In the midst of all this talk of Canadian nationalism, there’s a great opportunity for the future Conservative government to seize on a major unacknowledged—nay, neglected, abandoned, left for dead by the Liberals—issue underlining so many of our public conversations. The time is later than we think and I’d like to urge them to approach Canadian cultural policy with seriousness.
Remember the “Wackos” video, released by the Conservative Party near the end of last year taking viewers through the strange things the Liberals running our country have gotten up to? Unlike a lot of their edutainment partisan propaganda videos, which are very well done and warrant the ten minutes of your time, this one surprised many by its outward sneering and frat humour. What I noted immediately was the use of opera to signal beyond the pale weirdness. But why Puccini, one of the most popular (and populist) opera composers, and one of the few still able to sell out large North American opera houses? Someone on their social media team simply chose a voice with a slightly too-large vibrato singing this popular Puccini aria. This, in their minds, was meant to indicate wacko. Ha ha. Ha.
Ordinarily, I wouldn’t worry about fratty use of opera in political videos, if I hadn’t had to read the runes on what Conservatives intend to do, if anything, in arts and culture once they take power. I still have very little to go on, apart from “We’ll defund the CBC but not Radio-Canada.” Shadow heritage ministers do not comment, ever, on heritage and arts issues through their social media accounts, and neither do other front or backbenchers. No one in the Conservative HQ is eager to answer any emails about their culture plans.
Culture under Trudeau
Over the last 10 years of Liberal rule, we’ve witnessed some astounding changes to Canadian culture and institutions. We’ve seen arts founding become overtly politicized (especially from 2020 on), and we’ve seen museums adopt programs of “decolonization.” Meanwhile, you guess what kind of preferences our major book prize juries are being led by if you look at the shortlists of the last few years. We also find ourselves in a Canada of a consolidated publishing oligopoly led by three multinationals, in which books published by independent Canadian publishers (producing about 85 percent of all Canadian-themed and authored books) make up just 5 percent (or lower) of book purchasing choices by Canadians.
It’s never been the easiest endeavour to get Canadians interested in their own culture, but the flight has been unusually fast and large in the last few years, and not only due to the switch from the Gutenberg era to the digital age. I would bet anything that Canadians are refusing to dutifully read, watch, or listen because all their art has become ideological art. It’s the Zhdanovite stage of Canadian culture. We are dangerously close to being in the very last age of Canadian culture, ever.
But will Conservatives care enough to notice and actually tackle this? Never mind Left and Right, or woke and anti-woke, male and female, settler and Indigenous: the new and deepening dividing line in Canadian politics is whether you think Canada should exist or if you’re not bothered about it either way. Catalysed by Trump’s favourite negotiation tactic (taunting and trash-talk) and Lebensraum-y daydreams, a number of Canadians have begun to argue that Canada consider 51st statehood. The people who spent the last decade arguing that Canada is a shameful genocidal excuse for a nation are essentially saying the same thing, albeit from different ideological premises. There’s nothing here that’s unique worth keeping, in either case.
On the other side are the people from the Left, Right, and centre who still believe there is a there there.
A call for culture
One of the attributes of a nation is culture. If Canada should exist as a nation, then it should have a culture, would be the logical conclusion. So how do we go about answering that clarion call? Here I’m eager to hear from the future Conservative government. Entrepreneurialism and markets won’t solve that one, especially under present conditions, unless you are the world-dominating entertainment empire. Nearly every other culture in the world requires some form of government investment. The question is, what kind and how much?
If Canada should exist, so should attributes of it as a nation, arts, and culture. There will be disagreement between communitarian conservatives and libertarian conservatives on whether there should be any government funding of individual artistic creation and the operation of organizations (say, a baroque orchestra that specializes in Bach and Handel; or a publisher specializing in Canadian history), or if nothing but the ticket- and book-buying market should decide what lives and what dies.
Perhaps libertarians should instead look at the question of growth in the arts, as we regularly lose expensively trained talented people to other countries because our market is too small. We also nearly have no arts criticism left to inform consumers of their options. Our arts organizations, just like in Britain’s, are funded by a combination of sponsorship/donorship, government, and income through sales. All three could be in much better health than they are at the moment.
In his popular Substack, American journalist Noah Smith recently analysed the Canadian economy, describing it as a petro-economy which hides its sluggish productivity and lack of growth with large inbound migration and oil and gas exports. We can add that the Canadian arts sectoral has been sluggishly growing too; it’s all part of the same piece.See here, here, and here for more.
And why is art even worthwhile? What kind of things do Conservative frontbenchers enjoy these days? Inquiring minds want to know. Yes, you can make the argument that arts benefit other areas of economic activity like the hospitality and tourism industries. They also help immigrant integration and civic education and often keep bored young people out of trouble. But this can’t be art’s first line of defence. Why art, why culture, what is the purpose, what are they good for?
We are a country that produced Glenn Gould, Marshall McLuhan, Northrop Frye, Janet Ajzenstat, Robert Lepage, Jean-Paul Lemieux, Margaret Atwood, Kidd Pivot. Could we ever produce the likes of them again? Can we ever be a bullish culture that makes us feel good about being here? And how?
