Ideas - Remember the Last Time Canada Feared the U.S. Would Swallow It Up?

Episode Date: February 25, 2025

Four decades ago, trade negotiations in North America prompted great trepidation in Canada. IDEAS revisits a 1986 documentary by the CBC's Carol Off exploring a flurry of Canadian nationalism and patriotism brought on by fears that the U.S. was about to absorb Canada — a threat, once again, on many Canadians' minds. 

On the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz comes an unprecedented exhibition about one of history's darkest moments. Auschwitz, not long ago, not far away, features more than 500 original objects, first-hand accounts and survivor testimonies that tell the powerful story of the Auschwitz concentration camp, its history and legacy, and the underlying conditions that allowed the Holocaust to happen. On now exclusively at Rom. Tickets at Rom.ca. This is a CBC Podcast. Welcome to Ideas. I'm Nala Ayaad. Our country has always been a good place for investment. We're making it now an even better place. Our future depends

on trade. This is Brian Mulrooney when he was prime minister in 1985. He's speaking in Chicago. Our political sovereignty, our system of social programs, our commitment as Canadians to fight regional disparities, our unique cultural identity, our very special linguistic character. These are the essence of Canada. They are not at issue in these negotiations. Mulroney is giving the speech ahead of negotiating the Canada-U.S. Free Trade Agreement. The deal came into effect on January 1, 1989. When it comes to discussing better trade rules for cultural industries, you will have to understand that what we call cultural sovereignty is as vital to our national life as political

sovereignty. And how could it be otherwise living as we do next to a country 10 times our size and population? Mulrooney's predecessor, Pierre Trudeau, compared the relationship between Canada and America to that between a mouse and an elephant. One of my predecessors, the host of ideas at the time, Lister Sinclair, went further. He asked if the free trade agreement was bound to bring an end to Canada's identity as a culture separate from the US. Will free trade, the dissolving of all trade barriers between us and the Americans, turn

North America into one homogeneous cultural mass, or do we already have one common culture? Responding to that idea, the CBCs carol off. She later became the host of As It Happens. But back in 1986, she was making a two-part documentary series for ideas. The episodes were called Common Culture. Carol recently brought our attention to these works, which examine a flurry of Canadian nationalism and patriotism brought on by fears that America was about to absorb Canada, a threat once again on many Canadians' minds. So today, a visit to another time.

We're going to hear the most resonant extracts from Carol Oss' documentary, first broadcast on ideas in 1986. Carol begins by taking us even further back. Christmas 1935, one of the earliest national broadcasts in Canada. Come on Canada, let's sing. Everyone join in. This is our way of showing we can all sing together. Watch the tempo. All right, Montreal. This is an almost ludicrous exercise. It's an example of the awkward, often absurd, attempts at nation building Canada has undertaken over the years. Like the railroad built through 5,000 kilometers of granite and forests,

broadcasting was supposed to bind together a vast and diverse nation. Wheat, logs, oil, steel, these were to move in boxcars. Ideas, voices, faces, thoughts and opinions were to move on airwaves, to force an East-West flow across the continent, to divert our attention away from the South, from the United States. Broadcasting would be controlled by the government in Canada. The airwaves would be cultural ribbons of steel. They weren't to be the only ones. Over the years, we also got laws and policies to support book publishing and magazines. We got institutions to support Canadian artists, writers and filmmakers.

We got watchdog authorities to ensure Canadian content on radio and on television. We got agencies to fund Canadian films and television programs. Little slips of legislation, scraps of protection, paper tigers. Today we are swamped with American mass media. For economic reasons, it's cheaper to buy American books, films, TV programs, and to make our own. For political reasons, governments have been fearful of angering voters who like their entertainment bright,

glossy, and inexpensive. But most important for spiritual reasons, the least tangible, the will of nationhood. The forces that constructed the railroads, created the broadcasting system, built the institutions may no longer exist. John Gray is a Canadian playwright. He wrote Billy Bishop Goes to War and Rock and Roll. Last year John Gray gave a speech in Kitchener, Ontario. It was about nationhood. I'd like you to hear some of that speech now. The whole country is in an administrative crisis isn't it? We don't seem to have any new ideas. Our administrative crisis in Canada is really a creative crisis. Our deficit is really a creative deficit, and it's all bound up in our cultural assumptions.

I don't have any answers, arguments, or statistics. All I can contribute to the discussion is my personal experience. I was brought up in Truro, Nova Scotia, a conservative distribution center of about 12,000 people of primarily Scottish descent with a reputation for church, education, and the arts. There was a music festival every year and intermittently an amateur dramatic society called the Colchester Players under the direction of a sign painter named Alda Nerving and a hairdresser named Shirley Hamilton.

The Nova Scotia Provincial Exhibition, which was on the surface an agricultural fair but which was really an orgy of romance, intrigue, and mystery, took place in Truro every September. Music lessons were given primarily by church organists who needed the extra income. My teacher was a Latvian composer named Burino who had studied with Rimsky-Korsakov and played with Fritz Kreisler, but who had had the ill luck to spend the war in a Nazi prison camp and the postwar in a Stalinist prison camp. Understandably, Professor Brino had had enough of world events, and Europe had lost its glamour. But they had not luster for me and my friends, for whom the world was a distant flame from the South, hot, bright, dancing, and utterly fascinating. We experienced this mythic flame from the south as a vague, tantalizing light that glowed

somewhere over the horizon, giving off a distant, unsatisfying warmth. The flame glowed brightly when we went to the movies or watched television or listened to the hit parade, but as soon as the movie was over we were back in Truro, which seemed more cold and drab than it had before. I mean, what was the Truro music festival compared to Elvis Presley? What was the Colchester Players compared to a Warner Brothers movie? Like insects, we gravitated toward the larger flame.

I didn't know at the time that there was such a thing as a Canadian writer. In fact, upon my graduation I would not have been able to name with assurance a single Canadian author, poet, composer, musician, or artist. If there was one overwhelming lesson to be learned from both my school studies and my out-of-school activities, if there was one area where my teachers and Elvis Presley were in complete agreement, it was the notion that culture, history, and the arts are things that come from someplace else. That Canada on its own has no history, no culture, no arts. We play no music, write no poetry, paint no pictures, and make no history. Other countries do these things for us.

In these areas, Canada is the one place in the world where nothing happens. A cold, drab, lifeless place, grateful for any warmth and light it can get from that distant flame. And you know, part of me believes that even to this day, it's positively Pavlovian. Like a former Hitlerjugend who has to repress an instinctive, almost physical revulsion for Jews, I have to repress an instinctive, almost physical boredom when I hear the words Canadian culture. I don't feel this when I hear the words British culture, French culture, or American culture. Only the words Canadian culture can produce in me

that churn of nauseous ennui. How did this happen? Where does it come from? And who is it benefiting? Certainly it benefits the Americans who make the commodities we buy, and it benefits the Canadians who own the book and record stores, the movie houses, the broadcast networks.

They are the middlemen for these commodities. But it also benefits consumers who like to get vast amounts of that distant flame piped right into their living rooms. In Willowdale, Ontario, the Burns spend Friday night at home. There's the TV Guide, National Geographic, Sports Illustrated and McLean's magazine to read if you choose. And then there's the Tube, Mrs. Burns' contact with that distant flame. Dallas, Nott Landing, Dynasty, Falkens Crest. A couple other shows, again, it would be, I would just flick it round on a time that maybe there's not a soap on or just a time that I want to vegetate.

Basically that's what I use television for anyway, just to sort of vegetate. There's nothing you feel you're missing then? I would say no, not now. I'd say if there's enough on television right now to occupy you, you know, it's summer and winter, especially on the channels that we get. We've got them all up. Mrs. Burns does watch Canadian TV. At least she watches Canadian television stations, CTV, CBC and Global for instance. That's where she sees many of the American shows she likes. As for Canadian programs, Mrs. Burns has seen the littlest

hobo in the beachcombers. She insists that's not the way TV is supposed to look. Something is wrong with this picture. The whole purpose of having Canadian television was to bind the nation together with distinctively Canadian values. At least, that's what Robert Fowler had in mind. In 1965, he chaired a government commission on broadcasting. Leave it to Beaver, I Love Lucy, Rin Tin Tin, wildly popular programs were pouring over the Canadian border.

Fowler thought something had to be done. Left to market forces, there wouldn't be Canadian voices or faces on the air. We needed legislation. It is the task of the broadcasting authorities, using the plural, to read public opinion to some extent. That it is not simply a question of giving the public what it thinks it wants or what the broadcasters think the public think they want. Mr. Fogel, does the public know what it wants?

This is the point. You can't always be sure. There are many new things that the public might become very interested in and very fond of. But if you went around and canvassed them today, because of lack of knowledge of that particular element of programming, you would not get very much response. So we eventually got Canadian content rules. Broadcasters would have to show Canadian programs on their airwaves more than half the time. They could make their money showing American programs, but they would have to use their profits to make Canadian ones. The Canadian Radio, Television and Telecommunications Commission, a watchdog agency, was appointed to give licenses and to make

sure this wasn't just all schlock. They might as well have saved themselves the effort. For Mrs. Burns it's all just one homogenous mass. She can't tell one station from the other. I wouldn't be able to tell you that. Channel 8 is usually where I'll find her 16. And the numbers, you get them from the guide? Yeah, yeah. Oh yeah, yeah. And sometimes I can't even bother looking up the guide because I know what time it starts at, I'm only interested in that show and I just flick down the buttons to find it. I couldn't care less what stations they come in at. As long as I know what button to push, and sometimes I don't even know that, I just flick through it. That's the amount

of interest I have in what channel is on what. So in other words you also wouldn't know if you're watching CTV or Global. Do you know Global if you saw it? No. Global Television was licensed by the CRTC in 1972. This was at a low point for Canadian television when the airwaves were glutted with American programs. Global was supposed to up the odds for Canadian TV

to show the country that private broadcasting could make a profit showing Canadian programs, that Canadian television could be Canadian. It proved nothing of the kind. Paul Morton is president of Global. We cannot be elitist and cannot say this is what you must see. We must provide what they want to see. Canada probably, and I say Canada being the Canadian public, probably has the best television system in the world in that they have access to everything they've got in the States. It's worth a damn. And on top of that we've got a Canadian system in addition to it. You might want to reverse it and

say we have the Canadian system first and foremost and the American system on top of it, but the reality of it is that the Canadian public, because they are so closely entwined with what goes on south of the border, their number one choice is American programming. And that's supplemented by the fact that magazines, newspapers, everything else give more promotion to those foreign programs than they do to Canadian programs. I think if, and I say this only half facetiously, I think it should be outlawed to advertise or to have reported that any program is Canadian in origin. I think we do far better in attracting audiences because this country sadly, and I think everybody

accepts, has a terrible inferiority complex and things we generate ourselves because some of the quality in the things we do is great. But if the press starts reviewing it they say well for a Canadian program it's very good with that derogatory comment and not giving things made in Canada a fair shot because I think we've gotten far better than we were. The problem with Canadian content is dollars and cents. It costs $50,000 to buy an episode of Dallas, for instance. It costs a million to make one. It's simply cheaper for Canadian broadcasters to fill up the hours with U.S. programs.

In addition, advertisers don't want to buy time on Canadian shows. They know Mrs. Burns doesn't watch them. The private networks make game shows like The Jokes on Us, cooking shows, Stars on Ice, University of the Air. They do produce high quality news and current affairs programs, but the CRTC wants them to produce drama, storytelling, very expensive stuff. Doug Bassett is president of CFTO-TV in Toronto. That's the largest affiliate of the private television network, CTV. I'm not able to

tell you specifically what programs that I can say I'm particularly proud of. Why not? Because I don't know the programs. I don't watch television 24 hours a day. I love the Cosby show. My kids love the Cosby show. Everybody in Canada, everybody in the world loves the Cosby show. How can we do that in Canada? There's no talent, there's no writers here. This is the problem. We don't have the writers in Canada. We have some actors. We have a lot of very good technicians, a lot of very good production people. But it's the writers that are so hard to find.

Where are the writers? They've all gone to the United States. Can you not lure them back? No, you can't. The brain drain of Canadian talent into the United States has been going on since the 1950s. Since it became apparent that Canadian TV was going nowhere. The trend continues to this day. We export Canadian talent, we import American programs.

The economies of scale defeat us. The desire for American programs, which always seem brighter, glossier, better, defeat the system. Even the CBC, licensed to be Canadian television, shows as much as 50% American content in order to support itself. There have been occasional success stories. More Canadians watched Anne of Green Gables than usually watched Dallas. Global produced a series of superb Canadian short stories. But these are exceptions. The time, the money and the effort required is just too great. And the CRTC has historically turned a blind eye to broadcasters who dodge the rules in order to make a buck. Today's commissioner, Andre Bureaux, doesn't believe that anything

could be done. True. There are more and more programs coming from the United States. And it's a fact. We cannot fight against that eternally because we'll lose. There's no question about that. And Canadians will want to have access to that. Why should we tell Canadians that they cannot watch a program that is coming from the United States? It would be exactly like telling them that they can't read Time magazine or that they can't read any other

foreign publication. And this is something that philosophically you cannot accept. Broadcasting is among the most lucrative industries in Canada. It enjoys a 30% return on investment, twice that of Bell Canada. By trafficking in American culture, Canadian broadcasters get wealthy. Legislation that shields them from competition simply allows them to operate as Trojan horses in this country. Susan Kreen is a communications critic and a broadcast journalist. It's always very easy to sound high-minded about this and also to paint things in black and white. And I've always said and felt that there is such a thing as conspiracies of circumstance as well as conspiracies of individuals in back rooms with blueprints and stuff.

So I don't have to believe that the cultural industrialists have knowingly sold the country out but I think that the effect of what they're doing could add up to that. I think they're definitely part of the problem and not part of the solution. Night birds. I haven't heard them before. Well, there's sort of a special kind in the hills. Red-winged Orioles. Yeah, Red-wing Wing Orioles from Canada. This is the result of an early attempt to have some Canadian input into films shown here in Canada. In 1947, Canada's Minister of Everything, C.D. Howe, wanted to do something about the balance of trade deficit between Canada and the United States.

Twenty million dollars left the country each year going to Hollywood alone. But any attempts to affect the profits flowing south were met with tremendous resistance from the Hollywood majors. So in exchange for carte blanche over Canadian theaters, Hollywood moguls were required to include Canadian references in their films, perhaps even play some national film board travel logs. This would help Canadian tourism.

We shall smoke the pipe of peace, Indian, American and Canadian. We celebrate the peace and friendship of our three peoples who live on this northern frontier. However feeble or ineffective were paper tigers in other industries, this was the most ridiculous. The wilderness is calling north of the great divide. From everywhere it's calling North of the great divide

And it tells the story of the great divide Meanwhile, at the National Film Board and in the private sector, writers and directors like Claude Jutra, Gilles Carle, were anxious to make their own feature films, not just documentaries. And they were anxious to get them shown in the cinemas. But they couldn't compete in the American-dominated industry in Canada. Naturally, they lobbied the government for intervention and support. In 1968, the government launched the Canadian Film Development Corporation, the CFDC, an agency to assist filmmakers with funds and with expertise. It became notorious when some of its projects turned out to be

merely tax dodges for enterprising dentists and lawyers. When it failed, Telefilm Canada took its place, a market-driven funding agency to support television and film production. Whatever Canadian TV shows you might see, they're generally compliments of this agency. But Telefilm Canada has done almost nothing for the movie industry. The Hollywood majors still control the cinemas. Every other country in the world that wanted to create a local feature film industry

used one system or another, either a levy at the box office or some sort of a screen quota to ensure that there was access to their local market for whatever they produced and from the very beginning the CFTC made some half-hearted attempts requiring that that people who were applying for support had distribution agreements and what happened was that they discovered that these distribution agreements had no meaning in the real world they could could get them, but they were not worth the paper they were printed on. I'm not sure that the same thing isn't happening again.

You know, these are, to my mind, green cheese policies. You can all sit there and say the moon is made out of green cheese, but nothing will actually make it made out of green cheese, one way or the other, no matter how many motions you pass. No matter what policies the CFDC or Telefilm Canada wants to introduce, no matter how many times it says it's market driven and it's going to make itself economically viable or make the film industry economically viable, it can't do that and still remain a genuine Canadian film industry unless it deals with the American domination of distribution

and exhibition. But Michael Spencer says it's unlikely the government will change this. Our politicians have generally felt if we do anything here, the Americans will stop importing popular films into Canada and we the politicians will get it in the neck because we're stopping this stuff coming into the country. But I don't I think all we were ever asking for we didn't want the whole market we didn't want to take over the whole thing we just wanted to take over enough of it so that we get our foot in the door in our own country. What we wanted and what I think we we

still want and what we can do from time to time is the odd movie, you know, not the odd one, I mean, you know, the one from time to time, which, you know, excites Canadians. And it's a Canadian film. That's free enterprise for you, isn't it? If we were a satellite of the Soviet Union, we could not be so suppressed, so effectively, and certainly not so willingly. And why should we buck the trend?

Aren't our American saturated media telling our audience that that is what they want in their television programs, magazine articles, and even in our own newspaper entertainment sections with our toadying drivel on the personal habits of the American star of the week lifted from the AP Wire Service for about $1.98. Why should we fight the propaganda rather than taking advantage of it? Why should we tell our audiences that there is a distinctive society here with a history and culture that are worth looking at? Who are we to tell our audiences that they are interesting people,

that this is an interesting place to live? And yet we can, you know. Canada has something to say. We could light our own flame. On Ideas, you're listening to extracts from a documentary series called Common Culture by Carol Off, first heard on Ideas in 1986. We're a podcast and a broadcast, heard on CBC Radio 1 in Canada, across North America,

on SiriusXM, in Australia on ABC Radio National, on World Radio Paris, and around the world at cbc.ca. ideas. Find us on the CBC News app and wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Nala Ayed. On the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz comes an unprecedented exhibition about one of history's darkest moments. Auschwitz, not long ago, not far away, features more than 500 original objects, firsthand accounts and survivor testimonies that tell the powerful story

of the Auschwitz concentration camp, its history and legacy, and the underlying conditions that allowed the Holocaust to happen. On now exclusively at ROM, tickets at rom.ca. At Desjardins, we speak business. We speak startup funding and comprehensive game plans. We've mastered made-to-measure growth and expansion advice.

And we can talk your ear off about transferring your business when the time comes. Because at Desjardins Business, we speak the same language you do. Business. So join the more than 400,000 Canadian entrepreneurs who already count on us and contact Desjardins today. We'd love to talk. Business. In 1986, negotiations began between Canada and the U.S. to remove all remaining tariffs on goods traveling between the two countries. Also at issue, access to each other's markets. Could Canadian companies bid on U.S. government contracts?

And how much freedom would American companies have to control the news and entertainment available to Canadian audiences? Protecting a separate Canadian cultural identity and using trade rules to do it caused a lot of controversy. And it can be fascinating to hear how Canadians and Americans argued over the issue back in 1986, now that we have four decades of hindsight, and now that similar fears about Canadian independence have returned, this time over the reintroduction of tariffs and protectionist measures. Here's the Canadian theatre director John Hirsch speaking to Karoloff in 1986 about why any attempt to legislate a Canadian sense of self seemed to him to be hopeless. And some people have this and others don't.

And some nations have it and others don't. And when they don't have it, I don't know whose fault it is. Maybe God never meant Canadians to be really Canadian. It was all a kind of a joke. Or maybe he put us down next to the Americans to test us, and we failed the test, that's all. We just don't have the stuff, so on to the next thing. For John Hirsch, the battle is lost.

For John Gray, it's absolutely essential that it be won. Canada is a highly sophisticated country, created just late enough to avoid becoming a traditional European nation-state. This gives us some identity problems, but it also gives us insights that other countries would do well to emulate. For example, as a general order of priority, Canadians regard the survival of the earth as more important than the survival of Canada. You can't say this of the United States, the Soviet Union or France, who would rather see the world destroyed than watch their influence

over it decline. Canada doesn't regard nature as something to be conquered. Heritage and weather warn us against this and we're right. Other nations don't share this view. One country's reality is another country's revelation. Canada has something to tell the world. But that's the macro side, and I'm far more concerned about my kids. We have a chance, for the first time in quite a while, to bring up a generation of Canadians who don't have that terrible bug in their skulls that flashes the word dull whenever the word Canadian is heard.

We could bring up a generation of Canadians who know and like and respect themselves. And if we don't do it in this generation, I'm afraid we're not going to do it at all. The buck has been passed as far as it can go. I don't want my little boy to learn that it's heroic to blow your enemy's head off, or that the defeat of nature is something to be proud of, or that money is everything. But most of all, I don't want him to learn that terrible, instinctive self-contempt that leads us to pretend that we're somebody else and makes phonies of us all. And believe me, if we don't get our cultural act together, that is exactly what he's going to learn.

The lessons are coming in hour after hour, ad after ad, channel after channel, and on will go Canada, everybody's colony exchanging natural resources while the natural resources hold out. And my son and your children will have nothing. We're not alone in this by any means. This is not an isolated problem. A distinctive national culture is a luxury. When you live next door to a superpower, it is a luxury to be yourself. It's far easier to follow somebody else. Ask Mr. Barino what happened to Latvia. Ask Afghanistan, Nicaragua, Poland. For most of the world's people, the real struggle is not between communists and capitalists.

It is the struggle of the small to avoid being swallowed up by the mighty, to be allowed to live in peace, and to be themselves. Most of the world's peoples are now fighting for the meaning of their lives, and I think it's time that Canada joined them. If you look at a turn-of-the-century map of the world, it is striking how many countries existed then that do not exist now. Countries like people have lifespans. Countries like people are born and they die. As people, we know that the biggest mistake you

can make in your life is to assume that you're going to live forever, that there is plenty of time to do what you want to do with your life to make your contribution to the world. Canada will not always be here. We don't have forever to make our statement, to light our flame. Thank you for listening to me. Lewis Lapham is the editor of Harper's Magazine in New York City. He once said of America, when has a people ever done so much for the sake of an idea? The idea of America, its system of values, its strength, its power, has long fascinated Canadians and sometimes repelled them.

Our world is flooded with its culture. Often the best of our people go to America to work in one of the most dynamic, though often brutal, environments in the world. It's a delicate dance for the Canadian artist to take what America has to offer to hold on to what they value as Canadians. Filmmaker Sandy Wilson made an extremely successful film two years ago called My American Cousin.

Hollywood agents were impressed, constantly hungry as they are for new ideas. Now they send Wilson scripts that she might want to direct. A great opportunity, but tricky territory. I don't know, I think Canadians tend to consider the moral aspects of things perhaps a little bit more than the Americans who are strictly business. You know, the bottom line is the dollar and who cares if it's guns and raping women and stuff like that. We'll do it because it'll make money. Whereas the Canadians think, well, is there any socially redeeming feature in this project whatsoever. And I don't think the Americans understand that or have any time for that kind of stuff. I think they think that's sort of

socialistic or so. I don't know what that I have no idea what they think but I don't get it. For some the values of America are more than just confusing. They're repulsive. Timothy Findlay is one of Canada's leading novelists. His books like Not Wanted on the Voyage sell well all over the world, including New York City. And while the New York market is lucrative, Findlay still finds its attitudes and values upsetting, unsettling, and unlike anything he's ever encountered here. There are differences and one of the differences I'm profoundly aware of is that when I was a young man, my generation of young people

yearned to make a success of who we were as individuals and what we believed. In other words, to say, I will become Timothy Findlay, was the thing I sought. I did not seek how to find success. And this is now the whole tone of what you find in New York in young people, in the centers of creativity in Los Angeles and in New York.

I visit young friends in New York and go into their apartment buildings passing through gates and keys and video people watching me pass down the hall and some maniac man on a desk who phones up and says, what does Mr. Findley look like? Is this his voice? And I'm asked to say, Hello, Joe, it's me. Yes, that is, Mr. Findley. He may come up. They live in these places and apparently want to. You know, this is where they find some kind of security. Imagine not having the imagination to say, I will not live like this.

Then you sit down with these young people who are talented, and what they talk about is, How I'm going to have success. I don't care how I get it how I'm going to have success. I don't care how I get it, I'm going to have it. I'm going to have success. And you say, how? And you say, I don't know how yet. We never said that.

But for every Timothy Finlay, there are actually hundreds of Canadians who are willing to put up with the difficulties, who desire them. And America takes them all in. Well there are some obstacles. You must get a green card so you can work there. And then there's the competition. But without success in the United States, few have any success at all. For Canadian artists, there are opportunities, power, and money to be made in the United States.

But what they may not find is much patience for the idea that we and the Americans have any cultural differences or that those differences matter. Harry Olson is a full-time legal advisor for CBS television, one of the most powerful show business companies in the world. CBS Television, one of the most powerful show business companies in the world. What are these distinctive Canadian cultural values that I hear so much about in general terms but in specific terms I'm never told how those Canadian cultural values differ from those that prevail you you know, really generally in Western culture,

which I suppose came down to us from the Greeks and Romans. What are these differing cultural values? I know Canadians believe in honesty. I'm sure Canadians believe in courage. I'm sure that Canadians believe in sacrifice for a worthy cause. I'm sure that Canadians believe in returning good for good. Maybe sometimes they believe, as some of our people do, in returning evil for evil. I'm sure when you people see High Noon and you see Gary Cooper triumph at the end finally and shoot down the bad man and you know good has triumphed over evil but you've seen some violence take place. I'm sure that every Canadian heart you know leaps

just as mine doesn't you say George, that's a great ending. Do not forsake me, oh my darling, on this wedding day. darlin' we'll wait long maybe this only shows american blindness because i'm sure that a lot of canadians probably get angry if an american boldly says that we're pretty much alike. They probably focus on the differences. I think it's almost like two brothers in a family. They'll argue about very slight things whereas to a stranger it seems that they're not very widely separated in their culture.

For Harry Olson, a discussion about the cultural differences between the two countries is more than just an academic exercise. Because Harry Olson is among those who authored a very important document on the issue of free trade in the American entertainment business. The document says that Canadian national identity and cultural sovereignty are buzzwords, smokescreens for protectionism. The document says that Canadian government

policies stand in the way of American entertainment industry profits and that our Canadian content quotas in radio and in television are discriminatory. The Americans are angry because foreigners can't own our newspapers, our cable systems and our broadcast networks. And they say we discriminate against American magazines with a tax law known as Bill C-58. Olson's document also says that many countries have troublesome protectionist laws in the area of culture, but Canada is among the worst offenders. Olson's document is powerful and it's been of great interest to those in Washington who are involved in Canada-U.S. free trade negotiations. David Crane is a columnist with the Toronto Star newspaper.

His specialty is trade. The Americans are concerned about losing the steel industry, concerned about the decline of their automobile industry, and other industries of this sort, see cultural industries as one of those in which they believe they have a strong international advantage. And they don't believe the Japanese record industry is going to be able to do away with Bruce Springsteen or Tina Turner or any of these performing artists and the Japanese movie companies are not going to be able to

Offset or to compete against Hollywood. So they are trying to preserve that what they see as a As one of their industries that other countries can't take away from them and they want to use the trade talks with Canada to make sure that nothing is done in Canada, which really impedes the success of their industry in maximizing its return in the Canadian market. This may seem like American cultural imperialism at its finest, but the Americans don't see it that way. The argument, as it's laid out in Olson's trade document,

is that Canadians want American movies, TV, books, magazines, but that the Canadian government, by means of its protectionist policies, keeps getting in the consumer's way. Canadians like their entertainment bright, glossy, hot, and inexpensive. And America provides this. But cultural nationalists in Canada argue that by passively watching American life flickering on the TV screen, it's like one great monologue, and we lose the chance to take part in the conversation. That's why cultural nationalists in Canada are petitioning the Canadian government not to bend to American demands in the area of culture, to keep culture off the free trade table. Journalist and writer Susan Kreen is among them.

From one point of view, you can look at this and you can understand entertainment as being sort of the leading edge or the cutting edge in certain aspects of the information industry, which is probably the last growth industry left to the first and second world. Not only that, the Americans have always understood the connection between business and culture and the fact that the entertainment industry is the best advertising they could ever have for the American way of life and for other kinds of American products.

And in that sense, when you look at the history of the American film industries around the world, we shouldn't only be looking at ourselves, we should be looking at that and understanding that as well because the Americans have not got an unsullied record of defensive freedom of expression. Their economic industries collide all over the world with the cultural interests and freedom of expression

of other peoples. It's not that they are censoring other people's expression, but they are making it impossible in many instances for that expression to even begin to take place. For the rest of the world, for nine-tenths of the world, the issue at stake when it comes to free flow of information is getting a word in edgewise. Thomas Niles is the American ambassador to Canada. Well I frankly don't know and I don't know that anybody knows what the people of Canada want in the

way of television programs, cinema, radio programs, whatever, painting, architecture. I don't think anybody really knows and I don't think there's any real way to find out except to give them a chance to choose. In a situation where you only have one choice, well who knows, maybe that's the one people want but maybe it's not. I think what the nationalists have complained about is that there is only one choice in Canada and that's American programs.

Well I don't have that's American programs. Well, I don't have that impression at all. I mean, I watch a lot of Canadian television. Of course, I do see a certain number of United States origin programs there. A lot of Canadian programs too, certainly all of the public affairs programming, but I guess that goes without saying. You would have public affairs programming done in this country, and that's quite reasonable. But there are lots of Canadian shows, very successful ones, on television. And I've seen several

Canadian films since I've been here. What did you see? Well I saw the decline, is it the decline of the American Empire and my American cousin? Those are two that I saw that I know were Canadian. You know, one of the things is that you see a lot of products or you hear programs on the radio and you can't always say, well, I didn't recognize that to be a Canadian program, but that is a program imported from somewhere else,

either from the United States or from Western Europe or some other source. For Susan Cream, the fact that you can no longer tell the difference between Canadian TV and American TV is just the point. It's all turned into one homogeneous cultural mass, or becoming one common culture. And little is being done to prevent this or to maintain Canadian cultural values. When we talk about the Québécois and the French-speaking Canadians and the fact that assimilation is very clear and imminent and a presence in their lives, they can track it, they can

see the number of households that cease to be French-speaking over a period of time, and that is how they measure assimilation. The natives in the North also understand the threat of assimilation and how unmitigated masses of American culture, or what they call Southern culture, is piped into the North through television and how that can have a serious effect on their own sense of themselves, their identity and their culture. Well, what kind of arrogance is it on the part of Southern Canadians to believe that we can also be subjected to massive amounts of American culture without ever having any kind of spill-off effects.

One person's assimilation is another person's cultural exchange. Harry Olson. I think one of the problems with Canada, I think, with a Canadian situation, of course, is that Canada is much smaller than the United States. Its economy is smaller. Its population is smaller. Its voice in the world is smaller. And I understand and sympathize with what it's like living next to the elephant. It has its difficulties. The elephant can roll over and hurt you, sometimes not meaning to do so. On the other hand, it must have been very uncomfortable for some of the ancient Greeks

to live next to Athens, and I'm not comparing the American culture to the Athenian culture, but it must have been noisy and troublesome, and the Athenians must constantly have been influencing the cultures of the people they live next to. In that case, it turned out to be a good thing. I suppose the Canadians now who want to keep out foreign influences on their culture think that the foreign culture is a bad thing. Well, you know, I don't know. You'd have to be very, very wise, I think, to know

exactly what to keep out and what not to. Americans boast that they don't try to keep out foreign influences, and there are better people for it. Why then should Canada restrict ownership? Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the 28th annual seminar put on by the Canadian American Center for Canadian American Studies. The University of Windsor in southeastern Ontario. You can see Detroit from this campus. Canadian and American academics, students and bureaucrats met here for three days in November of this year. The subject, cultural sovereignty, Myth or Reality. I'd like to now call on Elaine Ducharme, a student at the University of Windsor, who will lead us in our national entrance. Elaine. Canada can sometimes be a confusing place for the Americans, not least of all when we

seem to be singing different words to the tune of our national anthem. In fact, people are actually singing in both French and in English at the same time. That's even more confusing. Through the windows I can see the Ambassador Bridge, where a continuous stream of transport trucks, laden with goods, pass back and forth across the border, crossing what some have described as the longest undefended special relationship in the world. For three days delegates here tried to understand that relationship. What came out of it for the most part is a sense that Canadians feel threatened and that the Americans don't really understand why.

Ambassador Niles couldn't make it to this conference, so he sent his colleague, James Thurber, to give the keynote address for the conference on day two. For those among you who honestly feel that the United States is practicing cultural imperialism, let me disagree but report that you are not alone. My service with the United States Information Agency has taken me to around 30 countries in Africa, as well as to all of the Middle East, Persian Gulf, and South Asia. Everywhere I went there were groups protesting so-called America cultural imperialism. For us, try as we might, it is a slogan that won't go away no matter how much we work

to dispel it. That an outside force can influence totally a nation's culture is almost ludicrous. Look at one of my favorite countries, India. The British, for over 300 years, first through a trading company and later through direct action, tried to impose their culture on India through a variety of methods that went up

to and included military force. Yet we in the United States have just witnessed an 18-month extravaganza known as the Festival of India, where we were treated to the exhibits of a culture that was as rich and all-encompassing as any in the history of the world. The Indic culture survived in all its glory the many attempts to alter it. The same could be said for the cultures of China, for Nigeria, and even Afghanistan. Try as they might, foreign nations, imperialist or otherwise, have not and cannot force their cultures on the anthropological makeup of another country.

Thus we are faced with the question as to how Canada can react to living next door to such a large and dynamic nation as the United States. One of the answers you hear is that the United States should impose restrictions on what cultural activities are available for export to Canada. But I don't think you want that type of censorship any more than we do. If we could do it, which we can't. It is like saying to you, keep all of Emily Carr's works in Canada. Don't let them come to the United States. They might influence us the wrong way. I do not personally believe, nor do I think most Canadians

believe, that Canadian culture awaits its flowering on finally becoming insulated from American culture, or indeed from the culture of other lands. And how insulting such a suggestion must be in that case to Canadian artists and writers and to its citizens, who I believe must resent being told what their culture must be or not be. So my first message for today to Canadians is even if we want to, which we don't, we couldn't impose our culture on you and destroy yours. Take from us what you want, incorporate that which you find acceptable, but reject, as

all nations have and should, the imposition of an outside culture upon yours against your will. The original idea of America and the idea of Canada were both noble ideas. They were ideas of democracy, ideas that people from all over the world could share. Each country crafted itself with a different sense of how that democracy would work. Many things have changed since those ideas originated. Many old roads no longer exist. We're building new ones.

North-south roads. Bridges between our two nations. Canada is seeking new markets in a world where markets mean economic survival. Culture is now part of that market. Culture is a business, a service industry. No longer a system of values. Culture is a commodity, a service industry, no longer a system of values. Culture is a commodity, like any other commodity.

But the point of developing culture in Canada, of shielding it from competition, the point of building institutions to support Canadian artists, was all done in the hope of expressing a particularly Canadian perception of the world. It was thought to be something too delicate to stand up in an open market place. But the world is much too fast for that now. And so free trade negotiators are not focusing on those values because that's not what the trade talks are all about. The trade talks are about new wealth and prosperity. They're about closer economic ties between old friends, as President Reagan describes us. If no one is looking

out for those values at the trade table then we must. We must decide how closely we want to be allied with the US and what we are willing and not willing to give up in order to have access to that valuable and substantial market to the South. It seems we may have already lost our cultural sovereignty. That we are now about to meet our natural destiny with the continent and some say so be it. But I think we must not lose sight of why it was all done in the first place. The idea of America, the idea of Canada, dreamed up in the hope that something approaching greatness, something transcending

borders can still be made. You were listening to edited extracts from Common Culture. The original two-part documentary was produced by Carol Off in 1986. Our technical producer is Danielle Duval. Our web producer is Lisa Ayuso. Episode producer, Tom Howell. Our senior producer is Nikola Lukcic. Greg Kelly is the executive producer of Ideas. And I'm Nala Ayed. For more CBC podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.