Beyond Polarity

Canadian policy keeps trying — and failing — to wall off our culture from America. Rinse and repeat.

FOR DECADES, Ottawa has waged a quixotic campaign to shield Canadian content from the cultural tsunami coming at us from south of the 49th parallel. The effort long predates Pierre Trudeau (the elder), but his Liberal government made it a signature mission with the 1968 Broadcasting Act and aggressive CRTC quotas. Successors of all stripes doubled down.

We’ve tried incentives, mandates, quotas, and subsidies. The latest bright idea from the CRTC: triple the levy on Netflix, Disney+, Spotify and other streamers — jacking their required contribution from 5 per cent to 15 per cent of Canadian revenues. Thankfully, Prime Minister Mark Carney stepped in. Citing affordability, his government told the CRTC to stand down — just weeks before trade talks with the Trump administration. Smart politics and smart economics.

Wanting to protect your culture isn’t crazy. Nations have done it for centuries. Post-WWII, the U.S. cleverly wove American films and radio into the Marshall Plan, understanding soft power’s reach. Culture shapes hearts and minds — sometimes more than tanks. Nazi propaganda proved the dark side of that coin.

In America, culture is also big business. Talented Canadians like Ryan Reynolds head to Hollywood for scale, budgets, and global reach. That dynamic is shifting: China’s market is massive, and Hollywood eyes every release nervously. Steven Spielberg’s Disclosure Day, dropping this week, will be a litmus test amid industry headwinds and high unemployment in Tinseltown.

Here at home, Quebec shows what actually works. It hasn’t just preserved Québécois identity — distinct from both France and English Canada — it has exported it across the Francophone world. Quebec culture even enjoys explicit constitutional recognition. How did they succeed where Ottawa has repeatedly failed? Not by micromanaging artists with federal mandates and “discoverability” rules, but by creating the conditions for creators to tell stories Quebecers (and others) actually want to watch and hear.

Cirque du Soleil didn’t emerge from a bureaucrat’s funding formula; it grew from authentic cultural roots — circus is to the French what theatre is to the English. The National Film Board planted itself in Montreal, nurturing animators and talent. Ubisoft (one of the world’s largest game studios) and the broader gaming scene followed. Montreal became a hub because it facilitated creativity, not because regulators dictated output.

Bureaucrats and regulators managing culture in the rest of Canada don’t seem to have figured out that formula for taking homegrown talent to the next level. Even Quebec, for all its successes, has seen its biggest international stars — Celine Dion, for example — head south to crack the global English-language market. But the broader pattern is clear: Shania Twain was a prodigy at twelve, strumming a guitar bigger than she was at festivals in northern Ontario. Now she’s a global superstar, soon to headline Wembley Stadium. Like so many other bright lights from English Canada, she had to head south to advance her career.

Truth is, there is a Quebec culture, an Alberta culture, a Newfoundland culture, and so on. But with credit due to Justin Trudeau — who I can’t help but notice is now jetting around with an international pop star — there is no longer a single Canadian culture that everyone can agree on. (A quick sidebar to would-be separatists: this observation isn’t an invitation to hijack the point. Quebec cleverly built real sovereignty within Canada. Alberta is now wisely emulating that model.)

That said, it was heartening to see the genuine national outcry when the RCMP handed Disney the keys to the Mountie image and uniform in 1995. For a brief moment, Canadians of all stripes instinctively rallied to defend a shared symbol. The backlash proved that some cultural touchstones still resonate — even if Ottawa treats them as bargaining chips.

Alberta is carving its own path with its Alberta Media Fund and competitive film tax credits, nurturing homegrown stories and attracting productions on market terms. The Aboriginal Peoples Television Network (APTN) delivers genuine Indigenous stories that could find audiences abroad. The five seasons of Blackstone comes to mind. 

The formula is clear: facilitate excellence and let markets — domestic and global — decide winners. Stop pretending bureaucrats in Ottawa can engineer national identity from the top down.

Veteran producer Pat Ferns, in his Sutherland House book The Big Picture, chronicles the evolution of Canada’s independent production industry and predicts its likely decline amid media consolidation. Ferns knows it’s feasible to make things people actually want to watch. But he sees the Canada Media Fund and CRTC as relics of 20th-century thinking — as if the internet never happened.

University of Ottawa professor Michael Geist has been saying the same for years: policymakers need to modernize. Geist rightly skewers the federal government’s attempts to force “discoverability” and manipulate algorithms to prop up Canadian content. It doesn’t work.

Canadians are underserved and overpaying for content that often feels like subsidized lectures. The CBC — Ottawa’s lavishly funded darling — hemorrhages viewers on TV while its streaming numbers stay conveniently hidden. As I’ve previously written, the model is broken.

Carney’s rollback of the Online Streaming Act’s worst excesses was the right call. It removes a needless irritant in U.S. trade talks. But the deeper challenge remains: how to support authentic storytelling in a borderless digital world where bits and stories cross boundaries invisibly.

Quebec figured it out. Alberta is figuring it out. Other provinces could follow. Canadian culture will thrive when it stops obsessing over what it isn’t (American) and starts excelling at what it can be. Time to retire the moat.