The Hand-over

by Elaine Dewar

  The literary agents were nervous about what was afoot. They held meetings, and according to the minutes of one of them, planned to make representations to the Minister. One publisher told me that one of his competitors had gone to Ottawa for a consultation and had expressed his concern about this everything-is-on-the-table business. He’d been told by officials not to worry; book publishing represents such a tiny fraction of the Departmental budget ($1.9 billion) that no attention would be paid to it at all.

  Was that Good? Or Bad?

  In mid-September, the Canadian Heritage website said the government was organizing five in-person events across the country at which the Minister would appear. The one for Toronto, the cultural capitol of English Canada, home of the largest segments of the film and television industry, music industry, games industry, publishing industry, dance, opera, theatre, what have you (close to 45% of all Canada’s cultural industry jobs are in Ontario), was scheduled for October 12.

  I was annoyed that no one had sent me a press release about these meetings, though I had been trying to get my name added to the Department’s media list for some time. Apparently my requests, including my request to interview the Minister, had fallen in some deep hole.

  But I was shocked when I realized that October 12, 2016, was Yom Kippur, the most significant day in the Jewish calendar. Wow, I thought, that’s got to be a mistake, who would brag about diversity as our strength, as Canadian Heritage always does, and then hold a public consultation event on the arts, culture, publishing, television, etc. on Yom Kippur? There are a few Jews involved in these industries (such as me). I was told, later, that October 12 had been chosen because the House of Commons was not sitting that week.

  Though I now had a date, a very inconvenient date, the website did not announce a place or time for any of the events listed, not in Vancouver, Montreal, Halifax, Edmonton, or Toronto.

  There was a note on the website that a company called Ipsos was in charge of organizing these events. Ipsos, I soon learned, is foreign-owned: its head office is in Paris, France. I spoke to Marc Beaudoin in Ipsos’ Ottawa office, asking for the time and place of the Toronto in-person event. I also asked to attend. He said these in-person consultations were by invitation only, but there would be tweeting and live-streaming. I said that was nice, but no one following on social media would be able to ask the Minister a direct question. I understand your concerns, he said. Please tell the Department.

  Who is invited? I asked.

  That too is up to the Department, not his territory, he said. He gave me the name and number of the man in charge of the who, the where, and the when—Scott Shortliffe, a Director General at Canadian Heritage.

  Shortliffe returned my call the next day. He explained that these events were working sessions, that’s why it was by invitation only, space was limited. Why would space be limited? I asked. Rent a bigger space. Who is invited?

  No answer.

  I asked to be invited as media to cover the event. I asked to be sent the invitation list. I was told my name and information would be passed on to the right people.

  About two weeks before the Toronto event, I phoned the Department of Canadian Heritage, the Minister’s office, and the Ipsos folks again asking for the time and the place of the Toronto consultation. No replies. At that point, I realized I needed to haul out my investigative reporter tool kit. The Department of Canadian Heritage seemed to be treating the time and place for public consultation on the future of Canadian content in a digital world as a secret.

  I emailed people in the Toronto cultural community who I thought might have been invited. I started with Elaine Waisglas, artist, photographer, and partner of Michael Hirsh, co-founder of Nelvana, a major animation company specializing in the adaptation of children’s literature. Hirsh had eventually sold Nelvana to Corus, and then had founded more companies selling stories around the world. Waisglas said neither of them had been invited and said she didn’t realize that everything was on the table.

  You and Michael should be there, I said.

  Waisglas contacted Gail Dexter Lord, a world-renowned museum consultant based in Toronto, to find out if she had been invited. No, not invited either. Later I would ask Rita Davies, Chairwoman of the Ontario Arts Council, formerly the transformative executive director of the Culture Division for the City of Toronto, and before that leader of the Toronto Arts Council, if she was invited to attend. No, she had not received an invitation either.

  I studied the advisory group list to see if there was anyone on it who I could contact to find out where and when the event would be held. The list included: a producer of CBC’s Republic of Doyle; an actress/writer with a web series running on Hulu; the President of CPAC; the chief digital officer of the Film Board; the CEO of TVO; Dean of Communications and Design at Ryerson; the President of the Society of Graphic Designers in Quebec; the CEO of APTN; the founder of the Society for Arts and Technology in Montreal; the President of Secret Records of Montreal; the Executive Vice-President of Public Policy at Rogers Communications (Ken Whyte is also a director of Munk’s Aurea Foundation); the Chairman of DHX. Someone must have raised a concern that this group was heavy on executives, light on “content” makers.378 Three women were added after the Vancouver consultation—two writers and a dancer. There were no book publishers at all, nobody currently in the newspaper business or directly in the magazine business, and no leading authors. Meanwhile, Elaine Waisglas and Michael Hirsh put a PR firm on the case and they soon got an invitation. Elaine sent me an email with the time and place: Art Gallery of Ontario, in the Baillie Court, at 12:30 p.m. on Yom Kippur.

  I got to the museum in plenty of time. The Baillie Court is on the third floor, accessible only by the AGO Members’ elevator at the back of the building, or, by the fabulous circular staircase that arrived with the Gehry rewrite of the AGO. There was one small stanchion beside that elevator carrying one small sign advertising the Canadian content in a digital world event. It was the only such sign in the building.

  I sat on a bench opposite and waited to see who showed up.

  People came in small groups. No familiar faces. Then there was a gang of four with phones in their hands muttering about messaging the Minister. Shortly thereafter, the Minister herself appeared, resplendent in over-the-knee leather boots and a charming cornflower-patterned blue jacket. She disappeared with her retinue into a side room. Elaine Waisglas came in after that, went upstairs, and came right back down. There’s a press table up there, she said. Just go up and sign in.

  So, I went up. There was a press table. There was a sheet of paper where media persons were supposed to sign in. There were a couple of names on it, which meant that at least some other media had been informed. Why not me? I told the woman at the table that I was not on her list but would like to attend. Is that a problem? No problem, she said, just sign in, there’s a scrum later with the Minister. At this point my ears got hot because I was very annoyed. Investigative tools should not be necessary when there’s a press table and any journalist can enter just by signing their name to a piece of paper.

  You know I’ve been trying to get information about this event for quite some time, I said to her. I asked to be on the press list, no one got back to me.

  Oh, you should speak to the Press Secretary for the Minister, she said.

  We were in an open space off the main room. People were milling about. I spotted a youngish man who I had seen before walking with the Minister. Pierre-Olivier Herbert, said his name tag. That is the name of the Minister’s Press Secretary, the same person I’d left messages for. I went over to meet him. I expressed my annoyance. He didn’t seem to understand why I was annoyed. I explained I had left messages for him, and for his assistant, which had not been returned, asking to be included on the press list. Now he remembered that he’d handed off my email to his assistant, so it was her fault if I never heard back. I said I had also asked for the list of al
l the invitees to these events.

  Oh, can’t do that at this time, he said.

  Why not? I said, people are here, they’ve been invited, you sent out the invitations a while back.

  Well there’s still Montreal to come, he said, meaning refusals were still coming in and invitations still going out.

  When will you have the list of invitees? I asked.

  In due course, he said.

  Are there any publishing people on it?

  He said there were.

  Anyone here today who is in publishing?

  I can’t give you the name at the moment, he said, backing away.

  At this point a policy person with the Department came forward because she had heard me mention that I was working on a book on publishing. She asked me for my card. Don’t have one, I said, I’ll write my email on this piece of paper for you. She rummaged in her purse for her card. She wanted me to contact her, she said. She assured me she would reply right away. So I took her card and explained what I was writing about and that I wanted the list of invitees to this event, especially in publishing. Is there anybody here today who is in publishing? I asked. She thought there was. Can I have the name? I asked. You should speak to the Press Secretary, she said. At which point my ears got hot again. I had begun to figure out that this absurdly evasive behaviour was not aimed at me. There was no aim here at all except to pretend to listen to a few well-chosen people of known views, and then write whatever policy the Minister or her Department had in mind from the start. Perhaps this moment of realization is when my whole face went red. Perhaps my face going red frightened the policy person.

  “Oh,” she said with that look of concern: “are you okay?”

  “Perfectly fine,” I said through gritted teeth. “Just pissed off.”

  I told her I would write her later that day and walked into the main hall. There were eight tables of ten with place cards for the invited. So, I thought, 80 people invited. That’s a pretty small number to represent the views of the English language cultural centre of Canada. But then I realized that each table also had an Ipsos facilitator, so the real number of invitees was 72. Later we would be told that five local area MPs had come to this event as well, so the number of invited cultural folk dipped down to 67. I spotted no one representing Unifor, a union that represents journalists and other writers, which had published an ad in the morning paper trying to get the Minister’s attention on the subject of its members losing their jobs at newspapers and in other media.

  There was a journalist standing beside me from the National Post. How did you hear about this? I asked him.

  There was a press release, he said.

  To you? I asked.

  No, just to the paper, he said. He thought it had come three days earlier.

  Do you know who’s invited? I asked. No, he said, I’m just gonna take pictures of the name cards on my phone. Which he did.

  The actor, Paul Gross, made a speech and introduced the Minister. The way he told it, things are tough in the world of Canadian content. “Consolidation has not helped us,” he said. No kidding, I muttered. “We’re ten years behind, the failure of SHOMI gives a good indication of where we’re failing,” he said. But since the new government and the Minister had taken an interest, he advised all assembled to take advantage of that and move forward. As to the Minister, he said, she is a thief and she doesn’t apologize. Apparently, he had appeared at TIFF with the Minister and at a shared meal she took over his fruit cup.

  The Minister told a different story. First, she thanked the Mississaugas of the New Credit First Nation for allowing us to be on their former lands. Then she mentioned that former councillor and MP Adam Vaughan was in the room as a guest and she named as well each of the other MPs, plus Ken Whyte of Rogers. She wanted everyone to know that “we come at this from a position of strength” that we have all this talent, that we are “number one in virtual reality due to the National Film Board. Our authors are celebrated around the world so that is why we are the guest of honour at the Frankfurt Book Fair in 2020!”

  But, she said, she still really needed help and so she was here to listen. There was an 8.9 % growth in the creative sector in the UK last year, pushed by that government, and she wanted the same for Canada. (Canada had an overall growth in GDP of 1.2% in 2016, which might climb all the way to 2% in 2017. Statistics Canada reports that cultural industries contribute about 3% to Canada’s GDP, and that this sector grew by 2.8% between 2010 and 2014, about half the growth was in audio-visual and interactive media.379) The invitees in the room, she said, represented “the present and the future of our country’s culture, the world is watching us, and is wide open to the stories we have to tell. Diversity is our strength…”

  At this point she launched into a speech that Ontario Arts Council Chairwoman Rita Davies would have made better—if she’d been invited—the one about the economic value of culture, the number of jobs it generates, the percentage of GDP it represents. For some reason this roused a man who was leaning against a wall to burst into hoots and hollers and a fit of handclapping as if she’d done a quadruple toe loop. “Think big for today and tomorrow,” she concluded. At which point she introduced Scott Shortliffe, Deputy Director General Broadcasting and Digital Communications, Canadian Heritage, to “frame the questions.”

  Shortliffe, a chubby fellow in a sweater, gave a talk about the culture ecosystem and the federal tool kit available to tinker with it. Apparently, no one in the Department of Canadian Heritage worries about mixing metaphors.

  Finally, a man from Ipsos named some of the other important people in the room—a person named Corey Vidal who has 71 million YouTube views, someone from Vice Media, someone else from Twitter, and, oh yes, the brand-new Vice-chairwoman of TVO, Ms. Trina McQueen. Everyone was asked to tweet as they worked, this tweeting was very important. “This is a working session,” he said enthusiastically. “You guys get to do the heavy lifting. As the Minister said, be bold.”

  The event was live-streamed on Facebook. Most comments I read later were complaints that the audio wasn’t good, that the social media participants couldn’t hear what was being said by the people in the room. My stomach began to growl because I was fasting, October 12 being Yom Kippur. I fast on Yom Kippur (though I also work on Yom Kippur, which makes no sense at all from a religious point of view, but then religion makes no sense from any point of view). I did not stay for the remainder of the in-person event, nor did I stay for the Minister’s scrum. I went home.

  I pulled out the policy person’s card and emailed her as she’d asked me to do. Who was invited to these events? I asked. What are their affiliations? Were there any publishers in the room? Names please?

  No response.

  I found that sufficiently annoying that I filed one more Access to Information application on October 17, 2016, with the Department of Canadian Heritage. I asked for a list of the names and affiliations of all those invited to participate in the in-person events on Canadian content in a digital world. I asked for a list of all those who attended, and in particular, I asked for the names of any book publishers or newspaper or periodical publishers, and the names of any writers who attended. I also asked for the names of the five Members of Parliament who attended in Toronto, and their constituencies.

  Please note: I used the word “list” twice.

  Remember that word.

  I placed a bet with myself: they will answer on time, but they will withhold most of what you want to know. I wagered fifty cents.

  The federal government gives itself thirty days to respond to Access to Information requests. It must do so either by sending out the documents requested, or, by giving itself more time to get permissions from third parties or to extend the search to other departments. I filed my request online. The response arrived several days after the date stamped on its cover letter—November 16, 2016—29 days after I filed. The Depart
ment had made it just under the wire, if you consider stamping a date on a letter the same thing as delivering it on time.

  The response included a CD-ROM. I opened it and printed the contents out. It consisted of a few unlabelled pages that seemed to be a list of those who attended the Toronto event—I knew that because Paul Gross’s name was there and so was the name of one person—one!—from the book publishing community. Barbara Howson was listed as representing “Anansi Press and Groundwood Books.” House of Anansi Press owns Groundwood Books. (Stoddart used to own House of Anansi. Now, Scott Griffin does.) Though Barbara Howson’s title was not on this sheet, I can tell you that she is the Vice-President for Sales and Licensing. No other book publishers’ names appeared.

  A member of the Prime Minister’s Youth Council was on the list. Names, affiliations and “justifications” were given for some names, but not for others. I found Elaine Waisglas’s name, but she was not identified in any way. Michael Hirsh wasn’t identified either, nor was Trina McQueen, the new Vice-Chairwoman of TVO. Email addresses, twitter handles, whether the person was under the age of 40, Aboriginal, etc., were withheld.

  The covering letter directed me to an attendees list for all five cities involved, which had been posted to the Department’s website. The information regarding the Toronto attendees as posted on the website differed from the list sent to me on the CD-ROM. Though I scoured all the lists, I found only one other book publisher person: she worked for an English language trade book publishers’ association in BC, and had attended the Vancouver event. She had formerly worked for Toronto’s Coach House Press. There was a scattering of representatives from newspaper publishers’ associations represented at the events in the West. But there were four times as many representatives from Telus as from book publishers.

  No MPs’ names appeared on any of the lists.

  The cover letter said: “Please note that information is withheld under subsection 19(1) [personal information] and paragraph 21(1) (a) [advice or recommendations.]