Marc Miller speaks to reporters ahead of a cabinet meeting on Parliament Hill, on Tuesday.Spencer Colby/The Canadian Press
If the Canadian screen sector was searching for a perfectly on-the-nose way to capstone a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad year, then they could not have written a better finale to 2025 than what’s currently going on inside the Department of Canadian Heritage.
Late last week, Culture Minister Steven Guilbeault resigned from cabinet, spurred by Prime Minister Mark Carney’s new energy accord with Alberta and the Liberal government’s overall track record on climate policy. Stepping into the role as of Monday: Montreal MP Marc Miller, a staple of former prime minister Justin Trudeau’s cabinet but initially kept on the outside by Carney when he first took office.
Guilbeault’s exit was primarily greeted as a blow to the country’s environmentalist movement. After all, Guilbeault, a former Greenpeace campaign manager who was first elected as a Member of Parliament in 2019, spent four years as environment minister under Trudeau. And even after Carney shifted him into the culture portfolio this past spring (with the file title having curiously changed from “heritage”), the Montreal-area MP remained, more or less, the public face of the Liberal’s climate-policy talking points. There’s no doubt that the green movement lost a loyal friend.
Yet the less-talked about injury will be inflicted upon this country’s arts community, especially those working in the multi-billion-dollar domestic film and television industry, who have now enjoyed a decade under the watchful eye of a ministry whose leadership has been treated more or less as a revolving door.
Back in the fall of 2019, when Guilbeault enjoyed-slash-endured his first tenure as heritage minister, my Globe and Mail colleague Kate Taylor warned the then-rookie Quebec MP about the challenges facing the industry that he was about to oversee: Canadian broadcasters and producers being steamrolled by untaxed U.S. tech giants; domestic media being slaughtered by algorithmic social media; copyright infringements pinching the few pennies that musicians and authors had left.
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It will shock no one that, six years later, the cultural landscape has gotten immeasurably worse, from the molasses-slow progress of Guilbeault’s Online Streaming Act to the post-2020 dominance of foreign-owned streamers such as Netflix and Disney+ to the ever-looming threat of nonsensical (but chilling all the same) U.S. tariffs.
Now, more than ever, the Canadian arts community needs a trusted, experienced and dedicated advocate. Instead, Carney shuffled in another Trudeau loyalist without a particularly strong history of cultural advocacy, or really a history on that front at all. Out with the old, in with the even older.
What’s more: Miller is now the seventh minister in charge of culture in a row to hail from Quebec. The Liberal Party’s preference for installing a Quebecker into the role is understandable, as both a political sop to a province that the Liberals desperately need to keep in their favour, and a tacit acknowledgment that Quebec’s culture, both as an existential idea and an economic engine, is as much a success story as these things go.
Prime Minister Mark Carney stands with Marc Miller after he was sworn in as Minister of Canadian Identity and Culture and Minister responsible for Official Languages during a ceremony at Rideau Hall in Ottawa, on Monday.Blair Gable/Reuters
But how, exactly, have the Quebec politicians previously in charge of the portfolio helped the rest of the country in such a way that demands the tradition remain in place?
The track record speaks for itself, in both official languages. Mélanie Joly, in the role from 2015 to 2018, embarrassingly rolled out the red carpet for Netflix, sparing the streaming giant from being taxed in exchange for vaguely defined spending promises.
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Pablo Rodriguez’s 2021 to 2023 run gave us the Online News Act, which is mostly remembered as the reason why you cannot share this column on Facebook or Instagram. Pascale St-Onge, in the cabinet position from 2023 to 2025, pledged to figure out a road map to modernizing the CBC, before she walked away from government with nary a Mother Corp. tote bag to her legacy.
And Guilbeault, technically a three-timer in the position, has tried all along to make the best of the Online Streaming Act, a well-intentioned piece of legislation requiring streaming services to offer Canadian content that hasn’t yet delivered much of anything. Other than, well, shabby comparisons to similar laws on the books in such nations as France and Australia, which seem to genuinely prioritize domestic culture instead of treating it like an afterthought at best, a nuisance at worst.
So, if all the ideas and initiatives above represent the best and brightest to come out of Quebec’s MP pool, then maybe – just maybe – it’s time to switch things up and look toward the rest of the country for some new perspectives on the culture file. However briefly! Just for kicks!
The English-language side of Canadian culture – from a chronically underfunded Telefilm to a chaotically managed CBC to a media industry on the very edge – has never been more in need of fresh, full-throttle support. It needs fresh blood, bold ideas and the ambition of a minister who sees the position as not a stepping-stone or way station, but a place to make real, lasting change in a sector that has been unfairly defined by unreliability.
Sure, perhaps Miller will surprise everyone and succeed where his colleagues have not. And if not, well, the revolving door is always open. Après vous.