by Elaine Dewar
Note: he acknowledged there is a Canadian We, but he did not describe who we are, he only referred to what we must do, as if group action is the same as identity. But identity is not just a function of action. Though the globalist idea is rational and seems utterly obvious (of course all human beings everywhere are equal, of course the world belongs to us all) reason has little to do with identity, the need for which arises out of physical vulnerability. Countries are not intimate groups, even when they’re very small, yet they are much more intimate than the entire world. So it’s not a question of whether globalism makes sense or whether we are or are not past the need for nationalist policies, it’s more a question of whether human beings can live meaningful lives in a globalized world. Globalism raises these questions: who governs, who decides, and how? Currently, the globalist agenda mainly benefits billionaires who try to manipulate political decisions that affect their interests. How do the rest of us get a vote?
So: what do I want? Here’s one answer. I want to belong to an open, pluralist society that respects all its members, expects me to participate in making its choices, and helps me tell its stories. (I want to be young again, too.)
Why do I care? Do I still care?
Maybe I pursued this story not because I care, but just to get to the bottom of it, because it was hard, because I discovered bottomless cleverness at work and I have always been fascinated by cleverness (thus, clever husband). And really: when I did get to the bottom of it, what did I discover? Yes, the law and policy meant to advance Canadian literature through the protection of Canadian publishers was followed, but in a way that gutted the law’s spirit and turned the meaning of the policy inside out. But was anyone unjustly enriched? Jack Stoddart thinks Avie Bennett probably got back the total investment he made in M&S over the fifteen years in which he owned it, thanks to the tax credit receipt and the sale to Random House. Bennett was certainly entitled to strive for repayment, but why did civil servants look the other way while the law and the policy on de facto control were twisted like licorice Twizzlers?383 No doubt they consoled themselves by arguing that they’d at least saved jobs in the book business, and protected their Minister from a hue and cry over cultural nationalism. Yes, clever professionals and a brilliant businessman exploited tax law, the rules of bankruptcy, and the Investment Canada Act, turning them one way, and then the opposite way, to get to a desired end. But isn’t that kind of flexibility exactly what an efficient economic system requires? Isn’t lack of flexibility the grievous flaw that brings down planned economies? The transfer of 75% of the shares of our most important publishing house for $1 may not have been the end point sought by Canadians who write, edit, and make books, but that does not make it wrong.
Maybe the notion that a national literature is vital to national sovereignty is wrong. Or maybe it was right once, but is wrong now. Once, in the second decade of the last century, Canadian book publishing was a thriving business without government support or protectionist rules necessary—back when information was shared in one direction, back before radio and television provided competing means to tell stories. Profits could be made then from the creation and distribution of stories printed on paper. Nowadays, mountains of money are made from the hardware and software which permit stories to be reduced to digits and shared everywhere. Clever machines enable everyone and anyone to be publisher, author, videographer, citizen reporter, stand-up comic, 3-D machinist, controller of robots, nanosecond star, group organizer and rabble rouser. These machines have enabled the birth of an infinite array of information commons, virtual communal places where everything and anything can be made, shared, discussed, distorted, described, misdescribed, faked, all open to everyone in any country that does not censor the Internet. These information commons are utterly different from the kind created by the makers of books, newspapers, and magazines.
The old information commons—books, magazines, newspapers—are the provinces of their gatekeepers. Their precincts are defended by legal and territorial boundaries. I was one of those gatekeepers when I was young. We were so arrogant: we assumed we knew what people wanted to know, and worse, what people needed to know, and worst, who among us had the talent to engage with the audiences who paid to enter our paper communities. But as the new means to distribute storytelling became available, as the young began to connect with each other on Facebook, YouTube, Hulu, advertisers and consumers abandoned the old commons in favour of these multi-directional new ones. Mountain ranges of money accrued to the enablers of every-which-way sharing platforms, rather than to those who create what is shared. Book publishers’ revenues have been shrinking and shrinking, because free offerings delivered via these new platforms attract people who can’t be bothered to go to a bookstore and hand over money for entertainment or enlightenment. Advertisers go where the greatest number of eyes can be found. As television audiences also fractured, because there are so many new ways and places to share visual stories, those revenues dived, too. If you want to see really interesting drama and comedy you have likely disconnected your cable and have a cheap subscription to Netflix, which is not regulated or taxed by the government of Canada, and does not care about reflecting Canadians to themselves, or building Canada word by word.
Protectionist laws applied to cultural industries may have been politically necessary and enforceable when I was young, but in a time when information knows no boundaries, some of them have become unenforceable, and therefore economically stupid. My publisher insists that economic inefficiency is beside the point. He argues that some things are worth doing though they have no economic purpose, that creating literature is one of those things, and people do it because they want to, or have to, and not to earn a living. He does not need to remind me: I know I write because I need to, not as a way to be wealthy, but to try to understand myself and the world I live in. That’s why I will continue to write though my bank account is a disgrace. But do we really want a public policy that depends on publishers being willing to forgo even the possibility of an upside? Grants have led to the proliferation of many small book publishers who will never earn significant profits, will never be big enough to compete with foreign-owned multinationals for talent, and will find no Canadian buyers for their companies when they are old and grey. The mere existence of the law and the policy depress the value of the companies they build, even though our national cultural commons has not really been protected from foreign buyers for the past 18 years. As Canadian Heritage bureaucrat Jean-Pierre Blais told the Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage in June, 2010, since 1999, more than 90 percent of applications for the sale of Canadian cultural industries to foreign owners were approved. In all that time only three were denied.384 But our publishers’ investments are discounted anyway, just because the Act and the Policy exist, just because a bureaucrat and a politician might decide to say no to an application in the future.
Rules are supposed to be enforced, otherwise why have them? In the beginning, these protectionist rules created a mini-economy that allowed me my life as a writer. But later, their creative interpretations by politicians and bureaucrats created something very unhealthy. Instead of a thriving book publishing ecosystem, we have ended up with an endangered one dominated by one foreign book publisher and one Canadian bookseller. The situation for newspapers and magazines is, if anything, worse.
Now it is probably true that writers in midlist (writers who have published a few books, won a few prizes, found a smallish audience, writers like me), never mattered much to the life of this nation. But on the other hand, if Canadians don’t tell Canadian stories to each other, what then? How much ignorance of our evolving nature can this nation—any nation—endure and still function as a democracy? Investigating and then telling this story has made clear to me so many things about the way Canada really works, about the intimate ways in which our decision makers and business leaders intersect, interlink, help and hurt each other. I have met many lawyers in my time as a journalist, but
pursuing this story convinced me that Canadian lawyers are a special breed. They are hard-nosed, objective, and can turn any argument inside out and upside down and still make it work. These are the kinds of things Canadian readers and voters need to know, that Canadian writers and reporters need to dig into. Would Rupert Murdoch’s publishing machine print them? If I had only been able to publish this story on my blog, would you have read it?
And getting back to why I care: not doing wrong is not the same as doing right and not even the citizens of a post national state should delude themselves about that, though we often do. Millions in grants were paid out to McClelland & Stewart, Macfarlane, Walter & Ross, and Tundra as if they were controlled by a Canadian entity, when in fact they were not. Thanks to Copps’ Letter of Opinion, this was not legally wrong, because Copps’ Letter blessed M&S as “Canadian,” regardless of Random House of Canada’s de facto control. But it clearly wasn’t right, either. There was all that public posturing, and all that praise of the deviser-in-chief, not to mention his elevation to the highest level of the Order of Canada. While Bennett deserves all kinds of praise for his intelligence, his foresight, his planning, and for carefully shepherding M&S at his own expense for 15 years, and then keeping his watchful eye on the place for 11 years more, it is not right that he is praised for what he did not do. He did not keep M&S Canadian. He handed it over.
And what about our leading institution of higher learning, a place devoted to the search for truth, publicly pretending to be in control of M&S while its accountants said the opposite in private? Did that private declaration constitute a new material fact that could have overturned Copps’ Opinion, the one pronouncing the new M&S to be Canadian? I am pretty sure lawyers would say no, the material facts had not changed, just their interpretation, so the government could not withdraw its blessing from this gift/sale because the government had been made aware of all the material facts at the time of the transaction. The Minister and her officials made a Brazilian (for-my-friends-anything-for-my-enemies-the-law) ruling that no matter what the contracts said, the new M&S would be “Canadian.” Her officials would have understood and explained that Random House would inevitably end up with 100% of the M&S shares if Copps issued her letter of Opinion. Nevertheless, she issued it. Neither Copps nor her officials can argue that they were misinformed.
Also, I have to say: the sheer size of First Plazas Inc.’s charitable tax credit receipt still sticks in my craw. As I know from reading the testimony given to the Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage in 2000 (and as that mysterious Q. and A. in my Canadian Heritage Access to Information file made clear), $15,900,000 amounted to almost half the dollars dispensed annually to Canadian publishers by the Canadian Heritage book fund then, and now. By the time the correct tax formula was applied, Bennett may have realized much less than that amount as cash, but still, the government might have been able to use that money to help others. In 2000, 10,000 books were produced by Canadian publishers, half by Canadians. As the law was ignored and the policy upended, the number of books originated annually in Canada declined to about 6500—a drop of almost 40%—and the number authored by Canadians fell to 4,000.385 What if $15,900,000 had been used to support an investment tax credit for the Canadian publishing industry? Would Key Porter Books, or McArthur & Company, or General Publishing, or Stoddart Publishing, to name a few extinct Canadian companies, still be in business?
What should we do?
I’m just a reporter. I find stories and tell them. I don’t hold myself out as a person able to invent great public policy. On the other hand, I no longer expect good policy to come from the Department of Canadian Heritage. Maybe the Department agrees with me. The Department contracted the Public Policy Forum in 2016 to generate recommendations on what to do about dead and dying Canadian newspapers and the disappearance of local TV news. The Public Policy Forum is directed by people who work for large interests with global aspirations—BCE, the Royal Bank, Ernst & Young, the Munk School of Global Affairs, etc.—as well as by bureaucrats running governments. As the Deputy Clerk of the Privy Council sits on its board, along with the Deputy Minister of Citizenship and Immigration, and the Secretary to the Ontario Cabinet, the Public Policy Forum cannot be considered an independent think tank, though it might appear that way to some. It’s more like a cheerleader for policies the government wants to promote, or, a test bed for policies that bureaucrats would like to expose in public so that political costs may be estimated in advance of commitments.
The Forum published its report in January, 2017.386 “The Shattered Mirror: News, Democracy and Trust in the Digital Age” was written by the Forum’s CEO, Edward Greenspon, a former Editor-in-Chief of the Globe and Mail, a former strategist for Torstar, and not so long ago a journalist for Bloomberg News. It called for drastic measures to support Canadian journalism in order to defend democracy, defeat the rise of “fake news,” and reverse the disastrous consequences of the terrible, galloping decline of Canadian print and television news operations. The recommendations were intricate yet sweeping. Significantly, the report did not call for Canadian ownership rules to be enforced. It called for, among other things, changes to tax law and the CRA’s charity rules to grab back some of the profits siphoned from the Canadian market by the likes of Netflix, Google and Facebook, and to redirect them to fund “civic” journalism by Canadian reporters and editors working for whoever owns their publishing companies.
The government is clearly no longer interested in protecting Canadian publishers from foreign buyers. Yet who owns what does matter, especially when it comes to newspapers. It took Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, to haul the Washington Post back from the brink: he did it in part through the use of Artificial Intelligence which wrote some of the Post’s coverage of the 2016 US federal election (which doesn’t bode well for the future of human journalists). Apparently, he wanted to save the Post because the Post’s journalism is necessary to American democracy and he’s an American. The Sulzberger family, which owns the New York Times, is also engaged in a desperate struggle to keep that newspaper alive as it transforms itself to fit our digital age.387 Would either of them fight so hard to support the Toronto Star if they were its foreign owners? Do Americans care as much as Canadians about Canadian democracy?
I don’t know if Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is right when he asserts that Canada has arrived at a place no country has even tried to get to before, a place beyond nationhood. I don’t know if Canadian literature has actually become a Literature of the World. I do know that we didn’t create a protectionist publishing policy in order to make a Literature of the World: we did it to reflect ourselves to ourselves. And the need to see ourselves so we can govern ourselves will never disappear.
While I don’t have any better suggestions than those offered by the Public Policy Forum, I think that finding the right ones may matter much more now, in this globalized yet splintering world, than when I was young, when opportunity was created by governments for writers like me to tell Canadian stories.
Just because I don’t know what to do, doesn’t mean I don’t care.
I do care. And I demand that you care.
Because: we’re Canadian.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank the Government of Ontario for giving me a grant from the Writers’ Reserve program. I would also like to thank the friends knowledgeable about the publishing business who spoke to me informally and provided very valuable insights. While I cannot name you, I can, and do, thank you for trusting me.
Several friends and colleagues took the time to read various versions of this manuscript and comment on them. I never know if my work is readable until the people I really write for, my friends and relatives, have given me their opinions. Philip Turner, a former US bookseller and then publishing executive and now editor, agent, blogger and writer, who is the next best thing to an honourary Canadian, edited my last book, Smarts. He agreed to read an early vers
ion of this manuscript when it was still lumpy and disagreeable and no fun to read at all. His positive response gave me the courage to finish. Charles Greene, who has been my dear friend, and my husband Stephen’s dear friend and business partner, since 1971, also read the manuscript. He had many, many changes to suggest, because he read with great attention, and all of his suggestions were helpful. Stephen, my husband and partner and collaborator-in-chief, read the manuscript in its early form when I was quite sure I should just forget the whole thing, and said keep going, it’s worth the trouble. Thank you, Stephen: if it doesn’t work out well, I’ll blame you, as usual. My good friend, the journalist, video producer and former magazine editor, Dawn Deme, read the manuscript when I thought I was done. She was able to show me that I was not. Dawn gave me some of my most interesting journalism assignments when she was the Editor of City Woman magazine. Those long form pieces prepared me to tackle books, so in many ways, I owe my career as an author to her, but her friendship matters more. The thing about forever friends like Dawn and Chuck, and the love of my life, Stephen, is that we always seem to be interested by the same phenomena, but each from a different perspective. Our conversations have been going on now for more than forty years without any diminution of interest.
Finding a Canadian independent publisher who would consider taking on this book was the unhappy task of my agent, Sam Hiyate, of The Rights Factory. Because he could not offer it to foreign-owned publishers, he could not hope to have anything like fair recompense for his work, but he did it anyway. Thank you, Sam, for all your efforts, and for helping me find Dan Wells, publisher of Biblioasis, who was willing to stick his neck out. After all, another Canadian independent publisher turned this project down because it might upset friends working for foreign-owned publishers.
