Peter Menzies: Are we really protecting Canadian Identity? Hut hut.
Here we are in an economic war fearful that we could become the 51st state when, in many ways, we already are.
By: Peter Menzies
Next Sunday, the federal agency responsible for the flourishing of national
culture and identity will be swamped with complaints. The grumbling will emanate from Canadians enraged they can’t get more American culture. Yes, America may be in the process of humiliating Canada as its lamest of lame duck leaders, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, waddles into the sunset. And, for sure, most of us are mortified that U.S. President Donald Trump has chosen to make an example of us as he launches his mission to bring the globe to heel and Make America Great Again.
But the bitching directed in the days to come at the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications (CRTC) headquarters in Gatineau will originate from Canadians angry they can’t watch American Super Bowl TV ads along with the game. A perennial contender to be the most watched TV event in Canada, the Super Bowl also has traditionally been the most controversial event on the CRTC’s calendar.
The USA can slap us silly with tariffs. It can send hundreds of thousands of us into unemployment and despair. It can mock our disinterest in maintaining the essentials of nationhood and drive us into unsustainable debt. Trump can brutalize our national esteem and taunt us for our cavalier attitudes towards the defence of our sovereignty. And he can lick his big beautiful lips while pondering our potential as the 51st state.
But what will really light us up Feb. 9 will be being unable to watch Meg Ryan and Billy Crystal reinvent their famous restaurant scene from When Harry Met Sally or Michelob Ultra’s production starring Willem Dafoe and Catherine O’Hara as a couple of pickleball hustlers. Or Matthew McConaughey channeling legendary Chicago Bears coach Mike Ditka for Uber Eats. And the Clydesdales. Everyone loves those Budweiser Clydesdales, particularly the cute little foal making a debut.
It doesn’t matter that the ads cost $7 million U.S. (which will convert into heaven only knows how many bazillion loonies in the months ahead) for a 30-second spot. Or that for more than a decade many of the commercials have been available on YouTube. Canadians don’t want to watch a Super Bowl adorned with Government of Ontario and Maple Leaf Foods ads. They want to watch the game like real Americans and relish the full, unfettered American experience.
So thousands will phone and email the CRTC angry that it has rules allowing domestic broadcasters like BellMedia/CTV to recoup the investment they made in buying Canadian rights to the game by selling their own commercials and substituting them for the American ads, including on the cable feed from Fox.
Yes, there was a brief period when the CRTC I was part of lifted the simultaneous substitution rules for the Super Bowl (even though during the game I would still, as a commissioner, get emails and calls from people watching the domestic ads on CTV.) But those old stick-in-the-muds on the Supreme Court overruled the decision in 2019 and confirmed Bell’s right to protect its investment.
The 2024 game between the Kansas City Chiefs and San Francisco 49ers, known by its imperial title of Super Bowl LVIII, drew an average TV audience of more than 10 million Canadians. Give or take, that’s 25 per cent of the population. It’s also about three times the size of the average TV audience for our own national championship, The Grey Cup, won by the Toronto Argonauts over the Winnipeg Blue Bombers.
And it’s not just American football and its advertising that we prefer over our own. CNN has a significant reach north of the border and our prime time programming is so dominated by U.S. shows that not only are we a nation not in control of our own programming, it is not uncommon to hear our Crown prosecutors referred to as district attorneys, our rights described as “Miranda” and phrases like “we the people” and “y’all” thrown about in concert with mutterings about first and second amendments.
A core purpose of the CRTC — its raison d’etre — is the nurturing and flourishing of Canadian culture. In the case of English television, it’s almost impossible to describe the scale of that failure. Since the advent of cable, our regulatory body has been unable to cope with the overwhelming power of American networks, and their ability to outspend Canadian productions and then undercut them by selling content into Canada for pennies on the dollar. Our sports broadcast schedules are filled with male and female U.S. college games while our university and domestic sports leagues can’t even get scores and standings posted on their websites.
Those managing the billions of dollars to be spent on the production of Canadian film and television abandoned any serious effort to measure cultural impact based on consumption and demand for more. Unable to compete with all that Hollywood bling, we shifted our ambition from instilling national pride to counting how many Writers’ Guild, ACTRA members and equity deserving groups were being fed and watered via CanCon requirements.
So here we are in an economic war fearful that we could become the 51st state when, in many ways, we already are. Little wonder 43 per cent of those of us aged 18-34 would vote in favour of making it official in exchange for full U.S. citizenship and conversion of Canadian assets into U.S. dollars at par.
But enough about that. I’m taking Patrick Mahomes and the Chiefs by 10.
Peter Menzies is a senior fellow with the Macdonald-Laurier Institute, past vice-chair of the CRTC and a former newspaper publisher.
Correction: The game is next Sunday! Not this Sunday. That’s an editing error, folks. Our bad. We apologize.
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Peter, it isn't difficult to mock Canadians' affinity for American cultural exports or to mock the idea of a distinct Canadian identity at all. However, it isn't clear from your article whether you have any point of view about any of this. Should Canadians just crack a Bud, reach into our bowl of Doritos and blankly assimilate ever more deeply into American culture? Should we resist assimilation? Reading your article, my take away was smug contempt for the thin tea of Canadian culture, but spoken from the safety of an ironic distance from where any of this might take us.
I think that's crap. Collectively we get a say in where our country goes. We can thrum to the supposed excitement of American football. We can also relate to American culture the way Ukraine relates to Russian culture: something they used to be into in a big way but now see as rotten at its core.
At the best of times I couldn't work up the slightest interest in whether Kansas City won the superbowl or danced the flamenco in high heels. Now? I see the whole show as rotten. Our American brothers and sisters have elected a fascist-adjacent leader, and I want no part in any of it. I see the 43 per cent of young Canadians open to joining up with the US as a regrettable number, but certainly not a number that is fixed or inevitable. My 19-year-old son has told me he would be very happy to defend his country with his life and said that his friends all feel the same. It's not everything - just a couple of kids in a small prairie city - but it's not nothing either. I think if more Gen X and Boomers were willing to exhibit even a passing sense of loyalty to our country that their numbers would grow.
I’ve lived here for almost twenty years, and it’s been apparent to me since my arrival that the CRTC was nothing more than a make work program designed to protect entrenched interests. More than ever it needs to be dismantled and the communications sector to be deregulated, perhaps replaced by another agency with extremely limited mandate and powers. But a complete dissolution is likely preferable.
The idea that mere plebes can’t choose which content they consume is a insult to human dignity.
The french have had a similar agency for decades with equally disastrous results.