A Plea for the CBC

Founded by the Tories under RB Bennett.

Non-Canadians can stop reading now.

Canadian conservatives tend to be anti-culture, anti-arts. This is a dreadful mistake. Shelley was right in saying that poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world; the pen really is mightier than the sword. The culture wars will, inevitably, be won in the culture. All politicians are ever able to do, unless they are themselves, like Ronald Reagan, artists, is rush to the front of the mob and pretend they are leading. Leave the culture on the other side, and the right will always lose.

Nor is there any unwritten rule that artists are always going to be leftists. They are not. In the early years of the twentieth century, the finest English poetic voices were on the right: TS Eliot and WB Yeats. Jack Kerouac was a Taft Republican. Even supposedly counter-cultural figures from the Sixties have revealed that they merely felt obliged to keep to themselves essentially right-wing views: Bob Dylan, Andy Warhol, Roger McGuinn, Joni Mitchell, and so forth.

So we should all shut up about shutting up the CBC. We need the CBC. We need it desperately in a country like Canada, not so much because we are threatened with assimilation by American culture, but because we are threatened, by a challenging geography, with regional, centrifugal forces. We need a megaphone to speak for Canada united.

On top of that, there is the issue of international branding. People outside France buy French products largely because “France” means something as a brand. So does “Japan,” or “Germany.” Canada too means something as a brand, but it is just good sense to advertise. A CBC concentrated entirely on Canadian culture and focused outward as well as inward, with the new fora of international cable and the Internet out there, would do this. It would also project “soft power” that might stand us in good stead in case of international conflict.

Wince all you want about exempting the arts from the free market. It works; and the arts have rarely, anywhere, been part of the free market. This is an exception to the general rule. We have seen government tinkering work in the remarkable growth of the Canadian popular music industry, unfairly subsidized, no doubt, in market terms, by Cancon rules. CBC radio, which unlike TV is all Canadian content, has also genuinely done a lot for Canadian culture.

Nor would this cost much—less and less with the growth of technology. The French auteurs used to talk of the ideal of a “camera-stylo”—a cinema that could be as intimate and personal as a writer’s pen. We have that now: everybody carries a video camera in their pocket, complete with means of instant transmission.

Foreign content.

The trick is to require that CBC broadcast only Canadian content, with a clear mandate for national unity and promotion of the Canadian brand. No shows from the US or Britain. Besides serving no national interest, such shows put the CBC in direct and unfair competition with private broadcasters. Bureaucratic bloat could be avoided by enforcing a budget requirement that limited percentages available for anything off-air.

And no money for anything the least bit “multicultural.” Canadian culture must belong to all Canadians.

Non-Canadians can now resume reading.