Canadian Content: Culture and the Quest for Nationhood (review)

Late in August 2008 Prime Minister Stephen Harper announced that his Conservative government was cutting federal funding for the arts by $45 million. Several programs would be eliminated, including the showcasing of Canadian artists abroad. The announcement elicited predictable outrage from the arts community. It also struck a discordant note with many media commentators and arts patrons who claimed that cutting culture was tantamount to assaulting national identity. Other critics chimed in by citing a Conference Board of Canada report that concluded that ‘the creative economy’ had injected $46 billion into the Canadian economy in 2007, accounting for more than 7 per cent of the nation’s gross domestic product. Unfazed by the critics, Prime Minister Harper added fuel to the controversy. In the midst of an election campaign that returned his party to power with a minority government, Harper was quoted on cbcnews.ca (23 September) as suggesting that ‘when ordinary, working people come home, turn on the TV and see . . . a bunch of people at a rich gala all subsidized by the taxpayers, claiming their subsidies aren’t high enough when they know the subsidies have actually gone up, I’m not sure that’s something that resonates with ordinary people.’

In microcosm the tempest that blew up over the Conservative government’s cuts to culture in 2008 distilled a spectrum of opinions about the arts and public policy that had become visible in Canada during the previous half century. The general outlines of this story are well known to cultural historians and policy specialists. Yet Ryan Edwardson’s book describes in genealogical detail the complex and often rancorous process by which issues of national identity, state protectionism, and industrial promotion became entwined and structured public debate about the arts in postwar Canada. There are two main arguments in Canadian Content, neither of which is controversial and both of which are convincing. The central thesis of the book is that culture became a primary vehicle for Canadianization in the second half of the twentieth century. Although this outcome was never foreordained, Edwardson claims that artists, bureaucrats, and politicians of different ideological stripes gradually became comfortable with the idea that cultural production gave vital expression and embodiment to the distinctive character of Canada as a nation. As cultural nationalism became paradigmatic in public discourse and public policy, it was the default point of reference for coping with all manner of seismic social and political changes that confronted the country: ethnic differentiation, Quebec separatism, us imperialism, globalization, and the unstoppable spread of mass media. Indeed, the link between culture and Canadianization became sufficiently endemic and flexible that it could withstand even movable definitions of nationhood.

The second argument Edwardson makes is chronological. The process of permanently affixing culture to Canadian identity, he claims, occurred in three stages, the first of which is best known to historians. In the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, the Royal Commission on National Development in the Arts, Letters and Sciences (the Massey Commission) gave voice to a post-colonial mentality that simultaneously stressed Canada’s growing independence from Britain and argued the importance of elite culture as an international marker of national credibility. This phase of cultural nationalism led to the creation of the Canada Council (1957) and greater emphasis on the civilizing mission and stewardship of institutions such as the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and the National Film Board. But state support for the arts community was counterbalanced by the inexorable growth of mass culture, symbolized by the arrival of television, and the pressure to develop new regulatory frameworks and investment strategies that rewarded private sector development in the cultural realm.

This initial phase of Canadianization was followed in the 1960s and 1970s by a ‘new nationalism’ that supported government intervention in the culture sphere as a bulwark against us domination. A new symbolism marked the era of the ‘Peaceable Kingdom.’ Although the bureaucratic apparatus of state support for culture continued to expand...