How Canadians Communicate II: Media, Globalization and Identity (review)

I have found it an interesting experience reading this book while we gear up for elections in Canada and the United States. It is perhaps at this time that we become most clearly aware of the differences between our two countries and when the idea of a Canadian identity seems to take on a more solid form. I spent a number of years living abroad and during that time was frequently asked if I was American. Upon learning that I was not from the United States, many people were curious to know what constituted a Canadian identity. I struggled to answer this question – usually replying, rather flippantly, that, because of our vast size and small population, the one thing that tied many Canadians together was the fact that we were not American. Some of this angst about identity seems to be deeply embedded in the discussion about media, globalization, and identity contained in the second volume of How Canadians Communicate.

In 2005, I had the opportunity to review the first volume of How Canadians Communicate and found it a worthy yet earnest consideration of Canadian communication in the new millennium. The second volume looks more specifically at how issues of media, globalization, and identity affect Canadian communication and offers a much more trenchant and timely analysis of the state of Canadian communication. It will be a useful resource for graduate students in media, communication, or policy studies. The book is divided into three sections: ‘The Debate over Policy,’ ‘The Quest for Identity,’ and ‘The Struggle for Control.’ The first volume offered an assessment of the state of each of the cultural industries in Canada. In this volume, the industry assessment continues, but attention turns more specifically to the relationship between the cultural industries, globalization, and identity. The clearer focus of this volume makes for a much livelier and more engaged discussion and offers some provocative challenges for the reader’s consideration.

Two challenges in particular caught my attention and perhaps warranted further exploration. First, as many of the authors note, in the Canadian context, globalization largely means Americanization – and there seems to be an assumption that this is bad. Second, the concerns of the contributors to safeguard Canadian identity often seem to reflect a concern to protect Canadian industry. Like my inadequate explanation of ‘Canadianness’ outlined above, the book does not define what it means by Canadian identity, either assuming that as Canadians we will know, or presuming that, in a global context, it is ‘not Americanness’ – neither of which is satisfactory in a book that specifically addresses Canadian identity.

Many of the contributors write about Canadian identity (and its relationship to cultural industries) as if it had a definite form, and yet the vastness of our geography, our bilingual heritage, the patterns of immigration, and the size of our population mean that Canadian identity is shifting, fragmented, and diffuse. Governmental policies such as regulations on Canadian content or limits on foreign ownership do not protect Canadian identity; rather, they protect Canadian cultural industries that may be threatened in an increasingly globalized media world.

In his introduction, editor David Taras identifies four themes that occur throughout the book (Americanization, global governance, digital globalization, and corporate concentration), and they are an accurate description of the main subject areas of the contributors. More importantly, though, he writes,

[I]f there is a dividing line within this collection it is between optimists and pessimists. The optimists believe that Canada has all of the tools that it needs to create its own cultural space . . . . The pessimists . . . argue that Canada has few levers with which to control the onrushing tide of media change.

With few exceptions (e.g., Dornan’s contribution on foreign ownership), the contributors rarely stray from their optimistic or pessimistic perspectives, seeming to forget that threats often bring with them opportunities and that the unstable nature of Canadian identity may actually thrive in a context of globalization where the local is...