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It is not clear what can be done to slow the tsunami of information coming from U.S. sources. Regulation can’t stop it, even if we wanted to give it a try. The government’s attempt to negotiate Canadian content on Netflix was accurately described as being more Netflix’s Canada policy than Canada’s Netflix policy.
In their recent book The End of the CBC?, media professors Christopher Waddell and David Taras point out that Canada has many institutions designed to protect our cultural sovereignty, which were explicitly protected by the 1988 Free Trade deal with the U.S. They include the CBC, the National Film Board, the Canada Media Fund, Canadian content legislation, the Canadian Periodical Fund, tax laws that discourage Canadian companies from advertising in American media, and simultaneous substitution of Canadian TV signals for the same American programs, which keeps hundreds of millions of advertising dollars here (and simultaneously irritates Canadian consumers wanting to see U.S. Super Bowl ads). And that’s just the federal government; all the provinces have their own wide range of support and subsidies for everything from TV to art exhibits.
Like German tanks outflanking France’s anachronistic Maginot Line in 1940, all these cultural institutions fortified by governments in Canada were bypassed by a blitzkrieg of, as Waddell and Taras put it, “Google searches, Facebook posts, Twitter bursts, data mining, internet streaming, immersive videos, memes, mashups, pirating, ad blocking, and the ubiquity of mobile devices.” Individuals spread and broadcast these messages irrespective of government control or regulations, which were designed for a different era and could not adapt to today’s rapidly shifting reality even if it were a good idea to try. The internet ocean is rising all around us; there is nothing would-be regulatory King Canutes can do about it.
