A 'Proudly Canadian' sign in the window of an Indigo book shop in Windsor, Ont., on April 1.JEFF KOWALSKY/AFP/Getty Images
Stephen Marche’s latest book is On Writing and Failure.
The months since the inauguration of U.S. President Donald Trump have seen the sharpest turn in Canadian identity since the foundation of the country. The only historical moment that comes close to resembling the sudden surge of national enthusiasm is when William Seward, Secretary of State in Abraham Lincoln’s cabinet, proposed sending the American army across the border. Our response then was to confederate, to become a country. One hundred and sixty years later, after similarly jarring remarks, we are deciding to stay a country.
The new American threat to our sovereignty has required a re-evaluation of all national symbols. Edmontonians are smearing feces on the statue of Wayne Gretzky – a reality that would have been beyond belief a few months ago. The Maple Leaf itself, so recently the emotional property of the trucker convoys, has turned from an icon of the anti-vax right to a standard of liberal internationalism. The culture industries in Canada can be forgiven for being caught off guard. For at least a decade, they have been focused, to the exclusion of virtually all other concerns, on promoting an anti-nationalist or at least a postnationalist aesthetic. Now they must become patriots, and fast, or disappear. Canadians are singing the national anthem at the ballet, and booing the American anthem at WWE events.
The Canadian culture industries have never been independent from the explicit goals of state building. Canadian culture is government funded rather than market driven, so it is no surprise that over the past decade, the culture industries eagerly, some might say slavishly, embraced Justin Trudeau’s concept of a postnational nation, even though there was an inherent contradiction in being the product of a nationalist sentiment that it sought to undermine. The most important thing for Canada was to purify itself from its historical evils – this task suited the activists who never asked themselves where the money for their activism was coming from.
Self-critique quickly narrowed into a negligible, impotent stream of identity politics to the exclusion of virtually any other perspective. The so-called Canada crowd took over. And while their intentions may have been good at first – I think most of them genuinely believed they were working to make Canada a more responsible, compassionate place – in practice they turned out to be blinkered, divisive and highly unpopular.
The most egregious, and most important, case is the CBC. The CBC has spent a decade turning itself into a big national scold. Literally, their ad campaign from 2023 featured the slogan: “It’s not how Canadian you are. It’s who you are in Canada.” That’s how they chose to promote themselves – a sneer at anyone who might think of themselves as a patriot. I am not sure, at this moment, whether the CBC even likes Canada. You certainly can’t tell by listening to them.
The Conservatives have, if anything, underestimated the problem. I say this as a small-l liberal: When the head of the CBC cannot name a single Conservative voice on their platform, when they are opposed, as such, to the political views of somewhere around half the country, they are failing in their mandate to represent the country. It is as simple as that.
I would also point out that, in their ritualized fetish for self-purification, the CBC is well to the left of Toronto liberals as well as Alberta conservatives. Its politics seems to derive from the sociology department at York University. Turn it on now and listen for five minutes and see if I’m wrong.
Whoever is in power after the election, whether it is Mark Carney or Pierre Poilievre, will have to reconsider their party’s platform on the broadcaster. In the middle of the crisis we have found ourselves in, doing away with the national broadcaster, as Mr. Poilievre has promised, will probably not be an option. Nor should it be. A majority of Canadians want the CBC to survive.
At the same time, Mark Carney’s most serious misstep in his campaign has been his proposal to provide $150-million in further support for the CBC, and, even worse, making that funding statutory. “By strengthening our public broadcaster, we are protecting our identity and our culture and helping it to shine around the world,” he said, and with a straight face. One can only assume, in the most charitable possible reading of his statement, that he hasn’t watched or listened to the CBC for some time.
The CBC News building in Toronto, on Feb. 8, 2024Laura Proctor/The Globe and Mail
The one thing the CBC does not need is more protection, more of the inertia that has made it irrelevant outside of national crises. The CBC talks, regularly, about a polluted information environment in the country. The CBC is a force of that pollution; they are an active vector of polarization. An institution that purports to represent the country while dismissing with contempt half of its population can only harm national discourse.
Mr. Carney should remember that, until very recently, the Conservatives had a 25 per cent lead in the polls, and part of the reason for that lead was a widespread national rejection of the self-sabotaging identity politics that came to dominate political, educational and cultural institutions. A far more vital threat to the country, from the United States, has raised its head. But that doesn’t mean that the Canadian people accept, or approve of, the Trudeau-era moralistic contempt for their country.
The CBC is only the leading Canadian institution that lives off nationalism but cannot bring itself to serve the nation. The publishing industry, outside of the small presses that have heroically kept Canadian voices alive, has followed a branch plant mentality for over a decade. The results have been predictable. Booknet described the inevitable decline in its State of Publishing report: “In 2021, publishers reported 92% of new books published were by at least one Canadian contributor, however this dropped to only 76% of new books in 2023.” In 2005, Canadian-authored titles were 27 per cent of sales. By 2014, it was 13 per cent. The government paid $53-million to Canadian publishing between 2020 and 2024. Taxpayers fronted this money not to turn Canada into a book-buying market for other literary cultures, but to turn Canada into a literary producer. If you are in Canadian publishing, your job is to nurture and promote Canadian talent and voices, and if you find that cringey, or if you think your job is to impose moral superiority onto Canada, or to lecture Canadians about their vices, stop taking the government’s money.
Everybody is entitled to an opinion. Certainly it is acceptable to hold Canada in contempt. But contempt is not entitled to a subsidy. Canada, at this point in history, cannot afford to subsidize its own undermining.
The need for a new cultural nationalism is a hard shift, I understand. For those in the culture industries who have no memory of the 1960s, here is what a new Canadian nationalism would not look like:
It would not be exclusionary or racist.
It would not be an empty flag-waving as a counter to idiotic American aggression and it would not use patriotic rage as a counter to the “so-called Canada” virtue-signalling.
It would not forget the complexities and horrors of Canada’s history.
Here’s what a new Canadian nationalism would look like:
It would understand its function to develop and promote Canadian talent either for internal consumption or, preferably, for export markets.
It would be a real reflection of Canadian perspectives and not the privileging of particular viewpoints. It would resist ideological capture as a necessary prerequisite of representing the complexity of Canadian life.
It would consciously attempt to unify Canadians rather than divide them.
Canadian culture that is government-funded must be nationalistic now. In Ukraine, the culture war was an early front of the conflict. Russians have deliberately targeted libraries and museums during the conflict exactly because they know that cultural identity is the very foundation of national sovereignty. Rallies around poets like Taras Shevchenko have been important aspects of Ukrainian independence from well before 2014.
The culture war is an aspect of the trade war as well. The reason Korean culture is so dominant and so immensely profitable, bringing an estimated US$29-billion into the South Korean economy between 2017 and 2021, is that it was understood, from the beginning of its development, as an economic policy designed to promote exports in the national interest: a fusion of private and public sector called Hallyu. Canada needs to think of its culture sector as a grown-up metrics-based industry rather than something nice your aunts think about.
Bashfulness and being willfully virtuous and negligible will no longer suffice. The wake-up call has come from the south, but the position of the culture industries was already untenable. Tens of millions of dollars were going into industries that devoted themselves to managed decline; Canadian audiences were turning off because Canadian audiences love their country. There has been a 72-per-cent decline in CBC’s prime-time news viewership in the past six years alone. According to one assessment, less than one per cent of Canadians watch local CBC TV newscasts.
In 1987, at a parliamentary committee, Margaret Atwood brought up an old piece of folklore that beavers, when confronted with a threat, bite off their own testicles and present them to their attackers. This has been the traditional instinct of Canadian cultural institutions. Donald Trump has taught a serious lesson but the truth is we were learning it anyway: Celebrate Canada or lose it.