Why we’re blowing a generational moment for Canadian culture

On the opening night of the 50th edition of the Toronto International Film Festival last month, moviegoers got an “elbows up” surprise.

In front of about 1,800 festivalgoers nestled inside Roy Thomson Hall, Prime Minister Mark Carney dashed onto the stage, where he praised TIFF and its commitment to promoting the arts as a “testament to part of what makes Canada unique.” As the audience munched popcorn and leaned forward, the Prime Minister continued: “Canada is a story whose best chapters are yet to be written. Not least because we’re in a country that welcomes the world’s storytellers.”

With applause echoing inside TIFF’s largest venue, a grin flashed across Carney’s face. Here was the leader of Canada, whose culture-friendly campaign had positioned him as the antithesis to Pierre Poilievre’s defund-the-CBC philistinism, basking in the adoration of a crowd who understood the value of the arts – how the stories we tell both each other and the rest of the world inform our core sense of identity. And how that identity is now more important than ever, as the country engages in a generation-defining fight against those who would like nothing more than to see Canadian culture eroded into 51st-state nothingness.

Seven charts that show the state of arts funding across Canada

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A few weeks later, though, Carney made an entirely different kind of speech. Inside an aerospace-parts plant in Mississauga and flanked by factory workers clad in safety vests and protective eyewear, the Prime Minister didn’t talk about the arts, or culture, or identity. He instead focused on the manufacturing industries that keep so many Canadians working, and announced a $5-billion strategic response fund designed to kick-start a new “buy Canadian” era to “transform” businesses affected by trade disruptions.

It was an important message for industries that need such promises of stability to survive. But it was also one that could not help but underline the existential divide of the “elbows up” moment, a fissure caused by duelling philosophies and optics that has become obvious in the lead up to the Carney government’s first budget, set to be tabled Nov. 4.

Threatened with tariffs and annexation, Canadians have been urged, in the Prime Minister’s words, to accept “a new age, an age of economic nationalism and mercantilism.” We need to protect our aerospace, lumber, energy, automotive and agricultural interests. We need to travel domestically and inspect the origins of our orange juice. But, despite early promises, Carney – and so many other leaders – have failed to genuinely support the one sector that makes Canada, well, Canadian: culture.

This country has, in a backward way, been gifted by the White House a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to not just support Canadian culture, but to strengthen and revitalize it for decades to come. And we’re blowing it.

Last week, a survey conducted by Pollara and commissioned by the Canadian Media Producers Association found that Canadians overwhelmingly want their culture and stories protected, with 88 per cent of respondents saying that the country should support domestic television and film productions the same way that citizens are encouraged to “buy Canadian” in every other aspect of their daily lives.

That’s not mere lip service, either. Canadians are genuinely changing their cultural habits. From March to June of this year, when the flames of Donald Trump’s 51st-state rhetoric started blazing, CBC Gem saw a 24-per-cent increase in time spent watching the streaming service’s content compared with the same four-month period the year before. The National Film Board reported a similar 25-per-cent increase in new Canadian visitors to its site earlier this year, compared with the same period in 2024. Subscriptions to the Canadian-owned streamer Crave have increased 29 per cent.

Yet in the face of this sentiment – not to mention the fact that the arts contribute about $63.9-billion to Canada’s GDP annually and employ more than 600,000 people – the country’s film, television, music, literary, theatre and visual artists remain on the veritable edge of this peak-patriotism moment.

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The longer we ignore the tenuous state of homegrown culture – from funding to distribution to consumption – the more we risk losing any real sense of what this battle for the soul of Canada is even about. Who are we without the stories that we watch and listen to and read together?

These tensions seem crystallized in Ottawa’s attitude to the CBC – a troubled and mismanaged organization, without a doubt, but an established and essential bulwark against cultural encroachment all the same. Funded and led properly, the corporation can be wielded as both a weapon and a shield in this new culture war.

It is a power that Carney undoubtedly recognizes, or at least he did while on the campaign trail, where he pledged to provide an initial $150-million annual funding increase to CBC and Radio-Canada. “When we compare ourselves to the U.K., France or Germany, we see that our public broadcaster is underfunded,” he said this past spring, flicking at how per-capita public funding for CBC/Radio-Canada is $32.43, just 41 per cent of the international average. “That has to change.”

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Something sure changed. In July, Carney asked CBC/Radio-Canada to find up to $198-million in annual savings within three years. Representatives for the CBC said the proposal was “separate from the government’s expressed commitment to strengthen public broadcasting by investing an additional $150-million.” But however you want to reconcile that nonsensical contradiction, Carney’s CBC doublespeak makes the Liberal government’s perspective on the arts and culture distressingly clear.

As do the spending cuts inside Canadian Heritage, which oversees everything from the Canada Council for the Arts to the National Arts Centre, and has already committed to $64-million in savings by 2026-27 as well as a $15.2-million reduction in operational costs.

Telefilm Canada, which also falls under Heritage’s umbrella and funds so much of this country’s cinema, has been left especially high and dry by Ottawa.

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In 2019, Justin Trudeau made a campaign promise to permanently increase the agency’s funding by 50 per cent. Although the Liberal Party announced in 2021 that the organization would receive $105-million in new funds over three years, that initial election pledge of permanent funding has yet to become a reality, robbing the film industry of any sense of predictability, which is essential to the medium’s long development process. And while the screen sector received more than $120-million in additional funding in the 2024 budget, much of that support will dry up in the 2025-26 fiscal year.

By many accounts, the office of Steven Guilbeault, Minister of Canadian Identity and Culture and far from a newbie when it comes to the arts portfolio, is fighting for culture. But right now, the rhetoric rings hollow. “As Canadians, we have our own unique identity, history and geography. To keep Canada strong, we will protect our culture, protect our environment and protect our core values,” Hermine Landry, Guilbeault’s press secretary, said in a statement to The Globe. “We cannot speculate on what may or may not be included in the budget.” So, in other words: best of luck.

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Then there’s the embarrassing state of the much-delayed Online Streaming Act, or Bill C-11. Designed to compel any foreign-owned streaming service with revenues of more than $25-million inside this country – such as Netflix, Disney+ and Amazon’s Prime Video – to contribute 5 per cent of their annual domestic earnings to support local productions, the legislation seems to be exactly the kind of tool needed to hammer home the message of the “elbows up” movement.

And yet, after years of debate and misconstrued rhetoric, C-11 might be on the ropes, with Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission chair Vicky Eatrides acknowledging last week that Parliament may have to revisit the act entirely if a court challenge from the U.S. streamers succeeds.

Taken together, the many missteps and missed opportunities add up to an overwhelming sense of disillusionment.

For generations, Canadian audiences have been overwhelmed by the strength and resources of the U.S. entertainment industrial complex. Today, we have a prime opportunity to subvert the twinned forces of audience uninterest and government ignorance that have stymied our artistic capital. Are we a culture that shapes itself based on the stories that we tell one another, or by the items in our grocery cart? Even better: Why can’t it be both?

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There are, of course, vast economic upsides to the arts, in addition to the more obvious experiential and soulful benefits. So many countries across the world have long figured out that investment in culture can reap untold economic rewards. Take South Korea, whose cultural budget has grown by about 40 per cent over the past decade – an investment that has helped bring in billions of dollars from cultural exports and pushed the country’s culture into countless homes around the world. Hard money meets soft power.

Back here, there are at least a few small signs of hope. Toronto’s new 10-year Culture Connects action plan will see the Toronto Arts Council get a $2-million annual boost in its budget over the next five years. And our artists are, despite the many challenges they face, grabbing the spotlight with full force. They’re winning over film-festival audiences, dominating streaming-viewership charts, headlining global tours, taking over international art markets and topping the bestseller lists. They just need our considered and committed support – as do those looking to follow in their footsteps and define this country’s artistic future.

To the skeptical Canadians out there – those who have never streamed a second of CBC Gem programming, or have no interest in anything that has ever won a Canadian Screen Award – there is the question of why does any of this even matter. Why can’t the free market decide the fates of the arts? Why are my tax dollars going to support someone else’s creative expression? Well, to borrow the words of a certain Canadian artist: Don’t it always seem to go, that you don’t know what you got till it’s gone?