart Is [1985] about

native women’s rights). The residual category of eleven programs includes Ralph Thomas’s directorial debut Cementhead (1979) about junior hockey players, Final Edition (1981; retransmitted 1982) about the closure of a long-established newspaper, and Hide and Seek (1984) about

computer hackers (the cBc’s most successful single drama in terms of foreign sales). The six ‘For the Record’ dramas chosen for analysis are represented in each of the seven categories of content, Je me souviens being chosen from

the residual category principally because of its explicit concern with Canadian national identity (the only other contender for analysis as a _ drama concerned with the national question, Someday Soon is about the ‘external contradiction,’ Canada’s relations with the United States) and its Quebec location.

Harrison, in one of few studies of Canadian television drama, differentiates Canadian film and television but I have not always done so: ‘Our drearily non Canadian film industry sheds very little light upon the life, values and concerns of the Canadian people in the 1980s. On the

other hand ... Canadian drama produced for television is an entirely different matter. Programming in recent years has been watched ... viewers have become increasingly impressed with both the sophisticated dramatic constructs and the degree to which programs attempt to reflect

the specific cultural, moral and social tenor of our tremulous times’ (Harrison 1981, 16).

There have been important differences in the historical evolution of

cinema and television in Canada but now it makes more sense to

consider live-action film and television drama as elements of a single

National Culture; or, Where Is Here? 275 audio-visual culture than to differentiate them. The dramas I discuss were all produced on film, and many of their directors (and scriptwriters and producers) are leading Canadian film-makers. But to discuss these works as cinema and to imply a categorical difference from other, televisual, works is not tenable. Audio-visual narratives, whether shot on film or video, exhibited theatrically or on a domestic television receiver, are (whether named as films or television dramas) modalities of an integrated audio-visual sphere. Accordingly I have appropriated various analyses that were developed for other media — principally cinema — and applied them to discussion of television. The Single Dramas: La misére canadienne

What is the nature of the Canadian culture that Harrison describes as being reflected in Canadian television drama? First, its presence is likely

to render Canadian cultural commodities (at least those in the audiovisual sphere) unsaleable in important markets. Grieve Horner and Associates state: ‘the international potential of Canadian programs should not be hobbled by making Canadian specificity a compulsory ingredient of Canadian content’ (cited in Caplan and Sauvageau 1986, 373); and Caplan and Sauvageau confirm: ‘what does sell, when we succeed in the big time is in most instances American programs made in Canada. The actors and production personnel may be more or less Cana-

dian, the locations usually neutralized by altering licence plates and taking down flags, may be Canadian, but the programs in their style and substance are Americar’ (1986, 369). Canadian culture, so far as film and television is concerned, must at least reflect the appearance of Canada and present individuals and actions that are identifiably Canadian. But Caplan and Sauvageau imply the existence of a ‘style and substance’ that is distinctively Canadian and goes beyond inclusion of the symbols of Canadian political authority — flags and licence plates. Frye (1971) argued that Canada has a distinctive ‘garrison mentality’

(that is, a paradoxical curiosity about and defensiveness towards the outside world) and an enduring preoccupation with the question:

‘Where is here?’ Concern with where is here and the garrison’s involution and defensiveness is manifest in the predominance of Canadian documentary productions. Wolfe (1985) refers to ‘the documentary tradition, the tradition of telling it like it is,’ as being ‘at the heart of Canadian film from its beginning’ (1985, 80). ‘Documentary’ is a slippery category and to attempt a definition more

276 Culture, Communication, and National Identity precise than Grierson’s usefully ambiguous ‘creative interpretation of reality’ is likely to lose more than is gained. Customarily, documentary has been differentiated from fiction, and discussion of documentary representation has thereby been ~ usually unproductively - directed into arguments about veracity and ‘Did it happen?’ It is more useful to retain the ambiguity of Grierson’s formula, which accommodates a

range of representations tracking between the sociological and the aesthetic but with, as Grierson stated, the emphasis on ‘sociological rather than aesthetic ideas’ (Hardy 1979, 78). In television drama, the English Services Division of the csc’s ‘For the Record’ series best exemplifies this documentary vocation.

5) ~ @

The Single Dramas: La Misére Canadienne

For the Record is a series of sixty-minute film dramas dealing with contemporary issues affecting the lives of Canadians. These ‘journalis-

tic dramas’ take current and pressing issues, and through the mode of dramatic fiction, interpret these issues and give them a human dimension. Each For the Record program strives to entertain, challenge and inform the audience with a fresh and provocative approach to its subject. (csc Mimeo, undated)

A series like ‘For the Record’ is unimaginable outside a public-service

broadcasting system. It is, as John Kennedy, head of cpc English Services Division (EspD) drama, said, the only anthology drama series in North America. Single dramas perform three functions in television: a

forum for development of new talent and experiment with new formulas, an outlet for creative activity not readily accommodated within the mainstream forms and conventions of television, and a form to represent contemporary concerns. In 1985, cBc English drama production was about 7o hours annually (a total that Kennedy aimed to raise initially to 100 hours and then to 150 hours, but he was frustrated by budgetary constraints), 13 hours of which were accounted for by the Vancouver-based series ‘Beachcombers’ (26 half-hour shows annually) and the remainder by single dramas (such as Chautauqua Girl), mini series (such as ‘Empire Inc.’ or

‘Some Honourable Gentlemen’), series (such as ‘Seeing Things’), telecasts of theatrical performances such as the Stratford Festival's Tartuffe and lolanthe, and the anthology single dramas ‘For the Record.’

278 Culture, Communication, and National Identity Too little production, according to Kennedy, to train, develop, and discover talent, although the drama budget of $25 million per annum compared favourably with those for news ($15 to 20 million) and public affairs ($30 million). Moreover, the English Services Division has had to spend the drama budget expensively, originating most of its product on

film (because of a shortage of electronic studio facilities), whereas French Services Division drama in Montreal can produce its studio téléromans relatively inexpensively (though ‘Le temps d’une paix,’ Radio Canada’s most successful téléroman, which ran for more than four seasons attracting each week an audience of from 2 million to 2.5

million viewers, had substantial location shooting). Budgetary constraints (exacerbated by the decline in the cac’s training allocations since 1976—7) have necessitated recruitment of drama producers from news, public affairs, and journalism. Each of the executive producers on ‘For the Record’ (Ralph Thomas 1976-8, Sam Levene 1979-82, Sig Gerber 1983—date) come from such backgrounds. Documentary is fundamental to ‘For the Record’; Sam Levene, when executive producer, said: “The drama has to be relevant; that is drama on

a public broadcasting system has a responsibility to do more than entertain. It must also challenge and provoke audiences. I’m talking about television drama ona public broadcasting system, the csc. Part of the drama, and I’m not saying all of it, must be serious, must examine

Canada today in a dramatic way and have something to say about issues’ (in Cinema Canada no. 75 [1981]: 17). John Hirsch, head of English

Services Division Drama at the inception of ‘For the Record,’ said: “To

reflect our country in an honest way ... to deal with our joys and problems | believe this series does just that in an exciting way’ (CBC Mimeo, undated); Sig Gerber: “For the Record moulds carefully and extensively researched facts into a universal experience ... [it] takes an uncompromisingly hard look at reality ... The scripts stick unrelentingly close to the basic facts and elements of story that add up to a realistic, emotionally accurate rendering without gratuitous embellishments. (csc Mimeo, undated); and Ralph Thomas echoed their views, stating that ‘For the Kecord’ should ‘explore social and political issues through dramatic form’ (interview with author, 7 March 1985). These formulas

diverge as well as converge, and there is no rigid style to ‘For the Record.’ The series exemplifies both the documentary project and the tendency to represent reality as ‘grey’ and problematic in the Canadian ‘garrison mentality.’ Such critical attention as the series has received — little other than Gail Henley’s article in Cinema Canada on its tenth

The Single Dramas 279 anniversary — confirms the definitions offered by the producers. Henley

states: ‘For the Record dramas are information laden, whereas the American counterparts are emotion-laden,’ and cites cBc research findings to support her judgment: The index that best exemplifies the uniqueness of For the Record dramas is the R/D index which measures how relaxing or demanding a show is. Most American shows tend to get a much more relaxing level, o to +20. They seldom fall into the negative area. Yet For the Record does this year after year, show after show, and not by accident. The producer does not want the viewer to sit passively, but to be involved, to think. It is demanding viewing. This series is unique because it is structured to appeal to thinking viewers ... Audience research has shown that current affairs and news programs such as The National and The Journal are less demanding viewing than many For the Record shows. (1985, 19)

Henley stresses the importance of research and documentation to ‘For the Record’: Nothing in For the Record one soon realizes is left to chance. Every aspect of the drama was scrutinized for truth and honesty. ‘We're always trying to break new ground in drama’ says Marylee McEwan who produced Ready for Slaughter. ‘Exploring different characters struggling with new ways of dealing with things that have become cliche’. The role of the farmer’s wife was written into the script based on what the research revealed. However during the shooting on a farm in the Bruce Peninsula a local women’s group called Concerned Farmwomen approached the producer and expressed their concern about the portrayal of the farm woman in the script. When the script was shown to them they were satisfied with the fairness of the depiction. “They’re partners on a farm. The job on a farm is seen as a partnership between a man and a woman’ says McEwan, ‘and our research which had been done prior to the shooting had helped shape the correct image of the farm woman in Ready for Slaughter.’ (1985, 20)

The realist ‘For the Record’ dramas testify to the range of expressive possibilities within both a realist aesthetic and the distinctive national discourse defined by Atwood (1972), Frye (1971), and McGregor (1987)

as characteristically Canadian. Although, as I have argued earlier,

280 Culture, Communication, and National Identity notions such as the ‘garrison mentality’ or ‘the Wacousta Syndrome’ are

insufficient to characterize the range and diversity of expression in Canadian television (and film) drama, there is no doubt that McGregor et al. have identified an important and long-lived tradition in Canadian representation. ‘For the Record’ well exemplifies this tradition. The

nationalist mandate of the series to ‘challenge, inform, provoke and enrich the viewers’ perception on matters of importance and relevance to Canadians and Canadian life’ (csc Mimeo, undated) has been manifested in both ‘active’ and ‘passive’ moods - ‘active’ when the national question is explicitly the focus of dramatic attention, ‘passive’ when the locus of concern is Canada but not, explicitly, Canada’s national experience or identity. ‘For the Record’ works in an ‘active’ mood, in Je me souviens, where the composition of the Canadian state and the precarious nature of its union is addressed, and in a ‘passive mood’ in such programs as Ready for Slaughter where the experiences shown are those of Canadians but are not uniquely and exclusively Canadian. Within its overall realist style ‘For the Record,’ as Henley states, offers ‘one of the few opportunities on television for individual Canadian voices to be heard. The structure so easily, so enviously [sic] can do something that no one else in this country has proven they can consistently do — produce high quality programming for a small price and set the standards for the independent pictures of this country’ (1985, 21). However, ‘For the Record’ tends to present Canada (e.g., in the series’ numerous representations of mental illness and flawed social institutions) as characteristically beset by problems in both the private and public spheres. The series’ representation of the Canadian reality is customarily the ‘grey reality’ defined by Wolfe. Dreamspeaker (1977) is about the formation of a self-sustaining and happy group of three males, whom mainstream society marginalizes, and the forcible dissolution of the group by the police and law and the refusal of life in separation by Peter, the Dreamspeaker, and the mute. Je me souviens (1979) uses the metaphor of the troubled marriage of a Québécoise and an anglo to represent the relations of French and English

Canada; Louise’s experience of loss and deracination are uppermost and, though the union persists, it does so without pride and hope and at the expense of an experience of past community. Dying Hard (1978) characterizes the experience of St Lawrence, Newfoundland, ‘once a town of fishermen, then miners, then widows,’ as representative of Canada ~ the narrator observes: “The story could

The Single Dramas 281 repeat itself anywhere in Canada any day.’ St Lawrence is dying because of the closure of Alcan’s mine and because of the heritage of industrial disease left to the miners. Every Person Is Guilty (1979) calls into question the basis on which the

Canadian state maintains the unity and sovereignty of Canada. Alex Campbell, an ex-journalist, pursues a personal enigma (why and by whom was his daughter injured) and discovers the program of the Canadian state to forcibly maintain its sovereignty in Quebec. Ready for Slaughter (1983) is concerned with the pressure of debt on farmers (551 Canadian farmers were bankrupted in 1984) and the experience of structural change in North American agriculture by a Canadian farm family. Those who are ready for slaughter are the farmers and their communities, as well as their livestock. Slim Obsession (1984) enacts the experience and consequences of a general social problem: the self-destructiveness brought on by a woman’s ~ attempt to conform to the prescribed norm of female beauty: to be slim.

The representativeness of these separate fictionalized experiences is implicit in their realist form. It is given a national focus in Dying Hard,

Je me souviens, and Every Person Is Guilty, which have an explicit national dimension, and Je me souviens and Every Person Is Guilty manifest

their national content in an ‘active mood.’ Their subject is the nature of the Canadian national identity and its relation to political institutions. Elsewhere, for example, in Dreamspeaker, Dying Hard, and Slim Obsession, the national referent is implicitly rendered in a ‘passive’ mood. In Dreamspeaker the authors (a disparate group of Canadians - Cam Hubert, the pseudonym of Ann Cameron, a Vancouver Island writer; Claude Jutra, a Québécois director; and Ralph Thomas, a journalist from the prairies) ~ took elements of the Canadian national formation — the native people and their culture, represented here by two Pacific Indian men —marginal to the dominant culture and its centres of power, and demonstrated dramatically the competence of the subordinate culture to

accept and comprehend, qualities superior to those of the dominant culture’s imperative to change and make conform. Dreamspeaker sets the

world-view, symbolic system, and way of life of west-coast Indians

against the value system, symbolic order, and institutions of the dominant white Canadian culture. The dominant is not presented as gratuitously vicious or oppressive; indeed, it is moderate and humane; but it is demonstrated to be less adequate, though more powerful, than the traditional order it displaces.

282 Culture, Communication, and National Identity In Dying Hard only once is the typicality of St Lawrence, Newfoundland, for Canada made explicit, when the voice-over states: ‘The story

could repeat itself anywhere in Canada any day.’ Many Canadians retain an image of their country as a primary producer fated to remain as

‘hewer of wood and drawer of water’ for the United States, able to control only the pace at which resources are pillaged and the nation itself

destroyed. Dying Hard can readily be appropriated to support this notion of dependency, and the power of the drama lends considerable

emotional credibility to the thesis. The beauty of St Lawrence, the hardness of its climate and terrain, the cost of winning its resources, the

psychological and cultural habits that its economy enforces can be perceived as representatively Canadian. Dying Hard, in this sense, is representative of ‘For the Record’ ~ a series of dramas that ‘grapple with

social issues,’ ‘examine the flaws and weaknesses,’ and take ‘an uncompromisingly hard look at reality’ (cBc Mimeo, undated). How-

ever, Dying Hard is unrepresentative in its refusal of the series’ customary narrative structure of a beginning, middle, and end, in that

order, and a temporally and spatially coherent fictional world. The inventiveness of Dying Hard’s narrative and its presentation of the positive, contradictory elements in the experience of St Lawrence — not

least, Newfoundland’s songs and music — offer the audience real pleasures and affirmations. Dying Hard ends with a testimony to the continuity of life in St Lawrence, a recognition of the productivity of the

ability to endure in its people, the value of the ‘male’ qualities that distinguish it. The voice-over narration states ‘St Lawrence will be here a hell of a long time after Alcan. A hell of a long time after all of them.’ The final shots under the closing credits show St Lawrence as a settlement of

striking austere beauty; the soundtrack features vigorous accordion music and a marvellous song. Analyses, such as mine, which are concerned with content and the way the real is represented by the artistic text, too readily lose sight of the aesthetic dimension. Representation of human misery, defeat, and victimization does not, as tragic dramas demonstrate, necessarily havea dispiriting and lowering effect on audiences. Indeed, for Aristotle the starting-point for his aesthetic was the question how and why humans can take pleasure in the artistic representation of events that, in reality, would horrify them. There is a danger in rehearsal of the content of ‘For

the Record’ of implying that critical representations are necessarily negative. They are not. Ready for Slaughter draws on what Harris (1966, 34) defines as the

The Single Dramas 283 Canadian agricultural myth: ‘Tf there is a myth about Canadian agriculture it is about the toil and uncertainty of farming in a harsh environment and this is a very different myth from in the United States.’ While there are no explicit cues in Ready for Slaughter, similar to those in Dying Hard’s soundtrack, to signal the Hacketts’ experience as paradigmatic of a general Canadian fate, they can be read as typifying Canada’s

place in the world economy and as pointing a national lesson. Slim Obsession, though unmistakably set in Toronto (a Toronto that does not have its flags and licence plates obscured) is a finely produced,

modest drama that transcends (to use an appropriate evaluative metaphor from the tradition of auteur criticism) both naturalistic concentration on an individual history and abstract sociological discourse about a big social problem. It capably represents both through its fictionalization of the transformation, physical and moral, of a Toronto housewife. But (here I think of the shots of Liz’s individual efforts and pleasure in solitary exercise, and self-indulgence in isolation and self-denial), through the resonances added to the basic narrative by the devices of mise en scéne (colour, lighting, composition are the crucial signifying elements), Liz’s project is invested with a general human significance. Her dilemmas, conflicts, and resolutions are not limited to those that are specific to her situation as a plump female Canadian but have general pertinence and speak of — and to — any individual human

project of self-transformation and disciplined orientation to a specific task. Liz’s obsessiveness and its consequences are not just those of slimmers. The sociological generalization of Slim Obsession — selfdestructive slimming is a pervasive problem — is made by showing Liz as

one of a class of women seeking to lose weight through negation (the self-denial of abstinence from food) and affirmation (development of a competence over and pleasure in one’s body through exercise). But Liz’s project is not articulated solely at this level of sociological generalization.

It is also represented as an instance of the general human project of achieving command over the world. In Slim Obsession Shebib has created a work that perfectly exemplifies the Chabrolian ‘little subject’ (Chabrol

1962) where an extensive representation is constructed out of an apparently modest subject. The ‘universality’ of Slim Obsession’s theme

establishes it as a drama that is as ‘continental’ or universal as it is Canadian. It is hard to read as a drama concerned with the nation or the

national question. Unless national character is manifested in the authorial signature of its director, Don Shebib, who is regarded as one of if not the most important of contemporary English-Canadian ‘auteurs,’

284 Culture, Communication, and National Identity ‘one of the best film-making talents of his generation whose first feature film Goin’ Down the Road is a key reference point in English Canadian film’ (Morris 1984, 269). Morris’s remarks echo the judgments made by

Handling on Goin’ Down the Road (1970) — a ‘landmark feature’ (Verroneau and Handling 1980, 73) —- and by Harcourt on Shebib’s films:

‘They are all important - important both in terms of understanding Shebib’s work and in terms of understanding something about the world we live in as Canadians’ (Harcourt 1977a, 212). Slim Obsession displays a number of Shebib’s authorial markings: ‘Shebib’s films are less about losers than they are about loners — like a good many Canadian films. And indeed Canada is a country in which there is very little sense of people working together collectively — especially in Toronto where

everybody seems to be working against everybody else’ (Harcourt 19774, 216). It also challenges the judgment on csc drama Shebib made at the beginning of the ‘For the Record’ era: SHEBIB: | think the film drama the csc does out of their Drama department is totally and completely incompetent, right down to the last detail. Their tape dramas are wonderful, they still have that expertise. I've never seen a decent film drama come out of the csc. They’re just dreadful, all of them. INTERVIEWER: You didn’t like the Camera ‘76 series [the name under

which the early ‘For the Record’ dramas were transmitted] that they did last year? SHEBIB: Well they were the best — I liked Peter Pearson’s Kathy Karuks Is a Grizzly Bear about the girl who swam Lake Ontario. The Insurance Man from Ingersoll was kind of corny but still it worked very well. Those

were good but the other stuff is just ... phew! INTERVIEWER: You weren’t approached to do any of those?

SHEBIB: No, their dramas are silly stories of girls growing up in the prairies, they’re boring. (Handling 1978, 110-11)

A ‘silly, boring’ story of a girl growing up in the prairies, Chautauqua Girl (1984), became csc Drama’s most striking success in the singledrama form.

Chautauqua Girl Chautauqua Girl - screened on 8 January 1984, in prime time (8:00 to 10:00

The Single Dramas 285 P.M.) over the full csc English network - is the most successful Canadian single drama of recent years. It enjoyed sufficient critical success to have become regularly invoked by advocates of Canadian content, those who, like Mark Starowicz (1984), regard ‘television [as] our national theatre. It’s not the National Arts Centre in Ottawa nor Stratford.’ Starowicz himself refers favourably to Chautauqua Girl as an

exemplary instance of ‘good Canadian drama’ and (together with ‘Empire Inc.’) a model for future productions. Pierre Juneau, president of the csc, in an address to the Canadian Club of Winnipeg (7 Feb. 1985) stated: ‘Looking back am immensely proud of the slice of Prairie life we filmed in Chautauqua Girl.’ Chautauqua Girl achieved an audience share of 29 per cent (2.629 million viewers) and an appreciation index of 77. What elements in this ‘nostalgic drama set in rural Alberta during the depression, on the backdrop of the United Farmers of Alberta organizing the voters ... hardly ... a jolt per minute American programme,’ as Starowicz described it (1984, 32), caused the mass audience (or strictly, the less than a third of it that watched Chautauqua Girl) and the cultural élite to approve and take pleasure in the spectacle? Naming the town in

which the action takes place ‘Fairville’ gives a clear sense of how Chautauqua Girl constructs an arcadian myth of the Canadian rural community and of the community’s ability to take command of its own destiny and achieve an individual and collective fulfilment commensurate with the potentiality signified by marvellous landscapes of golden summer barley stretching across a gentle landscape to the Rockies (a radically different representation of nature in Canada to that identified by McGregor [1987] as characteristic of the Canadian ‘langscape’).

The agency that brings about the self-realization of Fairville is the Chautauqua tent show. The productive influence of Chautauqua on the community is echoed by the commitment of Chautauqua’s girl — Sally Driscoll — to Fairville’s man (whom the community elects to the provincial legislature as the United Farmers of Alberta representative) —

Neil McCullum — and each to each other as lovers. The Chautauqua show brings culture, self-esteem, and a new set of values to the rural community. It is the catalyst through which Fairville recognizes its collective interest and it inspires the collective action through which the community realizes itself. Chautauqua provokes Fairville to create a new social institution that transcends the old ideologies, which had, in the past, divided the community. To get Fairville to pay its fee ($1,500, as one character says, the annual budget of the local school district) for the

Chautauqua show, Sally mobilizes the women of the community into

286 Culture, Communication, and National Identity producing for and organizing a sale of work: the ‘first ever interdenomi-

national bazaar in our district.’ The community, hitherto divided by ethnicity and religion, comes together through the agency of a cultural institution.

The parallel between Chautauqua and the csc is not explicitly signalled in the text of Chautauqua Girl but is not implausible. The advocates of national broadcasting for Canada — notably, Graham Spry

~ succeeded in mobilizing a united movement of disparate organizations to petition government for the organization that became the csc. A parliamentary committee considering the issue heard support for a national, publicly owned broadcasting network from an array of organizations and individuals which demonstrated a national consensus. The national council of women, the Catholic Women’s League, the Imperial Order of the Daughters of the Empire [sic], the ymca, the ywca, the Hadassah — all cast their voice for a national, Canadian, publicly-owned system. The United Farm Women of Alberta, the Trades and Labour Congress of Canada, the Canadian Congress of Labour, the Canadian legion, the Native Sons of Canada, the Ottawa Board of Trade, the Vancouver Board of Trade, the Civil Service Institute, the United Farmers of Alberta, the United Farmers of Manitoba — that is only a fragment of the list. Sixteen university presidents, the leaders of the Roman Catholic Church, leaders of the Anglican, United, Baptist and Presbyterian churches. Sir Robert Borden, Arthur Meighen, Louis St Laurent, Sir Ernest MacMillan, General Sir Arthur Currie, F.N. Southam, Sir George Garneau, Sir Robert Falconer, W.C. Woodward, John W. Dafoe. Several past presidents of the Chamber of Commerce, twenty general managers or directors of banks, the president of the Imperial bank, of the Bank of Nova Scotia, the general manager of the Royal Bank, the president of Monarch Life. (Starowicz 1984, 4)

In the process of joint activity, just as much as in collective consumption of the output of the resultant cultural institutions (whether the csc

or Chautauqua), Canadians experience themselves as united in a collectivity —’at home.’ And the content of the Chautauqua show resembles nothing so much as an evening of mixed programming on radio or television. Wolfe makes a similar judgment in his encomium on Chautaugua Girl: ‘the Chautauqua tent in Canada had been replaced by public broadcasting, a new kind of Chautauqua’ (1985, 59). Though the

The Single Dramas 287 location of Chautauqua Girl is strongly marked as rural Alberta in 1921,

the drama offers a locus for identification of a national self-image to the Canadian television audience. Chautauqua Giri constructs a unity

between the contradictions of the personal and the political, the community and the individual, the ethnic and the national, and makes a metaphorical equivalence between the Alberta farmers of 1921 and their

embrace of co-operation against the competition of the east and the anglo-Canadian television audience of the 1980s, recruiting the latter for

a national definition of Canada similar to Herschel Hardin’s ‘public enterprise economy’ against the private-enterprise, competitive, order of the United States. Between the key public scenes in Chautauqua Girl

(the bazaar and the election meeting) in which the female and male discourses are, respectively, articulated, Neil and Sally are shown

running through the ripe barley. Their eventual erotic union is pre-echoed in their exchange of looks. The physical location for their personal coming together is the locus for the symbolic unity — the national community — that they personify and that coheres around small farms. As in Ready for Slaughter, Chautauqua Girl powerfully mobilizes the Canadian agricultural myth (Harris 1966, 34). The dramatization of a myth of Canadian western history in Chautaugua Girlis very different from the critical interrogation of a national myth

(a different national past to be sure) performed in ‘Duplessis’ (Radio Canada 1977). Arcand and Blandford’s myth of Quebec is no less a

construct than Locke and Iscove’s myth of Alberta (and English Canada), but ‘Duplessis’ produces a historical understanding (from within a distinct and controversial value system) of the contradictions in Quebec nationalism. Chautaugua Girl offers the viewer a very easy

ride. Its aesthetic achievement is evident; the pleasure of the crane shots, location shooting, and performances that the $3.1 million budget

(‘the real cost including csc manpower and departmental plus plant overhead’ as its producer, Jeannine Locke, specified in a letter to the author [28 Mar. 1985]) makes possible is real enough. But, at bottom, Chautauqua Girl puts forward a version of history and the national experience that is uncontradictory, untroubled by adversity, nostalgic, and affirmative. We do not see the prairie winter or the precariousness of the rural life of the inter-war years on the Great Plains. The hardship and loneliness of life on the prairies is referred to constantly in Chautauqua Girl — indeed, the motor of the narrative is the community’s struggle to

honour its contract with Chautauqua in a lean year. And one of the deficiencies remedied by Sally Driscoll, the Chautauqua show, and the

288 Culture, Communication, and National Identity ‘culture that is every Canadian’s birthright’ that the narrative makes synonymous is the widowed old Mrs Ferguson’s need for company and attachment to community on her remote farm. But what the film shows is the Scottish piper playing as he walks through endless fields of ripe barley and the pleasure taken by the lonely old woman in contact with Sally and her lover, Neil, and in remarking a connection with her origins and cultural formation in Scotland, not the months of winter, the experi-

ence of isolation, of cultural deracination, and poverty; these savage experiences are constantly alluded to but their invocation in the characters’

speech is subordinated to the reiterated spectacle of summer landscapes; fertility; the golden colours of ripe grain and sunshine; the harmonies of music over extended shots of cars, buggies, and people across the horizontal line of the prairie. The length of shots, the exten-

siveness of the landscape, the colour balance of the images, the orderliness of compositions around strong horizontals signify abundance, relaxation, leisure, and confidence. Chautauqua Girl takes the negative qualities that Atwood, Feldman, and others define as the core of Canadian culture and experience, ‘the Wacousta Syndrome,’ and reverse their polarities - makes them positive. It is the flip side of In the Fall.

The National Idiom Feldman’s ‘The Silent Subject in English Canadian Film’ (in Feldman 1984) attempts to define and systematize the cultural continuities in English-Canadian film. His is an exercise in normative cultural history for the audio-visual, of the kind Atwood (1972) and McGregor (1987),

among others, have essayed for the literary. The core of Feldman’s argument is that English Canada lacks a cinematic (and cultural) language in which to express and rework its experience, because its language of thought is borrowed from the dominant metropoles of London and New York. His interesting analysis systematizes some evident: continuities in Canadian audio-visual representation but proceeds from prior assumptions about the nature of a nation and the axiom

that English Canada is a nation. Feldman’s argument is familiar: the nation is a distinctive human community bound together by factors that differentiate it from other nations. Factors such as language, culture, history, and experience are anterior to the political institution of a state, which, nationalists assume, should be the expression and guarantor of the distinctive forces that make a national identity and community.

The Single Dramas 289 The problem for Feldman is that Canada lacks the core distinguishing characteristic of a nation — its own language. Accordingly Feldman argues that silence and incoherence are the only authentically Canadian voices, for to speak is to use the tongue of foreigners; articulacy is the prerogative only of the outsider. ‘There are, of course, other responses to the failure of language. One is to associate successful articulation with the villains and outcasts of English Canadian Society as if their powers of speech automatically signify social deviance. The Peter Welsh character in Empire Inc, the debt collectors in Skip Tracer and Martha Henry in The

Wars see clearly through every problem. But the perceptual and linguistic trumps they hold are held precisely because of their alienation

from more sympathetic characters’ (Feldman 1984, 54). Clearly if Feldman’s argument is correct (though surely Kenneth Welsh is meant,

playing the lead, James Munroe, in ‘Empire Inc.’) English-Canadian film-makers are faced with formidable problems -— of finding aesthetic

modes of representing absence and of making them sufficiently attractive to audiences to establish hegemony for this authentic Canadian iconography in the face of competition from the different languages

of the dominant anglo metropoles, each thick with concreteness, presence, plenitude, and action. Feldman’s argument about EnglishCanadian cinema echoes those of other Canadian writers (both English and French) who define the Canadian national experience as one in

which Canadians have things done to them rather than do them themselves. To be Canadian is to be a victim. Atwood argues in her survey of Canadian literature, Survival, the title testifying to her sense of the national situation: ‘Stick a pin in Canadian literature at random and

nine times out of ten you'll hit a victim’ (1972, 39). Houle describes Quebec cinema as THE CULT OF THE HUMILIATED HERO, BEATEN BUT MORALLY RIGHTEOUS.

As a matter of fact, if we consider only a few of the positive characters (as opposed to repulsive figures like Seraphin, or Aurore’s stepmother), whose reputation has survived, and who are inscribed into the collective memory of the people (Alexis, Aurore, Donalda, Ti-coq), we realize that they have in common: 1/ the fact that their aspirations, their desires are always, at one point, in conflict with certain social duties, certain constraints imposed by the family, the community, or religion, and that each time they return to the ranks, bending, or giving in. 2/by making this choice, by sacrificing their life or their happiness,

290 Culture, Communication, and National Identity rather than failing in their duties (duties that are imposed on them), they acquire the halo of new moral qualities. Humiliated, resigned and

beaten, they at least have the conviction that they have not left the narrow path of Christian virtue, that they are in the right. A certain version of the history of Quebec as seen by the clerical and the petty bourgeois elites is condensed into these individual destinies. (1980, 165)

Many Canadian television dramas lend themselves to discussion in similar terms. The ‘For the Record’ series of ‘journalistic dramas’ well

exemplifies the documentary impulse that is associated with the ‘garrison mentality’ and its obsessive demand to know ‘where is here?’ ‘Duplessis’ has many elements that testify to the ‘misére québécoise’

that is a customary element in the téléroman. But none can be completely understood in terms of negativity, misérabilism, and victim-

ization. Indeed, ‘Duplessis’ makes an eloquent testimony to the harshness of the Québécois experience and simultaneously asserts heroic resistance to circumstances. And the poetic quality of the script, the inventiveness of the performances of Jean Lapointe, Patricia Nolin, and others, give the series an aesthetic power and excitement that is far from negative.

Arguments such as Feldman’s designate ‘the silent subject’ as distinctively Canadian because of anterior nationalist assumptions, the view that a nation exists and inheres primarily and principally in culture

and language rather than in political institutions. Because English Canada is a nation (and a bilingual and multicultural nation is a contradiction in terms) it must have a distinctive language and culture. Because the English language is not a distinctive property of English Canada, then English Canada’s language must lie somewhere else — in silence; in a refusal to speak, to articulate, instead to record, gesture, and be. Feldman’s notion of the silent subject (and allied notions such as ‘the garrison mentality,’ the documentary vocation, the victim, and humiliated hero that cluster in the same constellation) makes poor sense of such dramas as Chautauqua Girl, ‘Empire Inc.’ and “Vanderberg,’ which testify to other currents in Canadian culture, and to continuities that cut

across rather than parallel the political continuities of the state. But though the cluster of notions advanced by Frye, Houle, Atwood, McGregor, and Feldman engage with only some characteristics of Canadian television drama, there are undoubtedly instances in which they have real analytical power. Nowhere more so than in In the Fall.

The Single Dramas 291 ‘In the Fall’ ‘In the Fall’ (1983) commands attention both as an example of Tv drama production by commercial television and as an exemplar of Feldman’s thesis.

CKND in Winnipeg is the exceptional commercial broadcaster in Canada that disproves the rule that it is only the public sector that makes

television drama. CKND has made “The Catch,’ ‘Hunting Season,’ ‘Reunion,’ In the Fall, “The Prodigal’ and is remarkable not only as a commercial broadcaster that makes Tv drama but as a producer (and beneficiary of funding from crpc/Telefilm) from outside the Toronto/ Montreal core. ‘In the Fall’ (38 minutes) was made by CanWest Broadcasting (CKND) with support from the crpc in conjunction with the National Film Board of Canada, Prairie Region, and the Manitoba Institute of Education. It enjoyed critical success (more than ten awards in competition) and has

been sold to the BBc and to broadcasters in Ireland, Finland, and the Netherlands. It is based on a short story of the same name by Alistair MacLeod (1976). It concerns the miseries of an impoverished family on Cape Breton Island, surviving — since the father’s giving up working in

the mines in order to safeguard his damaged health — on irregular fishing work, the mother’s chickens, and — the focus of In the Fall — the

sale of the horse for mink food. Feldman defines some landmarks in English-Canadian cinema that pre-echo In the Fail. The first masterpiece of English Canadian cinemas, David Hartford’s 1919 production, Back to God’s Country. Nell Shipman who starred in and shaped that film is characterized as a nature child whose instinctive understanding of human and beast seems to distinguish her. Shipman is unable to settle any of her melodramatic crises through human discourse. Her redemption comes only from her ability to communicate with the film’s professed hero, a dog, and perhaps as well from the congruence between her silence and the vast frozen landscape. (1984, 54-5)

Feldman’s cultural history discusses films as varied as The Grey Fox (Phillip Borsos 1982) and La raison avant la passion/Reason over Passion (Joyce Wieland 1969) and defines a concern with nature and landscape (vide McGregor’s emphasis on ‘langscape’ in her The Wacousta Syndrome [1987]), notable characteristics in these films (also present in In the Fall),

292 Culture, Communication, and National Identity as representative of English-Canadian cinema. He writes, of The Grey Fox: ‘An identification of the protagonist with nature begins in the title. It extends through a magnificent visual metaphor’ (1984, 55), and of Reason over Passion: “Trudeau's call for an objective acceptance of logic is

shattered as the very letters of the slogans are permutated into meaninglessness against the backdrop of a photographed Canadian

landscape. True understanding of the land is equated not with a destruction of its description, but with a call for the undermining of description itself’ (pp. 55-6). It would be going too far to define the symbolic quality invested in landscape as a distinctive property only of Canadian cinema — it is a pervasive cinematic rhetoric — but there are many continuities to be found between In the Fall and the rhetoric Feldman identifies as characteristic of English-Canadian audio-visual works. If ‘horse’ is substituted for ‘dog’ in his account of Back to God's Country, we have in Feldman’s comments a kernel account of In the Fall. The ‘fall’ of the title suggests a metonym similar to that between ‘protagonist and nature’ as

Feldman perceives in The Grey Fox and the overwhelming power of nature represented by landscape in Reason over Passion. The ‘fall’ of In the

Fall is at once the temporal autumn and a post-lapsarian time, the human lives shown in the program being both fallen (in the Old Testament sense) and past their time of warmth and abundance, processing only towards the winter season of cold, denial, infertility. The title is the drama’s governing metonym and relates the landscape and representation of nature in the mise en scéne to the characters’ lives and experiences.

In the Fall fits well Feldman’s conception of silence in EnglishCanadian cinema. Despite the narration and dialogue of the characters, there are long moments of silence in the film where close-ups of the silent faces of the family are juxtaposed — the mother in the kitchen, the boy doing his homework, the father hunched on the bed sipping from a bottle of spirits (sharing pain and accepting its necessity). The world of In the Fall is bounded by light and dark, and frequently shots of bright light follow dark images (or black screens). The light is harsh, clear, and cold; darkness similarly lacks warmth and signifies absence, like the blindness that Scotty, the horse, acquired in the coal mine. In the Fall can be confidently placed within a long continuity in Canadian representation, whether cinematic or literary, and fits well the schemes of McGregor, Atwood, Frye, Houle, and Feldman. What, other than representation of national political institutions or

The Single Dramas 293 history, can be said to be distinctively Canadian subjects? The national content of ‘In the Fall’ is inexplicit; there is no decisive identification of its fictional world as Canadian; and the lives depicted are unrepresentative of the urban lives of most Canadians. While it is possible to place In the Fall within the Canadian literary tradition named by McGregor as the Wacousta ‘langscape,’ it could also, plausibly, be placed in others, such

as Scandinavian naturalism or even New England post-lapsarian symbolism.

As a product that satisfies the cultural objectives of Canadian communication policy and enjoys international sales appeal, In the Fall is pretty successful: it reconciles the contradictions defined by Dave Mintz (president of Global Tv, Canada’s largest commercial broadcaster): ‘One

hundred percent Canadian productions are least likely to recoup their costs because they lack international sales appeal’ (in Cinema Canada, Apr. 1985, 28). But it is not unambiguously Canadian. Chautauqua Girl is, in contrast, unambiguously marked as Canadian, but its brightness ill fits the Canadian cultural tradition identified by Atwood, Houle, Feldman, Frye, and McGregor. Speculation on whether Chautaugua Girl is more or less Canadian than In the Fall becomes ridiculous (In the Fall Canadian because misérabilist, Chautaugua Girl Canadian because of its explicitly Canadian political and historical referents; In the Fall not Canadian because unmarked by any explicitly Canadian discourse, Chautauqua Girl un-Canadian because outside the most strongly marked Canadian cultural tradition), not only for the pendantry that such discussion rapidly requires but because the criteria involved are necessarily conservative.

Feldman’s argument about English Canada’s absent voice and necessary silence is reminiscent of that advanced by Crémazie in nineteenth-century Quebec. Ce qui manque au Canada, c’est d’avoir une langue a lui. Si nous parlions iroquois ou huron, notre littérature vivrait. Malheureusement, nous parlons et écrivons, d’une assez piteuse facon il est vrai, la langue de Racine et de Bossuet ... Je le répete, si nous parlions huron ou iroquois, les travaux de nos écrivains attireraient l’attention du vieux monde ... On se pamerait devent un roman ou un poéme traduit de l’iroquois, tandis que l’on ne prend pas la peine de lire un livre écrit en francais par un colon de Québec ou de Montréal. Nous avons beau dire et beau faire, nous ne serons toujours, du point de vue littéraire, qu'une simple colonie. (1882, 40-1)

294 Culture, Communication, and National Identity Quebec, in the hundred years between Crémazie’s statement and Denys Arcand’s script for ‘Duplessis,’ ‘found’ a language and a voice for its experience. Joual is but one mark of Quebec’s emancipation from the

‘vieux monde.’ But the thick texture of the ‘vecu’ that distinguishes works such as Mon Oncle Antoine (1971), J.A. Martin Photographe (1976), Les Plouffe (1953-9; 1985), or ‘Duplessis’ (1977) is not separate from the

‘misére québécoise’ to which Houle refers (and which is, as Atwood suggests, a cultural constant in both Canadas) and which Québécois television viewers rejected (Canada/Quebec 1985). Is then ‘Canadian content’ (if this notion is not simply to designate a product manufactured in Canada, like the quota quickies for exhibition in the United Kingdom, on which Vancouver's film industry was founded, or Atlantic City and Black Christmas, which have no evident Canadian-ness) misery, negativity, and silence? Is, as Atwood claims, Louis Riel the paradigmatic Canadian (celebrated in cpc/Green River Production’s 1979 three-hour drama ‘Riel’): ‘Riel is the perfect all Canadian failed hero — he’s French, Indian, Catholic revolutionary and possibly insane, and he was hanged by the Establishment’ (1972, 167). And if, as Toogood suggests, ‘the most expertly executed examples of today’s mass culture’ (1969, 156) are American television programs (from which — if their nationalist vocation is to be realized — Canadian

productions must be differentiated), Canadian audio-visual producers are caught in an uncomfortable dilemma. If the attractive elements in mass culture are American, then Canadian cultural producers will find it hard to advance out of a misérabilist redoubt. For to adopt a popular rhetoric will tend towards abandonment of a distinctive Canadian-ness and the embrace of continentalism or américanité.

‘Duplessis’ (1977), when shown on the csc’s English-language television service, was preceded by an introduction by Conrad Black explaining Duplessis’s politics and history for anglophone viewers. Black is introduced as the author of a biography of Duplessis (Black 1977)

on which, as a voice-over states, ‘this series is partly based.’ Black was, himself, an activist in the Union Nationale party, associated with Daniel Johnson (one of the characters presented in “Duplessis,”’ who became

premier of Quebec), and is now a very powerful businessman, who controls the Daily Telegraph, and is president of the Argus Corporation

and whose career began with transformation of the economics of a Quebec newspaper, the Sherbrooke Daily Record. In his introduction Black testifies to the importance of Duplessis -— ‘Maurice Duplessis is now as much a figure of French-Canadian folklore

The Single Dramas 295 as of its history’ — and cites Duplessis’s obituary in Le Devoir (written by

André Laurendeau, the editor of Le Devoir from 1947 to 1963), which stated that Duplessis ‘dominated the public life in Quebec for more than a generation.’ But Black’s diction is far from Duplessis’s affectation of ‘Yair un peu habitant’ — rather his vocabulary and syntax imply an educated audience and offer significant obstacles to general accessibility and comprehension. He says of Duplessis, for instance, ‘Quebec and its government were largely emancipated from the tutelage of the Roman Catholic bishops, the Federal Government, the English Quebec business establishment ~ Duplessis more than anyone else achieved this’ and “Duplessis was not above the affectation of uneducated speech but his habitual conversation was not at all the rustic caterwauling for which those who listen to the original French version should be prepared.’ Elsewhere in the introduction, Black speaks of Duplessis’s ‘patrician adversary Alexandre Taschereau.’ This is a clear example of the rhetoric

of cBc’s television being such as to exclude the mass audience. An introduction is surely the occasion for tempting the audience, not fora lecture in a recondite academic vocabulary. Doubtless the modest audiences for ‘Duplessis’ in English Canada are the result of its French dialogue, subtitles, and lack of production values, but some blame must surely rest with Black’s forbidding introduction. It is unfortunate that

Black chose, or was given, this academic diction, for elsewhere he displayed a formidable capacity for vigorous colloquialism describing Ramsay Cook, the author of a critical review of his biography of Duplessis, as ‘a slanted, supercilious little twit’ (cited in Newman 1979, 43).

A host of exceptions can be found to definitions designating the Canadian style as documentary and Canadian content as misérabilist. Discovering where is here is not the only task for Canadian Tv drama and a misérabilist representation is not the only response to the question. The critical politique of Canada’s leading anglophone film critics — Piers Handling and Peter Harcourt — has been to promote the creation of images of Canadian experience in which a positive national

self-image can be found (for a characterization and critique of the Handling/Harcourt project, see Elder 1985). Among the television dramas considered here, Chautaugua Girl, Vanderberg,’ and ‘Empire Inc.’ offer a positive national self-image Dorland’s review of “Vander-

berg’ (‘Requiem for a Canadian Hero,’ in Cinema Canada no. 104 [February 1984]) testifies to the intensity of desire for a positive national self-image and for imaginative fictions that represent Canadians who do

296 Culture, Communication, and National Identity rather than are done to. Hank Vanderberg’s catch phrase ‘Let’s do it’ crystallizes the qualities that rightly aroused Dorland’s enthusiasm: ‘First ever outwardly looking Canadian dramatic series. ‘Vanderberg’ is the first Tv inkling of a Canadian claim to globalism: a conquest of the

territorial limits of the Canadian imaginary. For the first time that anguishing internal refusal to be that is so central to the Canadian self has been overcome’ (1984, 16).

Dorland (1984) writes of the ‘Canadian self’ and the ‘Canadian imaginary,’ but Canada experiences little circulation of anglophone television drama in the francophone sphere, and vice versa. Both language communities consume far more American drama than they do

that of the other Canadian language community. The only ‘For the Record’ drama concerned with Quebec, Je me souviens, had the worst ratings and appreciation indices of the programs I discuss. (Appreciation Index of 49 and 539,000 viewers. In the year of transmission of Je me souviens the average appreciation index and rating for ‘For the Record’ were 63 and 857,000.) The program had a French title and some dialogue

in French (with English subtitles). An outstanding success of Radio Canada’s drama ‘Duplessis’ was, on its first screening, watched by a quarter of the francophone population of Canada. When shown dubbed on the csc, it attracted an average audience of 150,000, and when subtitled, an average audience of 269,000. Together the two screenings achieved an anglophone audience share of 4.5 per cent. The same is true of ‘Lance et Compte.’ There is little ‘cross-over’ viewing of cac drama by francophones or Radio Canada drama by anglophones. “Empire Inc.’ was highly exceptional in attracting (for its final episode) an anglophone audience of 1,039,000 and a francophone audience of 1,210,000. Times have changed since Eric Till’s comments to Miller (1987, 27) (indeed Till directed the mini series ‘Glory Enough for All’ [1987], using the ‘American’ bio-pic genre for a series about the Canadian producers of insulin, Banting and Best, which was made as a United Kingdom-— Canada co-production). cpc drama now explores ‘American’ dramatic forms such as the miniseries as well as maintaining a commitment to the documentary dramatic mode that numerous commentators have identified as distinctively Canadian. A shift in the balance to which the csc’s

1986-7 drama schedule testifies: one ‘For the Record’ and four mini series. Canada’s attempt to develop domestic equivalents to ‘Dallas’ in such

programs as ‘Vanderberg’ and ‘Empire Inc.’ is one instance of an international movement. France with ‘Chateauvallon,’ West Germany

The Single Dramas 297 with ‘Schwartzwaldklinik,’ the United Kingdom with ‘Howard's Way,’ and the Netherlands with “Herrenstraat 10° have similarly attempted to

rework American forms in a national idiom. But in each national instance there is a pervasive suspicion of the new initiatives and the move from the good old things of the national idiom has been anathematized by critics as a move towards a bad new international, or American, rhetoric.

The Continental Culture and Canadian Television Drama: The Mini Series

The Americanisation of world culture so often commented on and deplored might be better described as the discovery of what world cultural tastes actually are and adoption of those into American media. (Pool 1975, 48)

American television drama exhibits more variety than is customarily acknowledged, but the melodramas ‘Dynasty’ and ‘Dallas’ are often taken as typical instances of American television-drama productions. Both series are organized around an endless process of conflict and reconciliation performed by icons — Blake, Alexis, Kristal, Sue Ellen, ].R., and so on. These icons have few of the characteristics that, as the etymology suggests, pertain to character. They are not individuated as are those who people novelist fictions, such as Huck Finn, Dorothea Brooke, or Fabrizio del Dongo, but rather symbolize a set of fixed values

whose meanings are articulated in recurrent acts of behaviour and appearance. The credits of ‘Dynasty’ establish sex and power as field of force binding the dramatic personae and actions together, and individu-

ating them within that shared field. Blake is shown next to a phallic skyscraper, which the camera pans up; Kristal is shown descending a staircase on the opposite side of the screen to that given to Blake. She is matched with a circular display of jewellery. Simple recurrent opposi-

tions — male, female; up and down; left of screen, right of screen; circular, linear — are combined to signify iconographically in a narrative where events follow each other to express emotion rather than attempt verisimilitude. The worlds of “Dallas’ and ‘Dynasty’ are worlds in which

The Mini Series 299 the forces of sex and power are simply set in motion. They are not worlds in which the specific historical institutional forms through which real people live those forces, through marriage, parenting, work, and so

on, are represented. That is the point. ‘Dallas’ and ‘Dynasty’ offer viewers a fictional world in which necessity is abolished and Blake and J.R., Alexis and Sue Ellen, can specialize in emotion. Their discourse, to take E.A. Poe’s often-quoted distinction from his essay on Hawthorne, is that of the tale not the novel: A skilful literary artist has constructed a tale. If wise, he has not fashioned his thoughts to accommodate his incidents; but having conceived, with deliberate care, a certain unique or single effect to be wrought out, he then invents such incidents — he then combines such events as may best aid him in establishing this preconceived effect. If his very initial sentence tends not to the outbringing of this effect, then he has failed in his first step. In the whole composition there should be no word written, of which the tendency, direct or indirect, is not to the one pre-established design. And by such means, with such care and skill, a picture is at length painted which leaves in the mind of him who contemplates it with a kindred art, a sense of the fullest satisfaction. The idea of the tale has been presented unblemished, because undisturbed; and this is an end unattainable by the novel. (Poe 1927, 188)

(I would like to acknowledge here my debt to E. Deidre Pribram — one of my graduate students at Temple University, Philadelphia, in 1985, from whom I learnt much — who helped to stimulate and clarify my thoughts on ‘Dynasty.’)

Canadian television dramas are more novelistic than are ‘Dynasty’ and ‘Dallas’; they are concerned with specific histories, individuals, and institutions. They aspire to the realistic — towards answering the question formulated by Northrop Frye, ‘Where is here?’ — not, as do American television melodramas (which international television audiences find so seductive), to creating a fabulous fictional world in which the limits of plausibility are stretched and real time and placedness minimized. The cultural forms of the two North American societies (if I may

continue with grand generalizations to which a host of exceptions spring to mind) have different competences. For instance, American television drama is ill at ease with didacticism -— compare the use of

300 Culture, Communication, and National Identity lectures on breast cancer in ‘Cagney and Lacey’ with csc dramatizations such as ‘Drying Up the Streets’ (1978) on drug addiction, and ‘You've Come a Long Way Katie (1981) on alcoholism. But America’s unnovelistic fictions, articulated for emotional ‘affect’ rather than realistic ‘effect,’

are among television’s most popular aesthetic forms, although the assumptions of most television critics — vide Wolfe — are as hostile to them as were those of literary critics to Poe. But the forty-ninth parallel is not a Chinese wall — American television has its realistic ‘Where is here?’

programs and Canadian television, examples of the melodramatic forms and popular accent of U.s. television.

Two cBc mini series — one that successfully attracted audiences, critical esteem, and foreign sales and one that did not — exemplify the cBC’s creative appropriation of popular American models. Both ‘Vanderberg’ (1983) and ‘Empire Inc.’ (1983) ‘Americanize’ the Canadian realist discourse exemplified by ‘For the Record.’ The third mini series | consider here, Radio Canada’s ‘Duplessis’ (1977), was made by the same ‘team’ — Denys Arcand and Mark Blandford — as was ‘Empire Inc.’

‘Duplessis.’ in contrast to the anglophone productions, strikes its aesthetic roots in Québécois popular entertainment (for example, its star, Jean Lapointe, not only was one of Quebec’s most popular variety performers whose doings were featured in the popular press but also,

like the character he portrayed in ‘Duplessis,’ was known to have a formidable capacity for drink) rather than in the continental mini series. I discuss ‘Duplessis’ here because it and ‘Empire Inc.’ are best under-

stood as complementary representations of the Canadian whole, in which their heroes are given different national representative roles — Duplessis as a political representative and member of the Québécois ethnic class and Munroe, the champion of Canadian national economic development. ‘Duplessis’ presents its hero (at least, in the full francophone version of the series) as more contradictory and problematic than

does ‘Empire Inc.’ its national champion, James Munroe. (Possibly Kenneth Welsh — like the actor, Michael Hogan, who plays the title role in ‘Vanderberg’ — played Munroe too softly and engagingly, whereas Jean Lapointe seized the opportunities offered by the role of Duplessis

to display the malign and destructive seductions of power.) Titans: ‘Empire Inc.’ and “Vanderberg’

The six-part (six one-hour programs) mini series ‘Empire Inc.’ was first screened between g January and 13 February 1983 on the csc’s

The Mini Series 301 English network and, shortly afterwards, dubbed into French, on Radio Canada. ‘Empire Inc.’ was successful in terms of critical esteem, favourable press reviews, and international sales but did not command commensurately larger audiences than other dramas of Canadian origin. The final episode, screened at 9:00 P.M. on the evening of Sunday 13 February, secured an anglophone audience of 1,039,000, a 10 per cent share, and an appreciation index of 88. The modest size of the mini series’ audience is a measure of the relative unattractiveness of cBc’s drama compared to

alternatives. ‘Empire Inc.’ was scheduled against one of the highest budgeted and most successful of all mini series, ‘The Winds of War.’ When shown dubbed into French, on Radio Canada, Empire Inc.’ achieved an audience of 1.21 million. The series was orchestrated by Mark Blandford, the executive producer, scripted by Doug Bowie (with

whom Blandford subsequently collaborated on ‘Hullo Suckers’, and directed by Denys Arcand and Doug Jackson (Blandford was to have directed two episodes of ‘Empire Inc.’ himself but judged the commitments of executive producer and director to be too heavy). ‘Empire Inc.’ was a co-production of csc French and English services divisions, with significant contributions in kind — including the use of studio space — from the National Film Board of Canada. In spite of concentration of resources from public-sector institutions to produce what was, by Canadian standards, a high-budget production, Blandford points out that the production budget of ‘Empire Inc.’ approximated to the publicity budget of ‘The Winds of War.’ ‘Empire Inc.’ was not the first major co-production between English and French services divisions (“The Immigrants’ and ‘Sur la c6te du Pacifique’ are among the precedents) but its harnessing of resources from a variety of sources is unusual. Blandford and Bowie were unable to reproduce the financing of ‘Empire Inc.’ with ‘Hullo Suckers’ (a mini series centred on soldiers returned to post—First World War Montreal); Blandford particularly deplored the nrp’s refusal to participate: ‘They told me they were not interested in something that was intended for a mass audience. It’s kind of too bad that they’re taking this essentially elitist approach’ (Globe and Mail, 6 June 1985, 13).

Canadian and foreign commentators saw ‘Empire Inc.’ in terms of

American melodramas; it was marketed by csc Enterprises as a Canadian ‘Dallas’ and was so perceived in, and outside, Canada: A sort of Northern answer to Dynasty and Dallas this Canadian pro-

302 Culture, Communication, and National Identity duced mini series follows familiar territory examining the lifestyle and traumas of a wealthy family. Kenneth Welsh plays a Depression-era tycoon whose ruthlessness makes him the target of fellow executives. There are also personal problems in the form of his sons and daughters, and if this all sounds like the Carringtons and the Ewings, you’re right on target. (Philadelphia Inquirer, 6 Apr. 1985, 60) Doc Blandford kept re-issuing his prescription in no uncertain terms, definitely ruled out was the bitterly earned pill that has been our traditional dramatic medicine on Canadian television. Instead Blandford repeatedly promised a handy concoction that mixed the sweet schlock of Dallas with the tasteful tang of Masterpiece Theatre. Well that’s exactly what he’s delivered — Soames Forsyte and J.R. Ewing neatly rolled up into one James Munroe. (Globe and Mail, 8 Jan. 1983, Ex)

Empire Inc is the kind of epic Canadian Tv viewers have always lacked and always needed at some deep emotional level. It’s a lusty clichéridden, fast-paced Canadianized Dallas. (Toronto Star, 9 Jan. 1983)

Bowie said that he aimed to attract a middle ground — not just audiences who like prestige programmes such as Brideshead Revisited but also those who tune to Dallas or Dynasty. He has done just that, in the process creating an anti-hero who makes J.R. Ewing and his ilk look like punks. (Canadian Press in the Truro Daily News, 20 Dec. 1983)

The promotional advertisement for ‘Empire Inc.’ in Tv Guide ~ America’s Television Magazine (Philadelphia edition, 33, no. 14 [6 Apr. 85]:

76) includes four oil derricks in the image, a component of business empires that has no part in Munroe’s; the source of his power is hydroelectricity. But the derricks assimilate ‘Empire Inc.’ more closely to ‘Dallas,’ and to the imagined expectations of u.s. television audiences, than would a dam or turbines — authentic components of Munroe’s empire. Dorland (1983), in his otherwise excellent review of ‘Empire

Inc.’ disassociates the series too emphatically from its American equivalent in order to emphasize the national distinctiveness of the Canadian product: ‘Except in the most superficial sense of being about rich people in big houses Empire Inc bears no comparison with Dallas’ (p. 35).

The Mini Series 303 ‘Empire Inc.’, “‘Vanderberg,’ and the u.s. melodramas have important similarities: all have heroes of the ‘new’ bourgeoisie, posit business as an

arena in which power and the instrumental use of other people can be dramatized, and are concerned with the capacity of families to contain and realize the desires of their members. But unlike the American series,

‘Empire Inc.’ is a closed narrative of finite length, centred on a single figure whose activity sets the terms on which other characters live their

lives. It offers characters who are seen changing over time and experiencing internal contradictions, and represents its fictional world in specific historical and national terms. J.R. Ewing, though unmistak-

ably American, is not signalled, as is James Munroe (and Hank Vanderberg), as representative of a national experience and aspiration.

Here the Canadian series do rework a ‘continental’ vocabulary in a distinctive ideolect. The Globe and Mail and Canadian Press critics who interpreted ‘Empire Inc.’ as straddling the forms of American television melodrama and British television historical drama identified some of the distinctiveness of ‘Empire Inc.’ Their judgments are echoed by Wolfe:

‘The show consciously tried to find a middle ground between the production values of such British serials as Brideshead Revisited and the popular appeal of such American melodramas as Dallas. Certainly it was far better written and performed than Dallas’ (1985, 46).

In ‘Dynasty’ and ‘Dallas,’ dramatic conflict flows from the clash of ‘stereotyped’ protagonists who stand clearly and straightforwardly for

a few stable qualities or vices. The location for their actions is a recognizable contemporary world, but one that is marked by no specific historical determinations. To be sure, ‘Dallas’ is set in Dallas, Texas, in the 1970s or 1980s, but the fictional Dallas has no real past, any more than do the youthful characters, whether grandparents or childless, that

people it. Timelessness is one of the penalties paid for narratives without closure: in contrast, the finite span of ‘Empire Inc.’ (six episodes) enables ageing, reflection on the past, self-consciousness, and

awareness of the losses of opportunity past choices entail to enter its fictional world. In ‘Dallas’ or ‘Dynasty,’ because there is no end to fictional time there can be no irretrievable lost possibilities (indeed, characters return from the dead): one of the most potent seductions held out by such stories. But ‘Empire Inc.’ insists on time and history — it includes documentary film and radio sequences (the Wall Street crash and the Depression bread lines, Chamberlain’s declaration of war broadcast in September 1939, the Normandy landings) and its voiceover narration is customarily in the past tense, setting the dramatic

304 Culture, Communication, and National Identity action in a historical present — shows the ageing of its central characters,

and testifies to the power and endurance of Munroe’s empire by maintaining the temporal integrity of the spaces he inhabits; his office and corporate headquarters, his Square Mile home (shot in Van Horne’s old home, now the Mount Stephen Club), while the surrounding world changes as decades pass. Styles of women’s dresses, motor cars, and music mark the passing of time outside the spaces marked as Munroe’s, but the interiors he controls endure. The distinctiveness of ‘Empire Inc.’ is not simply its choice of a Canadian milieu, hero, and history but also

its mode of narration and aspiration to present an effect of the real. Pribram (1985) comments on the differences between the narrative strategies of ‘Dynasty’ and ‘Empire Inc.’: ‘Dynasty’s scenes open with lines such as “So you broke off your engagement with Amanda” ~ no pleasantries or wasted words but right to the heart of the matter. Empire Inc tends to establish setting, character and event before working into

the issue the scene is meant to deal with. For instance we are shown Munroe and his wife dining, we are shown a close up of the meal, we watch the servants’ movements before the telephone rings and Munroe is informed of his daughter’s arrest’ (1985, 11). The scene to which Pribram refers (in episode one of ‘Empire Inc.’) is one in which the slow articulation of events establishes the frozen stasis of Munroe’s marriage and the chilling respectability of good society in Montreal and, though not wholly characteristic of ‘Empire Inc.’ (much of the pleasure of which rests in Munroe’s ability to unfreeze the status

quo and turn the powerful resulting flux to his advantage), supports Pribram’s pertinent distinction. ‘Dynasty’ permits no such arrest of the narrative flow and proceeds by pelting the audience with incident and emotion. The narration in ‘Empire Inc.’ shows how and why events

unfold, the causes of action, and the emotions experienced and expressed by its characters, whereas ‘Dynasty’ is constructed to prioritize the bombardment of the audience with incident and emotion not, as does “Empire Inc.,’ creation of a dramatic world with an evident historical referent. In ‘Empire Inc.’ the approximation of dramatic time

to real time (fewer ellipses, fewer ruptures in temporal and spatial continuity than in the American melodramas) renders its world more ‘real’ than that of ‘Dynasty,’ in which continuity is not provided through a simulacrum of history but through a precarious equilibrium of rapidly

articulated incidents and emotions: Empire Inc follows a different pattern of structuring its subplots. One

The Mini Series 305 of the reasons it feels like Empire Inc’s scenes are longer and fewer than Dynasty’s is because Empire Inc tends to resolve its subplots all at once before moving on to the next, rather than going back and forth between them as Dynasty does. Dynasty follows a more classical Hollywood pattern of plane crash, family setting, plane crash, different family setting, plane crash, rescue operation. Empire Inc on the other hand goes from scene nine right through scene fifteen on one subplot — business — without interruptions by other subplots or characters. In fact not a single woman appears in these six scenes which means that from one commercial break to the next — scenes twelve through fifteen — the show presents nothing but men functioning in a business capacity. This same pattern is repeated once Cleo is reintroduced. From scene twenty in which she is smuggling through scene twentyseven in which she confronts her father for buying off her financé each scene (a total of seven) is devoted to an aspect of the Cleo subplot

without interruption. One result of this is that though the business sequence involves six separate scenes and Cleo seven it is harder for the viewer to separate them because the content causes them to feel it as a continuum and therefore read the group of scenes as one long scene or sequence. This cuts down on the sense of excitement provided by criss-crossing between a multiple of events. It makes Empire Inc feel like things are moving along more slowly and that in fact fewer things are happening. (Pribram 1985, 11)

An ordering principle is imposed on the narrative of ‘Empire Inc.’ by grouping scenes into units, rather as the historian imposes an order on

the contradictory events of the past by grouping them in order to identify the forces that have shaped the present. In ‘Dynasty’ no such ordering is imposed; rather, audiences are exposed to a heterogeneous and compelling continuous present in which events and emotions make their claims on the viewers’ attention all the more urgently because of their fluidity. ‘Dynasty’ offers its audiences a fictional world in which, because of the causal relations between events are attenuated, more or less anything can, and does, happen; ‘Empire Inc.,’ a world in which the

past constrains and determines the possibilities of the present. The strength of these forces for the status quo is the measure of Munroe’s heroic qualities in shaping the world in his image. The materiality of the world portrayed in “Empire Inc.’ (its scrupulous imitation of a bounded time and space — Montreal, 1929-60) excludes certain possibilities and

306 Culture, Communication, and National Identity loci for audience identification. It is less general in its invitation to vicariously experience its world than is ‘Dynasty.’ The world of ‘Empire

Inc.’ is that of an anglo-Canadian heterosexual male capitalist, and though that world is the dominant one in Canadian society, its point of view and the experience it offers can be shared only by a minority of the Canadian television audience. ‘Dynasty’ and ‘Dallas,’ while located in unrepresentatively wealthy milieus, do have more space for imaginative

engagement by a wide range of audience members. ‘Dynasty’ has a greater plurality of characters (of varying sexual orientations) and a narrative that is less centred on a single individual. Kristel, Alexis, Amanda, and Steven have roles that are more important than their equivalents, such as Catherine, Cleo, and Laura, in ‘Empire Inc.’ The choice of Monroe as the character of whom the narrative turns lends ‘Empire Inc.’ a powerful integrating point of view, which stands as representative of the dominant forces in what Blandford called the era (l’6poque) and the city (une ville Montréal) in Le Devoir (20 Jan. 1982, 6)

but also gives ‘Empire Inc.’ a less-multivalent audience appeal. The characters in ‘Dynasty’ inhabit a fantastic playground where economic activity or necessity is absent, thus permitting many more points of entry for non-heterosexual male finance capitalists and their sympathizers than does ‘Empire Inc.’ ‘Dallas’ and ‘Dynasty’ and the American melodramas cloned from them offer audiences a world in which characters have the leisure and wealth to specialize in emotion. The necessity of keeping bread on the table or of subordinating adult erotic experience to the demands of work or parenting does not enter (or, if these demands do enter, they are

rapidly managed) the fictional world of the American television

melodrama. Characters are able to live out their erotic and emotional potentiality, unconstrained by the necessities of day-to-day experience. In such programming, emotion can be sought and played out because it is not for real. No fundamentally damaging consequences attend it. The

violence in ‘Starsky and Hutch’ or the car crashes and shooting in ‘The A Team’ similarly enable audiences to play with extremes of behaviour ina

fictional world where no lasting damage is done. No one is changed, either, by the experience of betrayal by J.R., manipulation by Alexis, ora thrashing by B.A.

‘Vanderberg,’ too, has similarities to ‘Dallas.’ Hank Vanderberg’s Calgary hydrocarbons business is closer to the Ewings’ Texas than either

the provincial newspaper industry of France’s ‘Chateauvallon’ or the

Amsterdam wine merchants of the Netherlands’ ‘Herrenstraat 10,’

The Mini Series 307 which form the locations of two of European television’s attempts to rework ‘Dallas’ in a national idiom. The choice of Alberta’s oil and ranching industries as the focus for “Vanderberg’ is audacious, risking misrecognition of “Vanderberg’ by audiences whose expectations have been informed and educated by ‘Dallas.’ A television series moving, as does ‘Vanderberg,’ between the business worlds of the oil industry, ranching, and women’s retail clothing and the personal worlds of family marriage, parenting, adultery, and extramarital romance invites com-

parison with ‘Dallas,’ a comparison that the credit sequences of ‘Vanderberg,’ showing the series’ main characters enjoying the prerogatives of their élite status — an orange Ferrari, executive jet, helicopter rides over the Rockies, beautiful clothes, luxurious interiors, tennis, and

ranches — further solicits. But the world of “Vanderberg,’ like that of ‘Empire Inc.,’ is a world in which consequences attach to actions, in which causality is maintained, and gratification of erotic or power drives of a character affect the lives and potentialities of others. For this reason

‘Vanderberg’ is less dramatic and extravagant than are its American equivalents. In “Vanderberg,’ emotion has to be denied and contained because its gratification is dangerous. It is less melodramatic, more realistic than ‘Dallas’ and, in this sense, is more ‘Canadian.’ The range of emotional experiences and orientations manifested by the ‘Vanderberg’

characters is both more contradictory and more differentiated than are the clear and forceful emotions of melodrama. For example, in the last scene of the final episode of ‘Vanderberg,’ Hank, his wife Elizabeth and father Lewis are assembled at the hospital after the successful delivery of the Vanderbergs’ baby. Their relationship to each other is reaffirmed by the baby who occasions their proximity, but each retains her or his own physical space and no one verbalizes his or her feelings. The characters’ emotions and orientations remain ambiguous and uncertain. Characters

in ‘Dallas’ may be unsure about who their parents are, whether their spouses are alive, and who shotJ.R., but they are seldom unsure of how they feel. The uncertainties of the u.s. melodramas are resolvable by further twists of the plot; those of “‘Vanderberg’ are integral elements of its dramatic style. The final scene of “Vanderberg’ is an excellent example of the series’

dramaturgy: the camera directs the audience’s point of view to the actors’ performances rather than signifying in its own right, through framing, composition, movement, and so on. The non-verbal signs produced by the players are revealed through disposition of the camera and editing, and Susan Hogan’s look of uncertainty as she contemplates

308 Culture, Communication, and National Identity the three generations of Vanderberg men with whom she is irretrievably linked but distanced from, is characteristic of the series’ representational style, which displays actors’ performances rather than articulating the specifically cinematic/televisual codes of camera movement, framing,

editing, and so on. The gratifications offered to viewers of the Canadian series are different from those of the melodramas of v.s. television that ‘Vanderberg’ and ‘Empire Inc.’ otherwise resemble. To apply the expectations learnt from consumption of ‘Dallas’ and ‘Dynasty’ — expectations that cues in the rhetoric of both series arouse — is to misrecognize both ‘Vanderberg’ and ‘Empire Inc.’ Although both ‘Vanderberg’ and ‘Empire Inc.’ Canadianize an American format, they enjoyed very different successes. ‘Empire Inc.’ has had unprecedented success in securing audiences in Australia, the Caribbean, Finland, Ireland, Israel, Spain, the United Kingdom, and the United States. It sold to the United Kingdom for $25,000 per episode: that is, for $150,000. A re-edited three-episode (each episode two program-hours) version was sold to Metromedia for u.s. national syndication for $500,000 and an unspecified

percentage of revenues realized from screenings. However, welcome though the revenues from foreign sales are, ‘Empire Inc.’ is far from returning its costs and sells for substantially less than do comparable u.s. products: ‘Dallas’ cost the Bsc $43,000 an episode (Variety, 23 Jan. 1985, 1) and is sold to a u.s. network for an initial screening for $750,000 to $800,000 (Broadcasting, 22 Oct. 1984, 70). “Vanderberg’ was much less successful than ‘Empire Inc.’ in terms of critical esteem, sales, and ratings. The ratings for the series’ six episodes

were (shown in English only): episode one, 726,000 viewers, appreciation index 53; two, 699,000 viewers, 55; three, 619,000 viewers, 58; four, 449,000 viewers, 62; five, 597,000 viewers, 67; and six, 466,000 viewers,

62. The ratings show two distinct patterns: a decline in aggregate viewing and a rise in viewers’ appreciation. The contradictory blips of viewing of episode five (597,000) and appreciation of episode six (62) are probably not significant exceptions. Sam Levene (the executive produc-

er) argues that the absence of publicity and critical response to ‘Vanderberg’ damaged the building of satisfactory audiences: ‘Aithough there was more or less adequate publicity for the first show, publicity dropped off in a dramatic way thereafter, which hurt our chances of increasing audience. Paid publicity always drops after the first show but other kinds of publicity builds [sic] if it’s well reviewed and

gets good audiences. In our case, the publicity just died, so whatever

The Mini Series 309 we did in the following show we couldn’t get the message out’ (letter to the author, March 1985). Another pertinent factor is the relative cost of the two series. ‘Vanderberg’ cost $400,000 per episode, ‘Empire Inc.’ (Auditor General of Canada 1984, 34) cost $5.8 million, i.e., $966,000 per episode. ‘Vanderberg’ was developed from a 90-minute single drama Take Over (1981), which did not achieve particularly good ratings but enjoyed good word-of-mouth and was successful in western Canada. “Vanderberg’ followed, using two of the same leading actors (Michael Hogan as Hank Vanderberg and Allan Royal as Ryan Evans), the same characters, and

the same production team: Sam Levene, executive producer; Peter Rowe, director; and Bob Forsythe, script writer. The initial impulse for the Take Over ‘Vanderberg’ initiative came from Peter Newman’s The Canadian Establishment (1975) — a series of biographies of the Canadian corporate élite). Take Over was shown on 5 February 1982 and secured a poor audience of 411,000, a 6 per cent share, and an appreciation index

of 66, but was thought a promising basis for development of a series. While the initial three episodes of ‘Vanderberg’ were in production, the series’ length was doubled and a further three episodes authorized. However, the final three episodes were shot by a different director, William Fruet (Peter Rowe shot Take Over and the first three episodes of ‘Vanderzberg’), scripted by two different script writers (Rob Forsythe

wrote Take Over and the first three episodes of “Vanderberg’ and retained overall script credit; John Hunter wrote episodes four and five;

and David McLaren, episode six), lacked the Ryan Evans character (because Allan Royal withdrew two weeks before shooting began), and had to accommodate the pregnancy of Susan Hogan, the actress playing

Elizabeth Vanderberg. Her pregnancy not only necessitated that the

Elizabeth Vanderberg character be pregnant but, because of the advanced state of Susan Hogan’s pregnancy, all Elizabeth’s scenes in episodes four, five, and six had to be shot together at the commencement of the shooting of the final three episodes.

Notwithstanding the problems of continuity of personnel and of publicity, it is agreed that there were further unresolved problems in the ‘Vanderberg’ project. A persistent judgment within csc was that there was too much business; as John Kennedy put it, ‘there is a problem in making a popular television show about business transactions’ (interview with author, 4 March 1985). Other, more subjective assessments asked: Was the actor playing the lead character, Hank Vanderberg, sexy enough? Can the hero of a popular Tv series have a moustache and be

310 Culture, Communication, and National Identity dressed informally? Were particular individual scenes intelligible or necessary? Is programming that offers an explicit nationalist discourse, and a western-Canadian inflection, likely to offer audiences sufficient points of entry? Are political references and orientations likely to exclude audiences? It may be that the inability of ‘Vanderberg’ to satisfactorily build audiences was the result of the misfit between audience expectations (educated by American melodramas such as ‘Dallas’ and triggered by elements in ‘Vanderberg’ reminiscent of them) and the series’ un-’Dallas’-like characteristics.

The contradictory rise in appreciation index and rating decline for “Vanderberg’ may also be related to audience expectations and ability to ‘read’ the series. Acquisition of a competence in any series’ ideolect is likely to develop with continued viewing of the series: viewers who stick

with the series may therefore experience increasing satisfaction. Thus viewing a number of episodes and thereby developing an understand-

ing of the series’ rhetoric may be a condition of understanding and pleasure. For viewers who see no more than one episode, no such competence is likely to be acquired and no incentive for successive viewings will be experienced. Possibly, attempting to rework the conventions of a dominant television genre, as did ‘Vanderberg,’ is a particularly hazardous project. If success is to attend the undertaking, education of the audience (publicity, ‘linkage’ between producers and consumers by critics explaining and evaluating the project) and patience

in building the audience by broadcasters are required. The support of senior CBC executives (the head of Drama and the, then, vice-president in charge of the Tv English Services Division) made possible conversion

of a single drama, Take Over, to a pilot mini series, ‘Vanderberg,’ for what was hoped would be a continuing series. A change in CBC senior management responded to the unsatisfactory features in the episodes made and disappointing ratings by curtailing ‘Vanderberg.’ ‘Vanderberg’ well exemplifies the difficulties of Canadian drama production, notably the absence of resources in the csc to persist with a format that did not immediately secure either good ratings or critical approval. (Indeed, as Sam Levene’s comments indicate, viewership is related to critical reception and, if a program is not well reviewed, it is correspondingly difficult for it to attract and retain audiences. Reviewers, their interests and assumptions, are therefore an important intervening variable in the processes of cultural production and consumption.)

In the United States, by contrast, greater resources permit greater persistence. ‘Dallas’ changed its format, including the composition of

The Mini Series 311 the Ewing family and the location and geography of the South Fork ranch, after the first half-dozen episodes. NsBc persisted for two years despite poor ratings for ‘Hill Street Blues’ before the series began to attract and retain satisfactory audiences. To be sure, there are counterindications on both sides of the forty-ninth parallel. The csc persisted for two years with the novel investigative thriller series ‘Seeing Things’

(described as ‘the best series in the history of Canadian television,’ Canada Today 15 May 1984, 5), and asc prematurely curtailed ‘Paper Dolls’ in 1984.

In neither ‘Empire Inc.’ nor “Vanderberg’ was ‘American’ style incompatible with Canadian content. ‘Empire Inc.’ attempted a representation of national history and the creation of a positive national myth. It offers numerous cues to audiences, inviting their perception of

the drama as representative of the Canadian past: for example, the musical theme that is associated with Munroe sounds like an accompaniment to a state occasion, his house has the coat of arms of Canada on the exterior, the series’ last shot frames Munroe with a large maple leaf. Mark Blandford affirmed the representative character of the series and stated: ‘Emptre Inc relatera ainsi non seulement I’histoire d’un homme mais aussi celle d’une époque et celle d’une ville, Montréal’ (Le Devoir, 20 Jan. 1982, 6).

Locating ‘Empire Inc.’ in Montreal between 1929 and 1960 offered a fictional locus in which the separate ethnic elements of Canadian society — francophones, immigrants, and anglophones — were intimately in

contact under the suzerainty of the anglophone finance capitalists of the Square Mile and Westmount, and where Canada’s financial and industrial heart (displaced increasingly westwards as Ontario grew in importance) was to be found. But representative though ‘Empire Inc.’ is, it underplays significant elements of Canadian experience, notably the

‘French fact’: ‘Personne ne niera la véracité historique de la série. On peut admirer l’ouvre. Quant al’aimer sans reserves il faudrait étre platot masochiste ... Tous les personnages francophones de la série sont ou des victimes ou des ésclaves complaisantes du maitre anglais. Ou alors, dans le troisiéme episode des nazis appuyant Hitler’ (Louise Cousineau, La Presse, 9 Feb. 1983, Fz). ‘Empire Inc.’ represents its hero, James

Munroe, as typical of Canada’s bourgeoisie; Munroe’s empire is presented as a microcosm of the nation’s: hydro-power, transportation, forward-linked resource industries such as pulp and paper, and the new

high-tech and service industries of aeroplane manufacturing and broadcasting. Choice of the period 1929-60 for Empire Inc.’ permits this

312 Culture, Communication, and National Identity ascendant trajectory to be presented as unchallenged by other groups. But Munroe’s supremacy would have had to have been terminated had ‘Empire Inc.’ continued into the 1960s and 1970s. In 1962, Quebec’s privately owned electricity-generation and -distribution industry was nationalized and assimilated into Hydro-Québec. In ‘Empire Inc.’ the brutal termination of partnership between Munroe (the anglophone immigrant) and Bouchard, his early patron and ‘gens du pays,’ and

Munroe’s refusal of love and marriage with Marie Bouchard are representative of the refusal of the two solitudes to embrace each other and the beginnings of the long moment of anglophone supremacy. ‘Empire Inc.’ offers a seductive myth of considerable aesthetic power, for which it deserves the praise it has received by Canadian critics. But its representation of a Canadian ‘titan’ does not fit the image of the role

and character of the Canadian national bourgeoisie described by Clement (1975, 1977) who were customarily excluded from the sectors

shown to be dominated by Munroe. Clement’s account suggests the career and success portrayed by James Monroe were enjoyed by few Canadian titans: ‘With the sphere of circulation dominated by the Canadian upper class and the sphere of production controlled by external elements, little room has been left for entrepreneurial indigenous Canadian capitalists’ (1977, 184). The nationalism that perceives Canada’s economy and development

as ‘dependent’ is one that longs for national heroes and a myth that challenges dependence. ‘Empire Inc.’ speaks eloquently to such desires.

Munroe and the myth elaborated so seductively in ‘Empire Inc.’ vicariously satisfy longings for a champion of national development who, though defeated by an alliance of domestic enemies and the

Americans (displayed in the series, in the persons of the corrupt Vermont police and Clint Jones, as surpassingly vulgar), is able disinterestedly to offer his capital, expertise, and entrepreneurship to another ‘peripheral’ economy — the Congo. Munroe’s destruction of Bouchard, exploitation of the workers in his factories, and general domestic rapacity are retrospectively legitimized by his adversarial relationship to the United States and his benign offshore activity. ‘Empire Inc.’ invests Munroe with seductive qualities as part of his patrimony as national hero. His energy, wit, ambition, capacity to love and be hurt, and, above all, his success invite viewers’ identification and

assent to him as hero. But a condition of assent is acceptance of the exclusion of the French fact and the ‘public enterprise’ philosophy that Hardin (1974) defines as a core of Canadian national identity. The nation

The Mini Series 313 for which Munroe stands is one from which major Canadian ethnic groups, social classes, and political identities are excluded. The nationalism of ‘Empire Inc.,’ seductive though it is, is prescriptive and exclusive. It could not be otherwise. All fictions in their construction of ‘intensive totalities’ privilege some elements of the real over others and

represent the ‘extensive totality’ of the world through selection. Successful though ‘Empire Inc.’ is in commanding assent to its version

of the national myth of a heroic bourgeoisie, and finely though it synthesizes popular television melodrama and history, its version of the Canadian past, and the identity of Canada, uses nationalist rhetoric and the creation of a national champion to legitimize the dominance of the anglo bourgeoisie: a consequence of a combination of the — now pervasive — international television-drama formula of businessman hero with a nationalist goal. A national theme and a businessman hero also distinguish ‘Vander-

berg.’ Its ‘pilot,’ Take Over, dramatized the reverse take-over of an established Toronto corporation F.W. Maguire (headed by Austin Gordon, a scion of the central-Canadian anglo élite) by a thrusting western enterprise headed by the unpretentious Hank Vanderberg. Maguire is shown as a company that ‘had power and tradition: they were establishment’ but which now exists as a parasite: ‘it’s cheaper to hunt — take what someone else has built, rather than build it yourself.’ Hank, the personification of Calgary, is presented as a more productive

entrepreneur than Austin, the personification of Toronto, and his energy and creativity command success in Take Over and commend him to the television audience. In ‘Vanderberg,’ Hank’s adversary is not simply the ossified, central-

Canadian business élite but the federal government and its policies. “Vanderberg’ plays out on a larger scale the value conflicts mapped in Take Over. Its more extensive dramatization opposes western imagina-

tion and entrepreneurship to eastern stuffiness and bureaucracy. The theme of western alienation and perception of the dominance of the central-Canadian élite as out of time and debilitating are first articulated by Vanderberg’s rival (in business and for the commitment of Elizabeth), and eventually ally and friend, Calvin Richards: ‘There’s a problem in this country, Vanderberg. Good don’t matter a damn. In this

country ... great don’t count for two bits.’ And is most explicitly dramatized in Vanderberg’s confrontation with the Ottawa Energy Department official who has the prerogative of granting, or not granting, the export licence essential to the realization of Vanderberg’s

314 Culture, Communication, and National Identity mega project. Vanderberg responds to learning that his application is not going to be favoured with government approval by charging the responsible official, Jordan, with reinforcing failure, protection of vested interests, and maintenance of the status quo: ‘A three billion dollar debt suggests incompetence to me ... but what does it suggest to the government. Your minister’s not gonna let Tripro sink, is he? He’s gonna keep it alive ... for the good of the banks ... for the good of the government’s image ... Our system is the best ... Is the best. Except we don’t have unpayable debts ... we don’t have Petro-Canada in this hand and the Minister in the other.’ Jordan rebuts Vanderberg, ‘we have to concern ourselves with national interest,’ to which Vanderberg retorts: ‘I work with my own money, Jordan. Unlike the civil service ... unlike the government ... unlike your puppet companies... I play with my own money. I’m the national interest, mister. It’s me!’ Vanderberg’s con-

tempt for the Canadian government bureaucracy is supported by presentation of small-scale metonyms of his experience in Ottawa. Two other international businessmen (Vermeulen in Brussels and Carpi in Rome) display similar disdain for government. The ideology embodied in Vanderberg is supported by other national instances; nowhere is the counter-position of the Ottawa government/central Canada dominant order given confirmation and support.

Audience assent for identification of Vanderberg and his business ventures with the national interest is mobilized by Vanderberg’s role as the locomotive of the plot. His vision is the only one that integrates and makes sense of the narrative. Other characters — notably, Elizabeth — refuse Hank’s order and try to impose their own, but the narrative prioritizes Hank and his is the only vision that finally coheres. The privileging of Hank’s vision is one of the series’ structural weaknesses. It is clear to the audience that, for Hank’s company, Creeland Gas, to achieve its ends, a complex jigsaw must be assembled. But the complexity of the transactions is such that Hank's activities are never fully

comprehensible. In the final episode all the pieces of the jigsaw are assembled but it remains unclear why Creeland’s Italian partners are

Mafiosi (the requirements of the plot would be satisfied as well were they legitimate businessmen) and why they agree to a deal that is very expensive for them. Hank’s vision and actions make the connections,

but the principle on which he calls the narrative to order remains unclear. It is not that “Vanderberg’ demonstrates the unattractiveness of a drama about business to mass audiences but that there are unresolv-

able and incomprehensible obscurities in the transactions, which the narrative shows.

The Mini Series 315 The challenge to the values embodied in Vanderberg comes not in business but in the personal sphere. His wife, father, and his friend Ryan Evans dissent from his instrumental relationship to other people. Elizabeth, Lewis, and Ryan stand for a different principle than Hank’s, one that demands space in which individuals negotiate their interactions freely without competing to imprint their own definitions and

agendas on others. Ryan, Elizabeth, and Lewis, all represent the ‘Canadian’ femininity, silence, and demand for personal space that Feldman and Atwood identify in their cultural analysis. Hank Vander-

berg, in contrast, demands the prerogative of action, to define and appropriate as his the world and all who do not actively contest his definitions. Hank’s version ends pre-eminent: Ryan drops out (a narrative resolution necessitated by Allan Royal’s unavailability for episodes four, five and six, as well as the ‘logic’ of the series’ ideological

unfolding), leaving his wife, Sandra, who shares Hank’s definition of the erotic and personal as dimensions of power and other-directedness, to become Hank’s lover and colleague. Elizabeth hangs in, maintaining her difference but not decisively refusing or challenging Hank: ‘So, we

haven't had a championship marriage ... and I haven't been ... perfection ... to put itin a word. And neither have you. But I’m still here

... and you're still here ... and that says something. That’s worth something. Worth a lot more than a chilled martini. I need you right now, Hank. I’m scared. I know that’s not a very sexy or romantic reason

for you to hang on for a while, but ... hang on?’ Lewis is shown retreating from business and letting his company run into bankruptcy. He and Hank walk through his desolate meat-packing plant, Lewis arguing that ‘defeat can be as good as victory,’ Hank vigorously refusing Lewis’s analysis and his retreat from adulthood: HANK: Is that it? No cattle left at all?

LEWIS: Not one worker said goodbye to me after all the years. HANK: You threw their jobs away.

LEWIS: I should have tied up the rest of my life for them? Just to keep it alive? HANK: I think you had a responsibility. LEwIs: And now I don’t.

No unemployed worker is permitted into the fictional world, and Hank is presented as the custodian of the interests of the unemployed —

316 Culture, Communication, and National Identity the scene adds further credence to his claim to represent the national interest, to represent Canada. Clearly the possibility existed for the authors of “Vanderberg’ to cause Hank’s company to fail, killed by his overreaching ambition and will to power, and thus to present his values as lethal to the interests of workers, as are Lewis’s. But that narrative route was not chosen. Indeed, Lewis returns to the board of Hank’s company (Vandoo) and ensures Hank’s success. In the corporate sphere, opposition to Hank is, to take one of Calvin’s categories, a ‘spit in the wind.’ In the personal sphere a more substantial cohort of dissent is mustered but it does not succeed in decisively challenging Hank’s instrumentality: an instrumentality that does, after all, get things done, and the series vindicates by showing Hank as working in the national interest. The sole review of ‘Vanderberg’ (Dorland 1984) describes the series: ‘Vanderberg reveals the face of 100% Canadian content. It’s as though one were seeing oneself at last for the very first time’ (p. 16). It’s unfortunate that Dorland’s enthusiasm was not more generally shared and his review remained tucked out of view in a journal read by the trade and a few intellectuals interested in the relation of national culture to the film and television industries. Perceptive though Dorland’s analysis is, it is worth enquiring into the components out of which ‘Vanderberg’ constructs its Canadian hero rather than simply welcoming it as the solution to the long-vexing problem of how to make a heroic alternative to the image of Canadian as victim that Atwood (and others) have defined.

‘Vanderberg’ attaches the nationalist sentiments of its audience to a hero of the most vital section of the Canadian bourgeoisie — the western

entrepreneurs of the extractive industries. The sense of recognition experienced by Dorland is one of a positive self-image; of Canadians who do things (Hank says all the time, ‘Let’s do it’) rather than have, as

is the lot of victims, things done to them. In ‘Vanderberg’ (as in the retrospective ‘Empire Inc.’ which shares with ‘Vanderberg’ a hero drawn from the vital section of the Canadian bourgeoisie — in the time of James Munroe, from the Montreal developers of hydro electricity, in the

time of Hank Vanderberg, from the Alberta hydrocarbon developers) the hero is a parvenu bourgeois troubled in his commitments to his family and relations with the national establishment. Both Vanderberg

and Munroe are outsiders, but both struggle and successfully force themselves inside. Both ‘Empire Inc.’ and ‘Vanderberg’ adopt continental forms (the

The Mini Series 317 mini series, the business man as hero) and Canadianize them by locating their fictional world in Canada, by playing in a different emotional key (emotions uncertain and contradictory, actions ‘for real,’ and unrealized potentialities irretrievably lost). They each have an explicit concern with Canadian national experience and identity and invest their heroes with a nationally representative character. Dorland described it as the ‘first ever outwardly looking Canadian dramatic series. Vanderberg is the first TV

inkling of a Canadian claim to globalism: a conquest of the territorial limits of the Canadian imaginary. For the first time, that anguishing internal refusal to be that is so central to the Canadian self has been overcome’ (1984, 16). But such ideological operations are precarious; viewers’ assent to fiction is conditional on recognition of their own experience and its integration into the narrative’s world. Any fiction is potentially as exclusive as it is inclusive, and one can imagine responses to ‘Vanderberg’ that refused Dorland’s judgment that ‘ Vanderberg builds

on its regionalism to obtain an entirely fresh national perspective’ (ibid.). There are as few reasons for Québécois to see ‘Vanderberg’ as representing their national perspective as there are for Albertans to see themselves in ‘Duplessis’ — and hardly more for a Maritimer. While potentially interesting loci for the articulation of a female discourse are present in Liz, Sandra, and Jennifer, the world of ‘Vanderberg’ remains a very male one, and those whose lives are spent in fighting the national bourgeoisie are unlikely to see their own national interest and experience personified in Hank. ‘Empire Inc.” and ‘Vanderberg’ refuse the ‘Canadian’ cultural patrimony of victim and humilated hero and emancipate Canadian television drama from what Dorland calls the ‘anguishing internal refusal to be

that is so central to the Canadian self’ (ibid.). But they experienced different fates: ‘Empire Inc.” success (though its achievement in commanding respectable audiences in both language communities is remarkable, it should not be forgotten that its audiences were far from being the majority of viewers) and ‘Vanderberg’ failure. The reasons for

the failure or success of television dramas with audiences cannot be identified by textual analysis. In the absence of audience research, we can only guess whether it was the western location that gave Take Over its success with western-Canadian audiences. Why one series that dressed its hero in continental clothes and represented the Canadian national identity and experience in an ‘active mood’ should not have enjoyed success with audiences and another, following an analogous formula, should have been successful is very uncertain. Whether the

318 Culture, Communication, and National Identity different receptions of ‘Empire Inc.’ and ‘Vanderberg’ were the result of a disparity in production resources (giving ‘Vanderberg’ lower produc-

tion values and an inability to resolve production problems) or their different temporal and spatial locations (period Montreal more popular than contemporary Calgary) cannot be determined. The two series represent an interesting and rewarding experiment in continentalizing Canadian television but their continental characteristics were not shared by the third mini series representing the national in ‘active mood’ that I consider.

‘Duplessis’

‘Duplessis,’ though linked to ‘Empire Inc.’ through key creative personnel — Mark Blandford and Denys Arcand worked on both series — has little relation to American television. Its national content and distinctive form are Québécois. Blandford describes ‘Duplessis’ (1977) and ‘Empire Inc.’ (1983) as paired representations of French- and English-Canadian experiences. Each series remains fictionally located and principally consumed within its own solitude. ‘Duplessis’ is Quebec

from the francophone optic and is concerned with political power; ‘Empire Inc.’ is the anglophone version of the same era concerned with economic power and the English milieu of Montreal. ‘Empire Inc.,’ like ‘Duplessis,’ marks the moral dimension of its narrative by the ageing of

its hero but inverts the pattern of ‘Duplessis’ by correlating James Munroe’s ageing with his growth of moral sense and emotional engagement with others. ‘Duplessis’ moves in the opposite direction. ‘Empire Inc.’ is more affirmative than is ‘Duplessis’ but treats some of the same concerns — Nazism in Quebec, the relation of American capital

to Canadian enterprise, and the role of the father/chief in ensuring a succession. It is to oversimplify both texts to categorize them as recto and verso of

the same document, substituting anglophone for francophone, economic for political, affirmative for pessimistic, but there are sufficient structural parallels and inversions present in the two series for Blandford’s account of them as complementary versions of the Quebec experience of the 1930-60 period to be sustained. Blandford, who has made a variety of other television dramas and documentaries concerned

with interaction between French and English Canada (a television version of Michel Tremblay’s Balconville, "This City Is for Sale’ (1974) about Montreal, and ‘The October Crisis’ (1975), the research for which

The Mini Series 319 was an important source for Valliéres [1977]), is a first-generation Canadian and was described as ‘le pére du Duplessis et l'example vivant du biculturalisme canadien’ (Le Devotr, 20 Jan. 1982, 6). The division between his two mini series ‘Duplessis’ and ‘Empire Inc.’ is that which

followed the Quebec Act of 1774 and persisted until the Quiet Revolution the anglophones dominating the world of finance and production, francophones that of law and politics (though these generalizations are broad-brush — francophone business an important element in the establishment of what ‘Empire Inc.’ constitutes as part of Munroe’s empire, the Montreal street-car system): ‘In effect the Quebec Act forced English and French to share the same territory and to come to some accommodation with each other. Under the circumstances each

group assumed a particular function or role: one was in charge of commerce and the economy while the other was to be in charge of laws and social organization in so far as they did not interfere with economic

development. This was the first time there appeared in Canadian history the notion of collective vocations’ (Arnopoulos and Clift 1984, 20).

‘Duplessis,’ the seven-part mini series scripted by Denys Arcand and

directed by Mark Blandford, is one of the major facts of Canadian television drama of the last decade. The series enjoyed a staggering success in Quebec. On its first screening in February—March 1978 (it was repeated in autumn 1984) it was watched by an average audience of two

million viewers, a quarter of the francophone population, in spite of a journalists’ strike at La Presse and Le Soleil leaving effectively only the up-market Le Devoir to cover the program. Le Devoir reported (25 Mar.

1978, 7) a telephone poll of 1,378 viewers on the night of the final episode’s screening in which 1,048 stated that they were satisfied or very

satisfied, 143 disappointed, and 138 had no interest; 59.5 per cent of respondents thought “Duplessis’ faithful to reality; 82.4 per cent were satisfied on the basis of its entertainment qualities; and 85 per cent were satisfied on the basis of instructiveness. The first four parts of ‘Duplessis’ were shown (the first time for a

_ French-language drama to be shown on the English network) in February 1984 on the cBc in two versions: on Sunday afternoon dubbed

into English, attracting an average audience of 150,000 viewers, and subtitled on Thursday evenings, attracting an average audience of 269,000. Together the two screenings achieved a share of 4.5 per cent. The dubbed version achieved a higher appreciation index (64) than the subtitled version (55). Both ratings and appreciation indices are low and

320 Culture, Communication, and National Identity suggest a very limited interest in English Canada for francophone television. ‘Duplessis’ aroused controversy as well as praise in the francophone press. Sixty complainants petitioned the crc, alleging that it misrepresented history and defamed their generation by offering ‘une injure a l'histoire, une tromperie envers la population, un objet de scandale et une fausse orientation pour la génération des jeunes a qui on a réprésenté comme étant historique une image clairement pejorative de la génération qui l’a précédée’ (quoted in La Presse, 26 Sept. 1978). A year

after transmission the crtc lightly rapped Radio Canada over the knuckles for not having made it clear to audiences that ‘Duplessis’ was nota ‘purely documentary study.’ Though the crtc was correct, Arcand based his script on the historical record and there is nothing particularly novel or historically heterodox about the view of Duplessis and Quebec presented in the series.

The controversy that ‘Duplessis’ aroused testifies, I think, to the continuing currency within Quebec of the issues Blandford and Arcand explore in the dramatic mode of a historical fiction. Not only are there continuities in the political ideologies circulating in twentieth-century Quebec, that is, there is no Chinese wall between the Duplessis era and the present (see, inter alia, Moniére 1977; Rioux 1971), but there are also

specific continuities asserted within Arcand’s work. ‘Duplessis’ is bracketed by Le confort et l'indifference (1981), in which the political analysis of Quebec articulated in ‘Duplessis’ is translated to both a more

contemporary and an abstract mode (see Beale 1984) and by Québec: Duplessis et aprés (1972). In the latter, Arcand points up the continuities between the Quebec of Duplessis and that of Levesque by showing Lévesque speaking to a political meeting with Duplessis’s voice dubbed into the soundtrack. It is clear that Arcand and Blandford’s ‘Duplessis’ does not simply circulate an image of its past to the Québécois television

audience, cementing the identity of the Québécois and their national experience, but rather redefines and re-presents that past in order to interpret and reshape the present. Desaulniers comments on the coded references to contemporary Quebec in ‘Duplessis’: ‘Les émissions sont truffées de ressemblances des réles (par example Adélard Godbout et Robert Bourassa, J.A. Dozois et Paul Desrochers etc). On y repére foule d’équivalences de situations’

(Desaulniers and Sohet 1982, 81). In ‘Duplessis’ there is a skilled manoeuvre within familiar generic conventions of Québécois popular television to represent the continuities and contradictions in the ideologies of Quebec (principally that of nationalism) personified in

The Mini Series 321 Duplessis (in and for himself as well as a character in the téléroman 4 clef

who stands for Lévesque) and to produce what Arcand called ‘un bon film’: ‘Je n’ai pas adopté, pour le faire, une démarche sociologique: pour moi cela ménerait un film ennuyeux aux émissions d’affaires publiques de Radio-Canada. Moi, quand le tourne je veux faire un bon film. Mon critére premier, je l’avoue tient du show-business. Je veux que pendant

une heure et trois-quarts tu ne l’ennuis pas, que tu aies du plaisier, de l’emotion, de la crainte, de la haine, que tu protestes contre mon point de vue, que tu réagisses. Ma démarche est cinématographique’ (Le Devoir, 6 Feb. 1982, 17).

Though ‘Duplessis’ has none of the ‘continental’ elements of ‘Empire

Inc.’ and ‘Vanderberg’ it is far from the ‘misére québécoise’ often designated as characteristic of Québécois television drama and its distinctive ‘téléroman’ form. Even when Duplessis evokes the harshness of the Québécois experience he lends it a heroic quality (and Arcand’s marvellous script gives the evocation a poetic quality, lost in

the English version). In the fourth episode of the series, La retraite, Duplessis is in hospital, out of office, in a winter that the script defines as

‘exceptionnellement rigoureux’ (though the camera never shows the outside), defining the unity of French Canada with its climate — ‘La neige c’est le calme, c’est le sommeil, c'est la paix, comprends-tu 1a? Nous autres, les Canadiens frangais, on, est le seul peuple qui a jamais été en guerre avec personne’ (Arcand 1978, 202) — its history, and the intimate experience of its land by the Québécois: Quand je t’ai dit tantdt qu'il s’était rien passé Adélard, je me suis trompe: il s’est passé la méme chose pendant trois cent ans. On travaillait. On travaillait. On a travaille comme des ... On a travaillé comme des boeufs. A défricher ce pays-la, a dépierrer la Beauce, 4 draver la Gatineau a essoucher au clair de lune pour gagner du temps sur ’été. Tu as raison Adélard, on avait pas le temps de lire Karl Marx, on travaillait! Tu rends-tu compte? Tout le monde entier parle de l’épouventable hiver russe. Il y a cent mille soldats allemands qui sont en train de mourir, gelés devant Leningrad. Bien, sais tu quel temps qu'il fait la-bas? Il fait cing, puis dix en haut de zéro. Bien, baptéme! Quand il fait ca ce temps-la ici au mois de janvier, nous autres on trouve qu'il fait chaud. Vois-tu comment est-ce qu'il fallait avoir du coeur puis des bras pour faire du bois comme on a en fait, pour se construire des poéles, pour nous lever des murs de quatre pieds d’épais, pour protéger puis nourrir nos animaux? (Arcand 1978, 206)

322 Culture, Communication, and National Identity Duplessis’s interlocutor in this long scene is the ruling prime minister of

Quebec and Duplessis’s political opponent, Adélard Godbout. In the dialogue Godbout is always the subordinate but becomes progressively silenced as Duplessis’s discourse, articulating the experience of the francophone Quebec community, continues, interrupted only by Godbout’s protests at the damage Duplessis’s passion is doing to his health and Duplessis’s increasingly racked and breathless coughing. Duplessis’s testimony ends witha statement of Québécois stoicism, endurance, and solidity: ‘On a peut-étre bien pas reussi grand-chose. Mais rien que ca, c‘est assez pour étre fiers de nous autres. Puis je veux plus jamais entendre rien contre nous autres. As-tu compris? Jamais! Pas un mot!’ (Arcand 1978, 207).

In the construction of the series, each episode is dominated by and centred on the actions of Duplessis. Duplessis’s perspective becomes privileged, though not presented as an unqualified truth. His alcoholism, the shady finances of the Union Nationale, the brutal exercise of state power in violent strike-breaking and denial of civil liberties, the marginalization of the idealist currents (represented, in particular, by Hamel) in the Union Nationale party, the sale of Quebec's resources to foreign capital at ridiculous prices are all as present in the narrative as is Duplessis’s Québécois patriotism, around which the community coheres. But it is only Duplessis who is shown extensively — at home and in Parliament, in and out of office, in sickness, in health, in youth and age. Through Duplessis’s construction in the narrative as typical - a status and role that the character consciously embraces and integrates into his public political persona — Blandford and Arcand are able to articulate and explore the nationalist ideology and experience — nowhere more so than in the scene celebrating Quebec's adoption of the fleur-de-lis flag (with which the version shown to anglophone viewers ends) where Duplessis is made synonymous with the flag, the song ‘Carillon,’ and a vigorous assertion of Québécois identity. The fictional world of ‘Duplessis’ is that of the Québécois collectivity defined at its point of maximal integration, embodied in the father of the national family, Maurice Duplessis. All other characters exist only in so far as their lives and experiences touch on his. As V.L. Beaulieu stated: ‘Duplessis a porté a sa limite Ja société québécois traditionelle et aprés lui, ne pouvait venir que le déluge’ (Le Devoir, 13 Oct. 1984, 25).

‘Duplessis’ offers the Québécois audience the pleasures of recognizing themselves in the hero and his exercise of power. To be sure the ending of ‘Duplessis’ is one in which the limits of that power — the

The Mini Series 323 mortality of Duplessis and the compromised economic and _ political

sovereignty of Quebec - are established, but the ending leaves the audience not with a sense of new problems created but with the newsreel images of Duplessis’s funeral, the corpse attended by the Royal 22

Regiment in bear skins, the commentary testifying to people of all classes honouring the deceased father and favourite son of Quebec. Within ‘Duplessis’ the major ideological and political themes of the last fifty years of Quebec are woven; the role of mass communications in the building and destruction of political power, the role of the church, rivalry with the federal government, relation to English-Canadian and American capital and entrepreneurship, the exercise of arbitrary power and flirtation with fascism, the aspiration to national sovereignty. Those contradictory elements in the political and ideological experience of Quebec are integrated in ‘Duplessis’ by the centring of the drama on the experience and actions of a political actor whom these discourses define

and who simultaneously amplifies them and plays them out on the political stage. The audience’s orientation to these processes is positioned by the narrative’s tracking of Duplessis’s simultaneous rise to power, moral decline, and ageing. In the congruency created between Duplessis’s ageing and his increasingly vicious, arbitrary, and destructive exercise of power, a strong correspondence is created by the authors of ‘Duplessis’ between the personal and the political, the individual and the historical. But in opposition to this dimension of the narration is another, inflected positively as the first is inflected negatively, in which

Duplessis’s accumulation of power and authority is presented as an expression and personification of Quebec’s entry onto the Canadian political stage. Duplessis’s absurd support of the censorship board’s refusal to permit the screening of Les enfants du paradis also asserts Quebec’s refusal to be patronized by metropolitan France, to respond to what France defines as ‘un élément tout a fait representatif de la culture francaise’ (and implicitly, therefore, representative of the finest interna-

tional high culture) with an insolent remark: ‘C’est votre opinion ga, Monsieur.’ Similarly, when breakfasting with the head of Iron Ore — an

action that, because conducted in English and part of the ‘sell out’ of Quebec to foreign capital, is a double betrayal of Quebec — Duplessis maintains a personal pride and integrity, without qualifying his status as a ‘vendu,’ by insolently blowing tobacco smoke over his breakfast companion. While ‘Duplessis’ offers Québécois television audiences the pleasures of experiencing themselves ‘chez soi’ and of vicarious identification with

324 Culture, Communication, and National Identity a charismatic and forceful Québécois hero, the series is by no means sentimental about or nostalgic for the social and political order personified by Maurice Le Noblet Duplessis. Rather, the political function of ‘Duplessis’ is to hold a mirror up to the newly elected Parti Québéois and

undercut some of the euphoria and hero worship that attended Lévesque’s election and the belief of the Québécois that they had becomes ‘maitres chez soi.’ As Desaulniers says: ‘Duplessis n’est pas

redevenue populaire d’un coup, il l’est en autant qu’il régénére les courants idéologiques encore problématiques. Bref ces émissions démonitrent que l'histoire du Québec, en dépit des changements d’autho-

rité, se trouve sur une continuité et une redondance idéologique beaucoup plus forte que le prétendent les politiciens’ (Le Devoir, 1 Mar. 1978, 37).

The version of ‘Duplessis’ screened by the csc English Services Division (i.e., representing Duplessis to English Canada) omitted the last three episodes in which the negative elements of Quebec nationalism represented by Duplessis are made most explicit. There are, in the first four episodes, hints of the racism, corruption, and viciousness that become insistent in the final three episodes but, for English Canada, Duplessis is represented as the bearer of the national vocation of the Québécois. It is as if the horror of Duplessis’s years of power from 1944 to 1959, ‘La Grande Noirceur,’ is not to be voiced outside the Québécois family. Wolfe, though recognizing that the original version of “Duplessis’ had seven episodes, can surely have seen only the English four-part version

to advance the judgment that ‘the series presents Duplessis as a compelling and sympathetic figure’ (1985, 93), though, since his remark is followed by an outrageous howler (stating [p. 93] that Jean Lapointe

played the lead photographer in ].A. Martin Photographe when Lapointe had only a cameo role in the film), it is unclear whether he has actually seen the programs on which he comments. The discussions of

‘Duplessis’ by Wolfe (1985, 91-3) and Desaulniers (Desaulniers and Sohet 1982, 79-82) succinctly exemplify the difference in quality between anglophone and francophone Canadian television criticism. The three mini series, ‘Duplessis’ (1977), ‘Empire Inc.’ (1983), and ‘Vanderberg’ (1983), testify to the existence in Canada of a television drama committed to representation of the national experience in an ‘active mood.’ However, national content is — as “Vanderberg’ demonstrates — no guarantee of success with audiences. As “Duplessis’ (and, to

a lesser extent, ‘Empire Inc.’) shows, there is a limited interest in the

The Mini Series 325 English community for francophone drama, and vice versa. The success of ‘Empire Inc.’ in bridging the two solitudes was limited — attracting respectable but not outstanding audiences in each language communi-

ty. But the achievement of ‘Empire Inc.’ in Canada (underscored by international sales) was not the result of its presentation of ‘the grey world as we actually find it’ (Wolfe 1985, 78) or of its reiteration of the motifs of victimization and suffering that Atwood (1972), Houle (1980), and others have defined as characteristically Canadian. For neither the

grey reality nor a victim is present. Rather ‘Empire Inc.’ displays the distinctive markings of continental culture, of catering for the mass

audience (the quality in Blandford’s project ‘Hullo Suckers’ that disqualified it from support from the National Film Board). No firm policy conclusions can be drawn from so limited a sample of

‘performance programming’ in Canada, particularly since so many factors are present in artistic representations of the complexity of those considered. No ‘scientific’ attribution of causes to effects can be ascribed. But certain provisional judgments can be ventured. First, resources are important —’Vanderberg’ was prematurely curtailed because of their absence, and the pleasures of ‘Empire Inc.’ are owed in important part to its production values — but not necessarily determining. The appeal of ‘Duplessis’ to Québécois audiences seems not to have

been impaired by its low budgets. Second, ‘continental’ elements in ‘Vanderberg’ and ‘Empire Inc.’ are by no means compatible with Canadian content and national themes. The documentary mode, the absent centre, the motifs of survival, the humiliated hero, the victim, do not exhaust the Canadian representational lexicon. And the forms and popular appeal in American television as described by viewers as ‘véhiculant la richesse, le réve et l’éspoir’ (Canada/Québec 1985, 47), and

advocated by Denys Arcand in his commitment to ‘faire un bon film,’

and Sydney Newman in his anathematization of Canadian works ‘stinking with probity,’ can be mobilized in Canadian television with successful effect. Popular appeal is by no means synonymous with

‘continentality’ nor is it the raison d’étre for cultural production. However, there are surely grounds for preferring Newman’s precept that ‘the cost of art in our kind of society has to be in relation to the number of people whose imagination it will excite’ (interview in Cinema

Canada, no. 15 [1974]: 46) to those that constitute the Canadian audiences’ taste for American films and television as a problem of the demand rather than the supply side. ‘Empire Inc.’ and ‘Duplessis’ pass Newman/s test with flying colours. Happily, there are, as I have noted

326 Culture, Communication, and National Identity earlier, signs that the nationalist reflexes that manifested themselves ina desire to close the forty-ninth parallel (Lumsden 1970) are being rejected and the continental forms adopted in “Vanderberg’ and ‘Empire Inc.’ are

found no less acceptable than the authentically Canadian rhetoric of ‘Duplessis.’

Conclusion

Came the cue: ‘All right Halifax’, a moment of breathless suspense — and we heard the first few bars of ‘O Canada’. Thus it went right across Canada, our national anthem played by nine bands but sounding like one. It could be done, had been done and will be done again. It was then that even I, toughened to this game as I am, got the thrill of my life. (E. Bushnell, cited in Stursberg 1971, 49)

Les concepts de communauté, peuple et nation sont parmi les plus difficiles 4 définir en droit public. Bien qu’ils soient a la base méme de toute étude de droit constitutionnel ils demeurent fort confus, variant selon les écoles, les époques ou les pays. Au lieu de les définir, il vaut donc mieux tenter de les situer en fonction de leurs principales composants, tant socio-politiques que juridiques. (Rémillard 1980, 102)

A central thesis in nationalist theory is that language and culture play a crucial role in the formation of national identity and consciousness. This notion conforms to a general tendency in twentieth-century political

theory to cede to ideas the central role in the life and death of social

organizations. Now, it is to consent rather than duress that we customarily look when seeking to understand how particular societies

and institutions maintain themselves. The emphasis on the role of culture and ideas has constituted the mass media, and particularly television, as central agencies in the production and reproduction of social relations. The belief in television’s importance rests, in turn, on

328 Culture, Communication, and National Identity the assumption that the representations performed by television are important influences on audience behaviour. Whether concern centres on television’s representation of political bias, patriachal versions of human sexuality, violence, or a world of American values there is a pervasive assumption that the representations of television are, or will be, reproduced in ‘reality.’ Slowly and laboriously behaviourist stimulus and response models of

effects and audience studies are being driven from the field by more nuanced models of media consumption and effects. A variety of studies (including Hall 1980; Morley 1980; Katz and Liebes 1985) have asserted

the differentiality of audience understandings and actions. Yet this understanding of the specificity of microcosmic responses to television programs is rarely replicated when macrocosmic impact is considered. There the prevailing assumption is that flows of information across state boundaries are aberrant, influential, and generally deplorable. Canada, where there is a pervasive concern that national identity and existence are threatened by American television, exemplifies this supposition. Indeed, the Fowler Commission regarded the consumption of foreign

cultural goods of acknowledged value as potentially threatening to Canadian identity: We cannot accept, in these powerful and persuasive media, the natural and complete flow of another nation’s culture without danger to our national identity. Can we resist the tidal wave of American cultural activity? Can we retain a Canadian identity, art and culture — a Canadian nationhood? These questions do not imply a judgement on the values of the American broadcasting system; indeed the dangers to Canadian national identity are much greater from the good American programmes than from their poor or clumsy productions. (1957, 8)

Yet consumption of u.s. broadcast programming, whether delivered by radio or television, has been the norm in Canada for more than sixty years. In spite of the absence of boundaries in the ‘aether,’ Canada, and Canadian nationalism, survive in robust health. Indeed, Rutherford (1978) emphasizes the pervasive and long-standing presence of foreign media throughout Canada’s history — no less in print than in broadcasting. He argues: More important than the lack of a Canadian belles-letters was the lack of a Canadian trash — a cheap popular product for the ordinary

Conclusion 329 reader. Elsewhere publishers supplied homegrown ballads, legends, satires, poetry, novels, indeed anything that might capture the public’s attention. Not so, or not often in Canada. The void was filled by foreign works, whether reprinted by Canadian publishers or imported from outside. By mid-century, the market for books and magazines in Upper Canada was largely the preserve of American publishers of cheap American works and British reprints ... Thus was established what has become a great Canadian tradition: a parasitical dependence upon the dreams, the romances, the adventures, the tragedies, the plays, the epics, all the stuff of fancy and fantasy, manufactured by outsiders. (p 3)

The case of Canadian television suggests that culture may not be so

important a factor in the formation and maintenance of nationalist sentiment as has been suggested by Gellner (1983) and others. My own view is that political institutions are more important than television and

culture, or even language, in producing and reproducing a solid sentiment of national identity among Canadians. The nation-state is pre-eminently a political institution, as Breuilly (1985) emphasizes, and a weak linkage between polity and culture seems to make better sense of

the Canadian case than does the reverse thesis. But the political, the cultural, the economic, and the linguistic dimensions of experience are not always easily distinguished, and assertion that any of the complex phenomena and relations that have been my concern are unicausal would be foolish. Culture is not a simple concept and, though I have distinguished between ‘anthropological’ and ‘symbolic’ cultures, these distinctions are not as readily made in practice as they are in theory. The prevailing ideas (symbolic) in civil society affect the passage into and out of legislation and the state of particular social (anthropological) structures and practices. However, since the differences between Canadian and American social policy are more striking than are their similarities (though most Canadians, most of the time, watch American rather than Canadian television programming) it seems in this instance that the linkage between the symbolic and anthropological is rather weak. In spite of the importance ceded to it in the Canadian policy discourse,

in theories of social reproduction, and as an eminent factor in the formation of national identity, television is customarily used for entertainment and relaxation (Hothi 1981). American television drama successfully meets such demands and, as Henley (1985) pointed out,

330 Culture, Communication, and National Identity Canadian television drama was customarily seen by viewers as less well

fitted for these purposes (because more demanding) than American television drama. There is no necessary reason why a medium of relaxation and entertainment should not be an important factor in the formation of national identity (although the connection requires more thorough demonstration than it customarily receives). But even if it is granted that television drama does shape the national identity of those

consuming it, then it remains to be demonstrated that viewing American television drama weakens Canadian national identity. Indeed, Rutherford claims (1978, 102-3) that the Americanization of popular entertainment has served Canadian unity by acting as an integrating counter-force to the local particularism of domestic Canadian media.

However, entertainment is not a synonym for culture, nor is drama (or performance programming) for television. Canadian audiences watch Canadian rather than American television news (why should they do otherwise -— the stuff of American news, whether downtown fires in American cities or new income-tax bands — has little to do with them) and (unless we have a notion of identity that is remarkably singular) it is reasonable to suppose that political identity and sense of citizenship are more closely related to consumption of political communications such as television news than to consumption of entertainment (although there is no shortage of examples of a weak linkage between political behaviour and media influence), But to explore the connections between television news and national identity would require a different book. Rutherford argues that there has been a ‘dichotomy of the popular arts and public ways’ (that is, between political communication and popular entertainment in Canada) and that the mass media, when used for political communication in Canada, have ‘fostered a pyramid of loyalties to place, province, the two solitudes, and the nation state. In particular, the news media in each province have buttressed a series of distinct political cultures and forwarded assorted parochial! identities’ (1978, 102). In these remarks, Rutherford echoes some of the ideas in Careless’s illuminating article ‘Limited Identities in Canada’ (1969). Careless comments, for example: ‘The true theme of the country’s

history in the twentieth century is not nation building but region building ... what has been sought, and to some degree achieved is not

really unification or consolidation, but the articulation of regional patterns in a transcontinental state’ (p. 9). Rutherford and Careless

Conclusion 331 point towards a notion of identity as a plural phenomenon. The loyalties Rutherford enumerates (‘to place, province, the two solitudes and the

nation state’) are not exclusive, but complementary, loyalties. These separate but non-exclusive affiliations suggest that ‘national identity’ is not necessarily threatened by an incomplete congruence between citizenship and culture, between political and cultural identity, but, rather, that national identity is but one of a series of identities held

simultaneously by citizens and viewers. These identities are not necessarily interdependent. As Desaulniers (1987, 151) stated, ‘in terms of nationality a person is either Canadian or not, but culturally one may be Canadian in varying degrees.’ More than that, one may be culturally Canadian in completely different ways — in French and in English, for

example. Doubtless some cultural circuits are more important than others for forming and maintaining political identity, but the strength of

the linkage between different sets of ideas and different instances of symbolic culture and political and social outcomes varies. Tv-drama consumption, an instance of Rutherford’s popular arts, in Canada

seems to better exemplify a weak than a strong linkage. News consumption, Rutherford’s ‘public ways,’ may well exemplify a strong rather than a weak linkage. Nationalists, and theorists of nationalism, seldom make distinctions concerning the different relationships between polity and culture when

maintenance of an established nation-state and the genesis of a

nationalist movement are concerned. A new movement lacks its own political institutions and instruments, its raison d’étre is to acquire them

and to displace the established incumbents from the apparatus of power. The only principle of coherence of a movement can be its ideas.

An existing state needs less of the ardent commitment to a shared vocation and experience of a shared language and culture that distinguish a movement. Smith cites Seton-Watson: ‘Nations which are independent, territorially satisfied and deeply nationally conscious have no need to be nationalist any more’ (1971, 201). The condition of territorial satisfaction, independence, and national consciousness defined by Seton-Watson well characterizes contemporary Canada. Why the persistence of active nationalism there? Perhaps because Canada is not a nation-state. The joys of independence and territorial satisfaction in Canada are not

enjoyed exclusively by a single nation. Trudeau saw this Canadian

condition as an opportunity rather than as a problem but not all Canadians share his view. The desire for a national home of the

332 Culture, Communication, and National Identity old-fashioned sort retains its potency among many Canadians. But important though old-fashioned French- and English-Canadian nation-

alisms are, and grudging though tolerance for bilingualism is, it is Trudeau’s sense of Canada as a pluralistic multinational state that fits the Canadian reality best. None the less, old-style nationalism is an important force in contemporary Canada — for two reasons.

First, the persistence of a Quebec nationalism that has not been realized in a state: while the majority of Québécois (let alone French Canadians) have demonstrated in recent years their preferences for Canada rather than a sovereign Quebec, Quebec nationalism will remain a potent political and ideological force as long as survival of the

French language remains precarious in North America. Should the Government of Canada guard insufficiently the rights of francophone Canadians to live and work in French, then the Government of Quebec

will reassume the role of guardian of francophone rights, and the attractions of an independent and sovereign francophone state in North America will once again be asserted. Second, Canadian cultural élites are best able to retain and extend their privileges and prerogatives under a nationalist rubric. If a national self-image and a nationalist movement require a conscious intelligentsia

to come into existence then, reciprocally, a conscious nationalist intelligentsia requires a nationalist movement in order to be able to survive and reproduce itself. Berlin’s formulation is prescient: ‘For nationalism to develop in it, a society must, in the minds of at least some of its most sensitive members, carry an image of itself as a nation, at least

in embryo ... This national image, which makes those in whom it is found capable of resentment if it is ignored or insulted, also turns some among them into a conscious intelligentsia, particularly if they are faced

by some common enemy, whether within the state or outside it — a church or a government or foreign detractors’ (1981, 347). The connec-

tion Berlin establishes between the ‘conscious intelligentsia’ and a ‘common enemy’ characterizes the relation between English-Canadian

(and many French-Canadian intellectuals’) and American (and, for francophones, English-Canadian) television. But Berlin’s remarks were

made in respect of a developing, not an established national entity. Within an established state, the role of the intelligentsia is guaranteed only as long as a common enemy can be identified. This is not to say that many nationalist intellectuals in Canada are not sincere in their concern for their country and compatriots, or that there are not many Canadian

intellectuals who enjoy less-than-privileged existences. But such pru-

Conclusion 333 dent qualifications by a ‘foreign detractor’ aside, it remains a central contention of my argument that the role of nationalist élites in Canada

has been of enormous importance in the evolution of Canada’s television policies, and that these policies have been less than optimal because of the assumptions and interests of these élites. Cook advocates scepticism when considering the productivity of nationalist policies in Canada; I echo him. His examples are drawn from the economy and the universities, mine from television. With an old ‘national policy’ that contributed substantially to the growth of sectionalism and the control of the Canadian economy by foreigners, it is no wonder that Canadians look sceptically at politicians who are professed economic nationalists and economists whose prescription for a better society concludes with a clarion call for a ‘new national policy.’ That same healthy scepticism might be applied to the current Canadian controversy over us domination of Canadian universities. Could it be that national cultural and educational policies, designed to promote an education industry at least the size of our manufacturing industry, are the cause of some of the difficulties? (1977, 203)

Ernie Bushnell, a pioneer of Canadian broadcasting, referred to the program celebrating the silver jubilee of King George v on 6 May 1935 as ‘choral hopscotch’ and as ‘a stunt but a fantastic stunt’ (Stursberg 1971, 48).

Bushnell’s sense of fun and inventiveness are too little present in Canadian television policy and programming. Contemporary Canadian nationalism speaks in anxious and threatened tones and manifests itself in television programming that earnestly counterweights its American opposition. ‘For the Record’ (characterized with seductive injudiciousness by one csc source as the “Disease of the Month’ show) counterbalances the insistently up-beat, glitzy jolts and jiggles of u.s. television (to appropriate the terms of Susan Crean and Morris Wolfe) and exemplifies the pervasive tendency for Canadian public-sector television drama

in both languages to speak in ‘misérabililiste et vieillissante’ accents (Canada/Québec 1985, 47). It is unsurprising that such programs attract smaller audiences than does the competition emanating from the United States. There are more opportunities than have been taken for Canadian broadcasters to follow the example of their compatriot Sydney Newman

and produce television dramas that reconcile the popular and the

334 Culture, Communication, and National Identity national. ‘Empire Inc.’ testifies to the possibilities of success of such a strategy (as well as to the difficulties of producing television drama that circulates in both of Canada’s two main language communities) and ‘Vanderberg,’ to the institutional and national-cultural inhibitions that militate against success. The economic logic of the international trade in television programs is for producers, like Canada, to specialize in niches of the international market. Old-style nation-states are less and less viable as internationalization of the economy proceeds, the benefits forgone by not partici-

pating in large markets or accepting the risks of specialization are too large to be ignored. In refusing this logic, Canada, particularly in the high-cost form of television drama, is seldom able to produce Canadian

dramas that mass Canadian audiences will watch (let alone nonCanadian ones) except by committing very extensive subsidies to production — that is, by making transfers from the internationally viable

sectors of the Canadian economy to sectors that are not. Even then success is uncertain. But were Canada to follow the dynamics of the international market, there seems to be no reason why it should not specialize successfully in particular areas of production, such as children’s programming, or seize the opportunity a bilingual and multicultural society offers. Co-productions between anglophone and francophone Canadians could offer Canada a perfect laboratory for developing programming that would be attractive to a plurality of world

markets. In a variety of program forms, such as animation, documentary, and children’s programming, Canada has demonstrated its competitiveness. Production over the whole range of television program forms is financially unsustainable without subsidy. Harrison, Young, Pesonen, and Newell (1986) identified entertainment as a more promising program form than drama through which Tv schedules could be further Canadianized at an affordable cost. Competing head to head

in drama against the United States in its sphere of excellence is economically foolish. But it is not economic logic that impels Canada to produce its own television drama, but two overlapping and contradictory ideologies that each repudiates the imperatives of the market: those of public service and nation. The public-service broadcasting vocation is minoritarian; assumes that audiences are falsely constituted as a mass by the technological characteristics and cost structure of terrestrial broadcasting. In consequence, itis believed, programming and scheduling should compensate

Conclusion 335 for this characteristic of broadcasting by constructing its program schedule to address a series of distinct minority ‘publics.’ The nationalist vocation

in contrast is majoritarian, seeking to integrate the audience components, the separate ‘publics’ of public-service broadcasting, into a unity, the single national public assuming its collective national identity through its collective consumption of endogenous programming. Canadian advocates of both the national and public-service ideological programs have

(rightly) identified commercial broadcasting as unlikely to realize their desired goals and have, accordingly, invoked the state and the public sector as agencies through which the desired ends are to be realized. But the designation of the state (and para-statal organizations) as the instrument through which the distinct ideological aims of nationalism and public-service broadcasting are to be realized has blocked recognition of the contradictory nature of public-service and national goals. The influence of the Bsc in the cgc’s formation is striking here, not only in the metropolitan, centralized organizational form that the Aird

Committee recommended in preference to the decentred, regional structure of the Reichs Rundfunk Gesellschaft but also in its commitment to the service of ‘publics’ rather than a mass public. The most obvious manifestation of the public-service vocation — serving publics rather than a public — is the distinct language services of cBc—Radio Canada (and TvOntario) but service of minoritarian publics is antithetical to the service of (and creation of) a mass — national — audience. Public-service broadcasting in Canada clearly requires production in, for, and by each language community; for the two major francophone

and anglophone publics (and also, further, smaller Italian, Chinese, Greek, Cree, Dene publics). But the evidence is that programming produced in and for one ‘public’ offers little to the other. ‘Duplessis’ was an outstanding success with francophone viewers but achieved derisory

audiences in English Canada. ‘Empire Inc.’ had a wider circulation in Quebec than did ‘Duplessis’ in English Canada but still offered little (as Louise Cousineau remarked in La Presse) to francophone audiences. Yet a national, nationalist, broadcasting policy for Canada necessarily seeks

programming that will attract and retain audiences across Canada and will ‘contribute to the development of national unity and provide for a continuing expression of Canadian identity’ (Broadcasting Act 1968, 3 g

iv). To attract and retain Canadian audiences for Canadian programming requires a program offer more attractive than the competitive American program offer (which is optimized for the production of a

336 Culture, Communication, and National Identity mass audience) and within smaller budgets. The circle has proved impossible to square, though the preferential allocation of funds to network rather than regional production suggests that, when push comes to shove, nationalist rather than public-service goals are chosen

(or as western-Canadian cynics say, central Canada’s interests are preferred to those of the regions). The increasing pressures of public-sector broadcasters in Canada to abandon their mass audience and nationalist aspirations and offer a ‘Ps North’ public-service alternative to American program schedules (whether delivered from Canadian or American transmitters) are another instance of the conflict between public service and national goals. Nationalists are

militantly opposed to such a policy and argue for maintaining — better increasing — the budgets of public-sector broadcasters so that they may

better compete with American programs for audience attention. But audience preference for ‘jolts and jiggles’ is not simply a matter of budgets

but also of the cultural characteristics of the programming. The dramas I have examined here are largely distinguished by ‘misérabilism’ (In the Fall, particularly, but so too the ‘For the Record’ dramas that have either unhappy endings — Dreamspeaker, Je me souviens, Dying Hard ~ or equivocal ones — Every Person Is Guilty, Ready for Slaughter, Slim Obsession) — and

the popular positive potential of “Vanderberg’ was unrealized because

of the absence of institutional support and a stratum of critics and commentators to build audiences and support for the series. The failure of ‘Duplessis’ to attract anglophone audiences is unsurprising, but its poor ratings were not helped by the intimidating seriousness of Conrad Black’s introduction. There has been too little of the stunts and fun to which Bushnell referred in the 1930s. The programs which have been (relatively) successful with audiences, ‘Empire Inc.’ and Chautauqua Girl, offer some of that fun and pleasure, albeit in a nostalgic, retrospective mode, which, in Chautauqua Girl, becomes glutinously cosy.

A new course has been set for Canadian broadcasting policy in the 1980s. A waning faith in the public sector and regulation has been supplanted by a waxing confidence in a market regime of private-sector institutions guided by incentives offered by the state. The stick has given way to the carrot. The old regime had important achievements to

its credit; albeit the benefits of its policies were distributed very unequally. Regulation, though imperfect in its achievement of cultural goals, established profitable cable and broadcasting industries, retaining jobs and wealth in Canada that would otherwise have been decanted south of the border. The public sector, in particular cac—Radio Canada,

Conclusion 337 delivered diversity in programming and ~ particularly in news programs that were consumed and appreciated widely in Canada. But above-average profits accrued only to owners, jobs were predominantly

located in central Canada (in particular, in Montreal and Toronto), consumer and regional interests were subordinated to those of metropolitan producers, and drama programming fitted ill the tastes and interests of viewers.

There are few reasons to suppose that the carrot will be any more powerful than the stick, or that the problems of managing public-sector organizations and capture of national resources by élites will be solved by allocation of resources through market mechanisms to commercial

broadcasters and independent producers. Rather it seems likely that inefficiencies will remain, but different inefficiencies; needs will remain

unsatisfied, but different needs; and élites, but different élites, will continue to exercise control over resources.

These contradictions are not peculiarly Canadian. Television is becoming an increasingly transnational medium. The pressures experienced in North America are becoming insistent in Western Europe — and elsewhere. The attempts of the Commission of the European Communi-

ty to create a common market in broadcasting — a Television without

Frontiers — under the rubrics of the market ideology and those of ‘European’ political and cultural unity are ones that promise to unfold a quite ‘Canadian’ scenario. What will ‘European’ programs be like? We can anticipate transnational marriages like that in Je me souviens becoming a staple of European programming as will the tales of entrepreneurs from the Community’s periphery — Scotland, Andalusia, the Mezzogiorno — battling the Brussels bureaucracy. Just like ‘Vanderberg.’ Given that broadcasting across the world is being ‘Canadianized,’ Canada’s prior experience of this condition offers it economic opportu-

nities. Increasingly programming is demanded that is of interest to different language and cultural communities. Canada has, in its bilingual and multicultural audience, a perfect laboratory in which to conduct research and develop new products. But, as Hétu and Renaud (1987) point out, co-productions (even between the csc and Radio Canada) and screening of programs in both language communities are highly exceptional.

The policy goal of Canadianizing television drama is a nationalist goal. It is one that makes little sense in terms of orientating Canadian program-producers to exploit the niches in the international television-

338 Culture, Communication, and National Identity program market in which they enjoy advantages. It was, and is, part of a nationalist project of achieving cultural autarky. But analysis of repre-

sentative Canadian television dramas reveals an uneven presence of national content — indeed, a surprising absence of it. There are two conclusions to be drawn from this finding. First, there are in all complex cultural productions a variety of discourses circulating, and it is therefore not surprising that few Canadian television dramas can be reduced to expressions of nationalist ideology. And second, the public-sector presence in Canadian television is animated by other ideologies than that of nationalism — principally, I suggest, that of public service. The joint presence of the ideologies of nationalism and public service in public-sector broadcasting institutions and productions is contradic-

tory. The public-service vocation is minoritarian, dedicated to the service of a plurality of distinct ‘publics’: the nationalist vocation is majoritarian, dedicated to the production of a unity of consciousness and sentiment of shared identity in a grand public. In Canada the distinct language communities (to refer to no other defining characteristics of distinct ‘publics’) demand — public service suggests — programming ina plurality of languages. Nationalism, on the contrary, demands

the knitting together of these distinct and fissiparous groups into a national unity and shared identity. The nationalist broadcasting policy is caught in a further contradiction. Its majoritarian and audiencemaximizing goal is shared with commercial broadcasting, yet, since its program is nationalist and has as its essence resistance to ‘Continentalism’ and Americanization, requires a distinctively Canadian and unAmerican style of program content. The Canadian cultural traditions of the vocation of victim, misérabilism, and silence have proved ill adapted to the task of nationalizing the popular imagination. ‘Our radio picked up Buffalo and Montreal always together, never

separate, so that the religious broadcasts always had a pleasant background of country and western music. We seven children would thus recite our rosaries at a gallop, learning, that in Quebec the most contradictory dreams are possible’ (Carle; cited in Leach 1977, 21). Carle’s amusing testimony to the experience of transborder spill over of broadcast signals from the United States, Canada’s absence of communication sovereignty, and the robust nature of its culture (distinguished by its transformative, adaptive, and synthetic characteristics) should give pause to those fearful of America’s ‘media imperialism.’ Only those

who conceive culture and identity as fixed will describe transnational informational flows as necessarily imperialistic. But though Canada

Conclusion 339 seems to exhibit a durable political identity and an adaptive and synthetic culture, its adaptation to the culture of the United States has not been on conditions of its choice. Nations, no more than men, make their histories on terms of their own choosing. Canadian television offers a challenge to long-held tenets of nationalist theory and a case-study of a nationalist intelligentsia, the actions of

which are relatively unimportant in terms of influencing popular sentiment (because its productions are not much consumed by the mass

of Canadians) but which have been successful in securing its own position as the recipients of transfers from other sectors. The challenge

to theories of nationalism lies in the weak linkage between national sentiment in Canada — generally strongly held - and low consumption of Canadian production in what is widely held to be the most important of the cultural industries: television. This generalization can be made

most confidently in respect of English Canada; in Quebec, a variety of commentators have testified to the importance of Québécois content in television in development of national self-consciousness and confidence. But in Quebec, as Carle, de la Garde, and others affirm, anglophone (and chiefly American) cultural productions have long been widely consumed without loss of national identity and character.

The different experience of television in Canada’s two language communities must, at least in part, be explained in terms of the differences between the intelligentsias of English and French Canada. In both Canadian national communities, a similar rhetoric of ‘dependency’

is articulated and a similar rationale for transfers to cultural producers (i.e., the national intelligentsias) legitimized. But in Quebec a different national experience has produced a stratum of the intelligentsia more in

touch with and sympathetic to popular taste than exists in English Canada. The relatively greater success of French-Canadian television drama in securing a mass national audience is, I suggest, partly the result of this intervening variable that differentiates the French- and English-Canadian cultures. What is finally most striking about both of Canada’s main cultural communities is the robustness of their identities and the weak linkage

between their long-standing consumption of foreign culture — in particular, broadcasting from the United States — and their confident assumption of non-American identities. Without question, nationalism has been a powerful force in the development of Canada’s broadcasting history and its television-drama programming. But Canadian television (and Canadian television drama) is not wholly to be defined or under-

340 Culture, Communication, and National Identity stood in terms of nationalism. There are, as I hope I have shown, other

forces and ideologies at work in its institutional and organizational forms and its aesthetic productivity. Canada’s long experience of economic and cultural life being organized increasingly on international and not national lines is now a general global condition. Television is pre-eminently a medium of international

economic and cultural exchange and of integration and interdependence (though many of the relations it calls into existence are unequal). Canada, exceptionally, has a tradition of political theory, indeed, paradoxically, of nationalist theory, that anticipates this condition, though one that has been swamped by old-style nationalism.

Doutre (1864; in Cook 1969) coined the intriguing paradox of ‘universal nationality’ as a recognition of the end point of interconnec-

tion and convergence of economic cultural and political activities, experiences, and institutions. Trudeau is the most recent and distinguished exponent of this continuity in thought, seeing successful accommodation of the two founding Canadian nations (and the ‘third force’ of non-anglophone, non-francophone immigrants) within a single political unit — the state of Canada - as a concrete institutional step towards the realization of Doutre’s conception. Instead of Canada representing a freak deviation from the stable norm of national identities and existences, Trudeau saw in Canada the possibilities of a novel form of human community and a pre-echo ofa better future than one founded on the atavistic traditional conception of the nation-state. Fanciful and

utopian though such notions seem in the context of what Crean and Rioux call ‘a world of American pre-eminence’ (and which causes them

to assert the importance of nationalism as a challenge to American domination and values), there are realities to them in Canada. The dominant paradigms of nationalism and dependency are ones that obscure recognition of these counter-indications.

Trudeau’s vision is one that offers Canada the opportunity of becoming the new model for social development in an internationaliz-

ing world, of assuming the role the United States once had of exemplifying a new form of society. ] have remarked earlier on the achievements that the absence of a strong and therefore exclusive national identity has made possible in Canada. McNaught rehearses some of the principal benefits: ‘two notions of “nationality”, cultural and political, were in tension in the 1860s and are so today. The balance

between them has remained uneasy yet the tension has produced a pragmatic politics receptive to change, suspicious of any form of

Conclusion 341 totalitarian democracy, and deeply concerned with the multi-racial and

multi-cultural problems that have come to dominate the twentieth century’ (1969, 134). McNaught signals explicitly the absence of congru-

ence between the cultural and the political in Canada, a discontinuity that profoundly troubles nationalists and that Canadian broadcasting policy has chiefly been directed towards reconciling. He also identifies the beneficial consequences that have followed from the Canadian absence of congruence between polity and culture. The erosion of a normative congruence between religion and polity that followed the decline if the doctrine of ‘Cuius regio, eius religio’ made possible more tolerant societies without prejudicing their stability. The Canadian case demonstrates that the normative congruence stipulated by nationalists between polity and culture is not necessary for a stable and successful society. Moreover the absence of a strong and prescriptive national identity (or rather the constitution of Canadian identity from looser, limited identities) has made possible the peaceable kingdom to which Trudeau often referred. The integration of markets on an international scale that so troubles Canadian nationalists, because increasing Canada’s ‘dependency’ (not least in culture), may indeed offer opportunities to states, such as Canada, that are blessed with weak identities. Weak national identity makes delivery of elementary civil liberties to groups whose ethnicity, religion, language, and culture are different from those of the core community less troubling than it has been in states such as

the United Kingdom and France. Canada’s success in creating a ‘peaceable kingdom,’ in integrating many disparate immigrant groups

(and another state) into the polity, is surely a consequence of the Canadian state’s having had to accept from the beginning that there are different ways to be Canadian. Given that the world economy is becoming more interdependent and

that international trade increases as markets are integrated and a division of labour more and more takes place on a world scale, then it follows that the performance of a brokering function between trading partners will become more and more important. States, like Canada,

that have evolved social and political forms capable of brokering between the communities and cultures within them are likely to be better placed to perform such functions than old-style nation-states cursed with a strong cultural identity to which conformity is demanded

and which is projected outwards to the world as a norm. But the opportunities (not least in television-program production increasingly made through co-productions for audiences of different nationalities)

342 Culture, Communication, and National Identity are only seizable if a traditional nationalism seeking to co-ordinate the cultural, political, and economic is eschewed. The demand for a Canadian Heimat is very strong and, for Canadian nationalists seeking to protect and develop a national home, culture is a neuralgic point par excellence. In the lively debate over the Canada-

United States free-trade agreement concern over the impact of the agreement on culture (in spite of the cultural industries being excluded from the agreement) seems at times to have outweighted concern over the economic impact of the treaty. Rick Salutin (editor of This Magazine and scriptwriter of a number of Canadian tv dramas, including the first of the ‘For the Record’ series), for example, states that ‘free trade is entirely a question of culture, because it is a matter of the kind of society we and our descendants will inhabit as a result of the deal’ (Globe and

Mail, 5 Nov. 1987, Az). Salutin’s view rests on an elision of the distinction between the ‘anthropological’ and ‘symbolic’ meanings of culture (and elision of distinctions between culture and other social, political, and economic forces), but it is representative of a large body of central-Canadian intellectuals. Fewer in Alberta would, I think, see their

existence and prosperity threatened by free trade than in Ontario. Yet, Ontario more than any other Canadian province consumes American television. Rémillard’s statement ‘les concepts de communauté, peuple et nation sont parmi les plus difficiles a définir’ (1980, 102) commands my vigorous

assent. The temptation to follow him and decline definition and offer, instead, description is seductive indeed. But I hope that my attempts to elucidate the contradictory ideologies in Canadian television’s institutions and programming have attained an analytical and synthetic rather than simply a descriptive level. Many of the existing propositions used to discuss and make broadcasting policy and practice in Canada require challenge and revision. The concepts of dependency, media imperialism,

and nationalism, and their unity in a distinctive ideology, are full of

flaws and contradictions. So too, as I hope I have shown, is the counter-ideology of the capitalist market. Yet there is a complex way of making sense of Canadian television and its expression of and formation by these systems of ideas and their human and institutional bearers; that has been the object of this study. Its realization has necessitated critical interrogation of dominant assumptions, and an analysis of the institutional and programming practices of the central institution of Canadian television (and the Canadian cultural sector), the csc, and representative examples of Canadian television drama — the genre of programming that Canadian nationalists and Canadian public policies have defined as

Conclusion 343 most important and most threatened in the existing Canadian broadcasting order. The production of this complex sense has necessitated, even in a study of this length, some speculative leaps and examination of too small a sample of television dramas. I would have wished, ideally,

to investigate farther the behaviour and motivations of Canadian television audiences and to discuss a greater range of francophone television dramas. But these tasks will have to await another writer. Study of Canada’s television and the notions of culture and national identity so important to the Canadian situation generates two kinds of conclusions — those formulable as concrete policy proposals and those of general theoretical applicability. It would be impertinent for a foreigner

to advance concrete policy proposals. The least-worst form of government is self-government, and since most policy choices are between options, each of which carries benefits and disadvantages, it is those who will live with the consequences of the decisions who should make the proposals. But there are some conclusions of general interest that can be drawn from study of the case of Canadian television. First, democratic political institutions may survive in robust health without those who control them and are ruled through them sharing a

national symbolic culture. Second, there is a weak linkage between consumption of television drama and the political actions and selfidentifications of audiences. Third, ideas count: in spite of the conclusions above, outcomes in Canadian broadcasting have been and almost certainly will continue to be affected significantly by nationalist beliefs in

the intimate relation between political institutions, cultural identities,

and the leisure activity of television-drama consumption. Fourth, Canada exemplifies both the pervasiveness and the intensity of longing for a national Heimat and the possibility of creating a stable and decent democratic society that imperfectly satisfies such longings. These conclusions contradict the correspondence among communications, culture, and political structure argued by Innis in his proposition that ‘empire is an indication of the efficiency of communication.’ Innis confidently invoked Minerva’s nocturnal owl as the sign of his scholarship. Iam reminded rather of the connection Pope proposed in the third book of The Dunciad, between the scholar and the owl: There dim in clouds the poring Scholiasts mark, Wits who like owls see only in the dark A lumberhouse of books in every head For ever reading, never to be read.

It is for the reader to judge which of Pope’s forces — fate, Jove, or the real

344 Culture, Communication, and National Identity deity of scholarship, Dulness - called this author and this project together. But both author and reader may now bid each other adieu, secure in the knowledge that their quotas in diving for lead have been

fulfilled. It is perhaps most of all after such an enterprise that the importance of Ernie Bushnell’s insistence on broadcasting’s capacity to offer fun becomes apparent. It is fun that American television (too often, too much, insistently, wearisomely) offers. Unless and until Canadian television transforms its miserable and ageing (as the subjects consulted

in the studies for ‘L’avenir de la télévision francophone’ [Canada/ Québec 1985] had it) accents it will be received with the indifference of the Canadian viewer and the shrill encouragement of Canadian nationalists celebrating the refusal of American values.

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Index

Aird Commission 52, 53, 54, 89, audio-visual sector: funding 6, 7

335 auditor general’s audit of the cBc 41,

Aldred, Joel 63 95-7, 309

Almond, Paul 272 Audley, Paul 83, 98 americanité. See continentalism

Anderson, Benedict 105, 106 Babe, Robert 73

Andrew, J. 191 Barbin, C. 88-9 Ang, Ien 158 Baton Broadcasting 63 ‘Anne of Green Gables’ 12, 34, 100, BBC, influence of on CBC 55—6, 68, 335

212, 257, 271 ‘Beachcombers’ 12, 212, 257, 271, 277 Applebaum/Hébert Report 37, 40, Beale, Alison 206, 320

41, 87, 91-5, 104, 158 Beattie, Earl 6

Arcand, Denys 199, 222-3, 251, 285, Beaulieu, V.-L. 322 294, 300, 301, 318, 319, 320, 321, Bell, Daniel 8

322, 325 Bennett, R.B. 54, 55

Armour, Leslie 115 Berlin, Isaiah 332

Arnold, Matthew 261 bilingualism and biculturalism (8 and

Arnopoulos, S., and Dominique Clift B) 19-20, 117, 127, 130, 131, 139, 177

181, 184, 319 Bill C-58 17, 71, 73

Atwood, Margaret xv, 37, 224, 256, Bill C-136 3, 37, 69, 104 258, 279, 288, 289, 290, 292, 293, Bill 64 17

294, 316, 325 Bill 101 116, 184

audience commodity, the 170-2 Bill 109 198 audience research: appreciation in- Black, Conrad 294, 295 dex 296, 308, 310, 319; ratings Blandford, Mark 259, 273, 285, 300, 28, 32, 205, 228-34, 296, 301, 308, 301, 306, 310, 318, 319, 320, 322,

310, 319; R/D index 279 325

360 Index Board of Broadcast Governors (BBG) Canadian Broadcasting League 55, 56

59, 62-5, 75 Canadian content 64, 75-8, 83, 86,

Bourassa, Henri 113, 114, 116, 118, 102, 142, 244, 294

125, 138 Canadian Radio Broadcasting Com-

Bowman, Charles 54 mission (CRBC) 52, 54, 55, 58 Boyle, Harry 79, 80 Canadian Radio League. See Canabranch plants 161-2, 167-9, 174, 183 dian Broadcasting League

Brennan, Timothy 145-7, 157 Canadian tv drama, compared to vs. Breuilly, John 106, 108, 329 TV drama 298-311, 316—26 Brimelow, Peter 26, 126, 129-36, 139 Canadianization (of broadcasting in Broadcast Program Fund 99, 101, 142 Europe) ix, xiii, 5, 337 broadcasting, nationalist goals for CANCOM 46, 47, 78, 81-2, 85

48, 49, 63, 66-7 Capital Cost Allowance 97-8, 143

Broadcasting Act: 1958 65; 1932 54, Caplan/Sauvageau (Task Force on 103; 1936 55; 1968 3, 40, 47, 48, Broadcasting Policy) 30, 31, 33, 37, 59, 66-7, 79, 80, 136, 138, 139, 141, 41, 51, 59, 73, 74, 75, 78, 86, 89-91,

235, 244, 248, 268, 335 104, 201, 228, 238, 239, 242, 248, Broadcasting Research Unit (Bru) 250, 255, 275; evidence from CBC

68-9 13, 30, 241; recommendations 31,

Brophy, Reginald 55 32, 39-40

Bruck, Peter 173 Careless, J.M. 116, 330 Brunet, Michel 111 Carle, Gilles 338, 339

budget: federal cultural 1984-5 6 Cartier, Georges-Etienne 113, 138 Building for the Future (1983) 37, 41, Cathayvision 85

92 csc (Canadian Broadcasting Corpo-

Bureau, André 78 ration) 67, 101, 173, 206, 233,

Bushnell, Ernest 327, 333, 344 241, 243, 244-5, 247; application for licence 30; cBC2/Tele2 go; develop-

C-Channel 83 ment 55-64; élitism 209, 212; fundcable television 15, 43, 45-7, 60, 64, ing 3, 6, 7, 8, 39, 40, 73; program 70-1, 83, 90, 151; regulation: see sales to the United Kingdom 39,

crtc cable regulation 61, 241, 308; resource allocation 27, Cable Television Association 70 88, 92, 95; television 44, 46, 60-2,

Camu, Pierre 78 73, 89, 101, 245, 267, 274; TV dramas Canada/Quebec xiv, 228, 236-8, 325, 267-90, 293-6, 300-26, 335-7, 342

333, 344 | centre-periphery relations 27, 48, 50,

Canadian and vu.s. television com- 58, 88, 90, 111, 158, 160-7, 175, pared: 9-13, 16-17, 34, 206-7, 176-7, 337, 342; see also branch

248-9, 294, 296-311, 316-18 plants; dependency; staples theory Canadian Association of Broadcast- croc (Canadian Film Development

ers (CAB) 54, 55, 59, 73 Corporation) 97-8; funding 6,

Index 361 7, 8, 64, 93; points system 76; see 114, 138, 139, 180, 185, 294, 333,

also Telefilm Canada 340 Chabrol, Claude 283 Cooper, Thomas 215 CHAN 63 coproductions 99, 102, 337 Charter of the French language. See Cété, Guy 213

Bill 101 Cotnam, J. 34

‘Chautauqua Girl’ 268, 270, 271, 277, Cousineau, Louise 311, 335 284-8, 290, 293, 295, 336; view- Crean, Susan 129, 136, 137, 191,

ing statistics 285 214-15, 333; see also Crean and

CHCH Hamilton 45, 47 Rioux Chinavision 85 Crean, Susan, and Marcel Rioux 23, Christian, W. 215 24, 26, 119-21, 125 Cinema Canada 6, 7, 80, 94, 102, 103, Creighton, Donald 216

206, 214, 2'78, 293, 295, 325 Crémazie, O. 293

Cité Libre 122, 195 Crown corporations 6, 11, 95

CITV 47 crtc (Canadian Radio-television and CKND 12 Telecommunications Commission) Clark, J. 163 46, 47, 51, 69, 75-86, 268; cable

Clarke, H.D., et al 21, 22, 41 regulations 46, 50, 72; funding 6, Clarkson, Stephen 126, 127, 128, 134, 7, 8; relations with United States 15

135, 137, 138, 157 CTV 44, 46, 50, 63, 64, 73, 77, 100, 101

Claxton, Brooke 56 cultural élites. See intellectuals

Clement, Wallace 312 culture: and political identity ix, xii, Clift, Dominique 184, 200; see also 13, 21-3, 25-6, 36, 42-3, 60, 67,

Arnopoulos and Clift 106-40, 202-3, 223-7, 254-5, 260-1,

CNR Radio 68 328-32, 341; anthropological 35,

Colapinto, J. 259 253, 259, 266, 329; Canadian 10, 20, Collins, Richard ix; and Nicholas 35, 87, 89, 224-6, 245, 262, 274; high

Garnham and Gareth Locksley and mass x, xvi, 60, 107-8, 112,

4 120-3, 140, 188-9, 190-3, 198,

Commission of the European Com- 226, 252, 256-7, 260, 262, 264-7;

munities 337 symbolic 19, 23, 35, 140, 253, communication sovereignty xi-xii, 4, 259, 266, 329, 343 8, 13, 49, 94 Culture and Communication (report,

254 Curran, A. 81

consumer interests 50-1, 86, 90, 144, 1983) 37, 41 Consumer's Association of Canada

86 Dallas, costs of 38, 100, 308

continentalism 5, 19, 26, 33—5, 43, David, R. 43, 198

128, 134, 189, 190, 201, 338 de la Garde, Roger 19, 33-4, 35, 138, Cook, Ramsay xiii, 21, 23, 34, 113, 339

362 Index Department of Commerce 15 223, 248, 258, 259, 268, 270, 271, dependency theory 14, 158, 159, 273, 277, 289, 290, 295, 296, 300-6, 160-89, 199, 215-16, 312; Québé- 308, 309, 311-13, 316-18, 321,

cois 178-88 324, 325, 326, 334, 335, 336; viewDesaulniers, Jean-Pierre 26, 160, ing statistics 301 196-8, 201-4, 227, 254, 320, 324, Every Person Is Guilty 248, 268, 269, 331; and Philippe Sohet 198, 201, 271, 272, 273, 274, 281, 336

204, 321, 324 : Desroches, Pierre 103 Falkenberg, Hans-Geert 158

Le Devoir 113, 195, 199, 205, 295, 310, Family Channel/Canal famille 85

319, 321, 322, 324 Fcc (Federal Communications Com-

Disney Channel 85 mission) 15, 144

boc (Department of Communica- Feldman, Seth, 125, 127, 206, 224, tions) 13, 27, 37, 41, 85, 92-3, 94 274, 288-93; and Joyce Nelson

documentary 275-—80, 290, 295 222 Dofny, J., and Marcel Rioux 194 First Choice/Premier Choix 83, 84, 85 Dorland, Michael 102, 206, 254, 295, For the Record’ xvi, 37, 102, 270, 271,

296, 302, 316, 317 272, 273, 276, 277-84, 290, 296, Doutre, Gonzalve 138, 340 334, 336, 342 Dreamspeaker 68, 268, 271, 272, 273, Fowler Commission 42, 62-3, 95,

274, 280, 281, 336 206, 249, 328

Dugré, Adélard 121 Fowler Committee 65, 66-7 Duplessis, Maurice 124, 139, 185, Fox, Francis 81

195, 294, 320-4, 335, 336 Fox network 39 Duplessis 25, 199, 206, 223, 248, 257, Frye, Northrop 37, 206, 256, 258, 268, 270, 271, 273, 285, 290, 294-6, 275, 279, 290, 292, 293, 298

300, 318-26 Fulford, Robert 206, 210

Dying Hard 268, 271, 272, 273, 280, Fullerton, Mimi 40

281, 282, 336 ,

Galbraith, John Kenneth 148, 157

Eaton/Bassett 50, 63 Garnham, Nicholas 172, 173 Edmonton Journal 226 Gathercole, Sandra 14, 16 Ehrenberg, Andrew, and Patrick Bar- Geertz, Clifford 202

wise 153 Gella, A. 191, 205, 267

Elder, Bruce 295 Gellhorn, E., and R. Pierce 147, 150

Eliot, T.S. 260 Gellner, Ernest 18, 106, 107, 111, Ellis, David 44, 52, 53, 54, 60, 61, 66, 117, 120, 329

67, 206 Gerber, Sig 272, 278

empire and communication 215-22 Gerlach, P. 5

‘Empire Inc.’ 12, 13, 25, 34-5, 39, 97, Glassco Commission 95

Index 363 Global Television 44, 45, 77, 100, Hirsch, John 272, 273, 278

102, 293 Hirst, Paul 268

Globe and Mail 80, 88, 342 Hoskins, Colin: and Stuart Globerman, Steven, 142-4, 155-9; McFadyen 12, 100, 171; and Rolf

and Adrian Vining 159 Mirus 249

Godbout, Jacques 190, 197, 201, 210 Hothi, H. xiv, 228-35, 238, 243, 248,

Godfrey, D. 215-16 329

Goldfarb Consultants xiv, xv, 50, Houle, M. xv, 225, 289, 290, 292,

228, 244-6 293, 294, 325

Gough, Bill 215, 272 House of Commons Standing Com-

Grant, George 125 mittee Report 1988 8, 37, 42, 73,

Grierson, John 276 87, 88, 171

Grieve Horner Associates 38, 39, 275 Hull, William 65 Groulx, Lionel 181, 185

Guérin, André 198, 250, 268 Ibranyi-Kiss, A. 222

Guillet, J. 251 identity: cultural ix, xiv, 19-21,

Guthrie, Tyrone 68 23-6, 32-7, 57, 108-40, 141, 143, 144, 191, 200, 250-97, 328-32,

Hall, Stuart 328 338-9; English Canada 124-36,

Handler, Richard 194 190-1, 194, 290; national 25-6, 65, Handling, Piers 284, 295 105, 109-12, 122, 328, 330-1, 341;

Harcourt, Peter xv, 206, 262, 273, Quebec 33, 57, 110-14, 117, 121-5,

284, 295 128, 138, 190-6, 199-201, 213, 223,

Hardin, Herschel 11, 27, 48, 58, 332, 339

78-80, 91, 104, 125-6, 133-4, 139, In the Fall 80, 268, 270, 271, 288,

142, 144, 157, 159, 207-8, 261, 290-3, 336

285, 312 information, economic characteristics

Hardy, Forsyth 276 of 9, 148-50

Harris, C. 282, 285 information society x, 8, 93-4

Harrison, J.K. 274, 275 infrastructure: electronic 3, 6, 162; Harrison, Young, Pesonen, and physical communication 3, 5-6,

Newell xiv, xv, 30, 228, 238, 127, 162

241-3, 334 Innis, Harold 161, 162, 163-7, 172,

Harvey, Denis 72 214-22, 343

Henley, Gaile 278-80, 329 intellectuals 25, 26, 28, 32-5, 106,

Herrndorf, Peter 205-6 139, 140, 159, 161, 179, 188-9, Hétu, Anne-Marie, and Claire Re- 190-227, 267, 270, 332, 339, 342 naud 24, 36, 44, 337

Himmelweit, Hilde 230 Jacobs, Jane 129 Hind-Smith, Michael 70 Je me souviens 25, 268, 271, 272,

364 Index 274, 280, 281, 296, 336, 337; view- MacDonald, David 81, 85, 87

ing statistics 296 MacDonald, Flora 39, 226

Jhally, Sut 171 MacDonald, I. 168

Johnson, Al 90, 96, 240 Mackintosh, W. 165, 175

Johnson, Elton 52 MacLennan, Hugh 20, 190, 257, 258 Johnston, D. 116 McFadyen, Stuart, et al 71, 72, 73 Jones, David 213 McGregor, Gaile 20, 255-9, 279, 280,

Juneau, Pierre 5, 51, 285 285, 289, 290, 291, 292, 293

Jurgens, Eric 4, 4-5 McLuhan, Marshall 216 Jutra, Claude 272, 274, 281 McNally, R. 168

McNaught, Kenneth 111, 341

Katz, Elihu 14; and Paul Lazarsfeld market, competitive, and broadcast-

205; and Tamar Liebes 170, 328 ing 147-8, 152-9 Kedourie, Elie 26, 106-8, 118 Masse, Marcel 94, 102 Kennedy, John 273, 277, 308 Massey, Vincent 23

Kiefl, Barry 30 Massey Commission 59-60, 62, 214,

King, Allan 373 249 Kotcheff, Ted ix, xvi, 224, 257, 262, Mear, Annie 204

270 media imperialism xii, 14, 15, 17-18, Krasner, Steven 160 338 Meech Lake Agreement 116, 118

Lamonde, Yvan 19, 33, 121, 122 Meisel, John 20, 33, 35, 79 ‘Lance et Compte’ 25, 36, 197, 271, MétéoMédia 85

296 Miller, Mary-Jane 206, 207, 208-13,

language, as a component in national 227, 270, 271 identity 109, 114, 118, 129, 191-3, Minogue, Kenneth 106, 107, 111

253, 289-90, 327, 329 Mintz, David 100, 293

Laurence, G. 197 misérabilism xv, 206, 237-8, 258, Laurendeau, André 43, 196, 295 274, 290-5, 321, 333, 336, 338, 344

Leach, James 338 Moir, G. 12

Lee, C.C. 14, 15, 17-18 Moniére, Denys 181, 182-3, 184, Levene, 5am 272, 278, 308, 310 188, 200, 320 Lévesque, René 57, 117, 183, 192, Montpetit, R. 34 195, 196, 199, 200, 203, 213, 320, Morin, Edgar 34

321, 324 Morley, David 328

Locke, Jeannine 287 Morris, Peter 98, 284 Lorimer, Rowley, and Jean McNulty MuchMusic/Musique Plus 85

169 Muldane, Don 272 Lumsden, Ian 326 Mulroney, Brian 80, 88, 91, 176, Lyman, Peter 37, 39, 82, 83-4 236

Index 365 Murdock, Graham 172, 173; and Pe- Peacock, Sir Alan 155

ter Golding 173 Peacock Report 142, 156

Murray, Gladstone 55, 68 Pearson, Peter 101-3, 251, 272 Peers, Frank 44, 52, 56, 61, 64, 68,

Nairn, Tom 106, 111 80, 206

National Film and Video Policy Pitsch, Peter 145-148, 151, 153, 157

(1984) 37, 41, 92, 94, 101 Plaunt, Alan 56 National Policy 11, 27, 127, 168 Playboy Channel 84 nationalism x, xii—xiii, xv, 11, 13, Les Plouffe 62, 64, 197 18-19, 22-3, 33, 69, 105-41, 178-9, Poe, E.A. 299 200, 243, 322, 331-4, 338-40, 343; political patronage 63, 80, 103 of United States and Canada com- Pool, Ithiel de sola 298

pared 23-4 Porter, John 109, 189, 194

‘Nature of Things’ 36 post-industrial society. See informa-

Nelson, Joyce 112, 121 tion society

new communication technologies 5, Pratt, Larry 133, 175

8, 37 Pribram, E. Deidre 299, 304-5

Newman, Sydney 212, 213-14, 223, profitability of Canadian broadcast-

325, 333 ers 12, 64, 78, 142

Newsworld 85, 91 public goods and broadcasting 146, NEB (National Film Board of 150-2, 155-7

Canada) 17, 89, 90, 244, 245, 274, public-sector institutions xi, 11, 67, 291; critique 35, 92-3, 101, 213, 95, 101, 139, 140, 141, 159; see

222; funding 6, 7, 8 also Crown corporations

Nielsen Commission 254-5 public-service broadcasting xi, 48,

‘Nightheat’ 12, 248 57, 60, 67-9, 90-1, 95, 141, 233,

Niosi, J. 142 247-8, 334-5, 338

OECD (Organization for Economic Co- ‘Quatre Saisons’ 44, 45 operation and Development) 4, 163 Quiet Revolution, the 183, 184, 198, 199, 200

Panitch, Leo 167-9, 172, 172, 174,

178, 181, 188 Raboy, Marc 57, 58, 185, 195, 197,

Parti Québécois (PQ) 80, 131, 183, 198 184, 187, 195, 199, 236, 324 Radio Canada 36, 43, 58, 61, 80, Pay television 39, 46, 80, 82-6, 99, 196-7, 201, 204, 233, 249, 296; see

102, 151, 154; Ontario Indepen- also CBC dent Pay television 83, 84 Radio Quebec 44, 45, 51, 88-9, 183, pes (Public Broadcasting System) 71, 198

226, 247, 248 Ravault, René-Jean 18

366 Index Ready for Slaughter 268, 270, 271, Smith, Adam xi 272, 274, 280, 281, 283, 285, 336 Smith, Anthony 14

Régie des Services Publics 17 Smythe, Dallas 161, 164, 168, Régie du Cinéma et de la Vidéo 198, 169-73, 178, 216

250 speciality services 85 regulation 17, 47-51, 58-60, 62-7, opry, Graham 54, 56, 59, 63, 64, 286 69-80, 83-5, 103, 139, 140, 142-7, Spry, Robin 25, 272

336; see also Canadian content; staples theory 161, 163-8

CRTC; BBC Star Channel Services 83, 84

Remillard, Gilles 113, 327, 342 Starowicz, M. 225-6, 246, 285, 2386,

Richards, John, and Larry Pratt 287

174-78, 187 state (administered) and market sys-

Richler, Mordecai 143, 257, 262 tems compared ix, x—xi, 8-11, Rioux, Marcel 121, 122, 123, 124, 23, 26-9, 42, 49-50, 53, 59, 92-5, 128, 129, 136, 137, 320; see also 103-4, 139, 140-59, 247, 336-7

Crean and Rioux Studies in Political Economy 167 Ross, L., and Héléne Tardif 197 Stursberg, Peter 327, 333

Roy, J.-L. 195 Super Ecran 85

Russell, Peter 23 Superchannel 84

Rutherford, Paul 328, 330 Surlin, Stuart 190

Salutin, Rick 342 Take Over 271, 309-10, 313, 317 satellites, television ix, xi, 5, 39, Tardif, Héléne 197

44-7, 64, 81-2, 94, 151 The Tar Sands 206, 272, 273

Saturday Night 206 Télé-Métropole 50, 102, 196, 197,

Schiller, Herbert 14-15 204, 237

Schmidt, R. 16-18 Telefilm Canada 12, 17, 50, 97-104,

Sedgewick, Harry 55 250, 268, 272, 290

Seers, Dudley 106 Telelatino 85

Senate (1970) 234, 236 teleroman 61, 278, 290, 321 Seton-Watson, Hugh 105, 106, 191, Telesat Canada 17, 162

331 television criticism: xvi, 190; in

La Sette 45 English Canada 205-13, 222-7; in Shebib, Don 251, 272, 283, 284 Quebec 193-204, 227

single system 59, 67, 69, 91, 92, 141 television drama: xv—xvi, 24-5, 42,

Sirois, Jean 103 78, 97, 225-6, 248, 250, 267-326, Slim Obsession 68, 268, 269, 271, 330, 334, 335-7, 334, 342, 344

272, 274, 281, 283, 284, 336 television programs: cost of 38, 39, Smith, A.D. 105, 106, 111, 127, 205, 72, 99-100, 308; economics of

331 production of 13, 15-16

Index 367 television viewing: in Canada 29-30, two solitudes 20, 24, 190 51, 74, 228, 234, 239-40, 246; of

drama 13, 29, 30-1, 33, 226, 285, Underhill, Frank 108, 176 296, 301, 309; in the Netherlands United States television program in10; shares in the u.s. market 39; of dustry 16, 17, 71 U.S. TV in Canada 10, 11, 13, 43,

44,51, 73-4, 86-7, 234-5, 238, 241, _ Valliéres, Pierre 184, 185-7, 319

245, 246 ‘Vanderberg’ 223, 248, 258, 268, 271, third force, the xiv, 20, 21, 109, 131, 292, 295, 296, 300, 303, 306-11,

341 313-8, 321, 325, 334, 336, 337;

This Magazine 342 viewing statistics 309

Thomas, Ralph 272, 274, 278, 281 Verroneau, P., and Piers Handling

three plus one 47, 81-2 251, 284

Ti-Cog 43 video-cassette recorders 45 Tiger, Michael 37 Videotron 50 Till, Eric 209, 296 Vision Tv 85

Toogood, Alex 160 Vital Links (1987) 37, 41 Towards a New National Broadcast-

ing Policy (1983) 37, 41, 81, 92 Watkins, Mel 243

trade, Canada’s external 162-3 Watt, F. 23 trade in TV programs 4, 12, 16-17, Weinthal, Arthur 78

39, 72, 99-100, 275, 334 Weir, E. Austin 68 Trofimenkoff, Susan 180, 249 Weiss, J. 34 Trudeau, Pierre 79, 130, 131, 133;0n | Whitaker, R. 216 nationalism 22-6, 112—19, 122-5, Wilden, Tony 20, 110, 125 128, 137-8, 184, 331, 332, 340, 341 Williams, Arthur 158 TSN (The Sports Network)/Reseau Williams, Raymond 35, 250, 259

des Sports 85 Williams, Tannis 228, 231-2, 235, 247

Tunstall, Jeremy 14, 18 Winnipeg manifesto 250

Tv Canada 31, 50, 89, 90 Wolfe, Morris 47, 90, 173, 201, 206-8,

TV 5 85, 8&9 227, 252, 261, 275, 280, 300, 303,

242 83

Tv World 99 324, 325, 333

TVA 44, 45, 47, 50, 51, 196, 197, 201, Woodrow, R., and K. Woodside 81,

TvOntario 40, 44, 45, 89, 101, 335 World View television 83, 84 twinning agreements. See coproduc-

tions yTv (Youth Television) 85