Last week Culture and Identity Minister Steven Guilbeault showed up at the House of Commons’ heritage committee for his root canal.
The Conservatives were on him immediately about former CBC host Travis Dhanraj’s charges that the public broadcaster violated the Human Rights Act by treating him as a token “brown guy.” MP Rachel Thomas cited CBC’s “toxic environment” as a fact.
Guilbeault appeared to take Dhanraj’s allegations at face value, expressing “regret” at “what happened to him” but distanced himself from the CBC’s handling of the dispute.
MediaPolicy has covered the story here, here and here but I was waiting for more details on Dhanraj’s claims against unnamed colleagues in CBC’s Ottawa bureau and how CBC management handled the whole situation.
Now Dhanraj has given a more fulsome version of his story on episode one of his new podcast, Can’t Be Censored, produced with former CP24 reporter Karman Wong.
The episode is over an hour long and it’s pretty clear that without naming David Cochrane, the host of CBC’s parliamentary show Power and Politics, that is who Dhanraj is identifying as his nemesis (Cochrane has declined comment). Dhanraj says that “three or four” journalists are running the Ottawa bureau’s news coverage as their own club.
Dhanraj’s narrative is that CBC headhunted him, first as a national reporter and then as the host of Canada Tonight, a current affairs show. Dhanraj tried to make the show edgy and popular by inviting controversial guests. They included former Fox News host Tucker Carlson, whose appearance CBC management vetoed on the grounds that Carlson is a white nationalist, although Dhanraj says in the podcast he doesn’t agree with that description.
What got him into hotter water was inviting Conservative Party deputy leader Melissa Lantsman onto his show while the Conservatives were boycotting Cochrane’s hot seat on Power & Politics. As it turns out, CBC management already had an internal protocol that forbade the Conservatives end-running Cochrane in favour of a preferred host. Dhanraj tried to convince his boss that it was good journalism and better for the CBC’s reputation as a big tent public broadcaster to get the Conservatives onto any CBC show at all. He even quoted the Broadcasting Act. His boss didn’t buy it.
There’s more in the podcast episode on other friction points between Dhanraj and the Corp. Assuming he has offered his best arguments, it’s hard to see his allegation of racist tokenism as anything other than his editorial gloss. Rather his story comes across as a tale of an ambitious television anchor making a play to upgrade a lesser show into a bigger one, some colleagues resenting that, and CBC not accommodating it.
If David Cayley’s new book critiquing the CBC had gone to press a little later, I am sure he would have devoted a chapter to Dhanraj. Earlier this week, MediaPolicy posted a review of Cayley’s book.
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Bob Iger is writing his own history, day by day.
Iger is the Disney CEO responsible for suspendingLive! host Jimmy Kimmel for his mockery of the US President’s odd reply to a journalist’s question about grieving Charlie Kirk’s death. Then the viewer and political backlash hit Disney. Iger turned Kimmel’s “indefinite” suspension into a one week cancellation.
US media commentator Evan Shapiro has a LinkedIn post breaking down the events leading up to Iger’s actions against Kimmel.
Bottom line: the threat by Trump’s FCC chair Brendan Carr to strip Disney’s ABC affiliate stations of their broadcasting licenses was an idle one. Up until now media moguls have blinked because they won’t play the long game against the Trump administration’s campaign to tame mainstream media.
Kimmel’s show is back on the ABC network, but initially two major station affiliates refused to air it. One of them is a big Trump supporter. The other needs the FCC to approve a merger.
That lasted three days. Yesterday the two affiliates that include 56 stations across the US reversed course and agreed to resume airing the show.
It ain’t over. Trump replied on Truth Social, “I think we’re going to test ABC out on this. Let’s see how we do.”
***
It’s World News Day tomorrow which is a reminder from major newsrooms around the liberal democratic globe that you’ll miss them when they’re gone.
Pairing up with that, my alma mater Unifor —-which represents journalists and media workers across the country—- has launched a middle brow version of the same, a public service campaign branded CheckFactHere.
Video and print ads created by Unifor will appear in Canadian media who are donating the inventory.
***
A few sunny weeks ago MediaPolicy posted a dissent from a Canadian Press story concluding that PM Mark Carney was considering repeal of the government’s Online News Act C-18 and its $100 million tithe on Google that compensates Canadian newsrooms for their stories appearing on Search. I didn’t think that Carney’s mangled response to a Kelowna journalist’s question about C-18 actually said that.
It took some time to pin down the government for a clarification, but Politico.com asked Culture and Identity Minister Steven Guilbeault for comment and his press secretary replied “the federal government has no intention of repealing either of the acts,” referencing both C-18 and the Online Streaming Act C-11.
Then the National Poststory added that Guilbeault’s office hedged a bit, saying “for us, currently, the intention is not to repeal those acts… But I can’t pretend to know the end result of the negotiations with the United States” which are “very much” the main factor that will determine the future of both acts.
Somebody needs to put this question to Carney.
While we are talking about C-18, when the Canadian Journalism Collective announced the distribution of the $100 million in August, Media Policy posted that the conservative news outlet Western Standard was getting a $68,000 cheque. What I didn’t mention is that I e-mailed publisher Derek Fildebrandt asking him to confirm that he wasn’t also receiving the federal government’s “QCJO” journalist subsidy. His publication was part of a coterie of anti-subsidy news outlets who published a public oath they would never take that kind of money. Fildebrandt didn’t reply to my e-mail.
Now we know why. He’s taking the money. In an email to his subscribers, Fildebrandt said he couldn’t compete without the federal cash and ——I am reading between his lines here— without Pierre Poilievre in power those subsidies will continue to flow to his competitors.
Fildebrandt’s books aren’t public, so it’s also possible he couldn’t remain solvent without federal and Google money. In any event, my condolences, climbing down from high moral ground is never fun. Just ask Mark Carney.
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Television host and journalist Travis Dhanraj – CBC Photo
July 12, 2025
The fireworks ignited by television host Travis Dhanraj’s public resignation from the CBC will not be a flash in the pan. Not if the Conservative Party has anything to say about it.
The Conservatives are demanding summer Parliamentary hearings, a sequel to the political inquisition that followed the CBC’s annual payment of performance pay to some staff in late 2023.
Conservative headquarters also launched a volley of fundraising e-mails [download, below] citing Dhanraj’s “bombshell” resignation and reiterating its campaign promise to defund the CBC under the leadership of Pierre Poilievre, now standing in the August 18th by-election in Battle River-Crowfoot.
Dhanraj is a veteran television reporter and host who returned to the CBC in 2021 as a National Affairs correspondent and two years later, to much fanfare, as the host of Canada Tonight. At the time, CBC’s press release highlighted Dhanraj’s commitment to “unfiltered” and “diverse” journalism.
But last week Dhanraj announced his “involuntary resignation,” denouncing the CBC’s commitment to diversity as performative and promising detailed revelations to come. The CBC denied the allegations and cited confidentiality obligations as the reason for the brevity of its public reply. It also announced his resignation had been refused.
It’s difficult to recap the sequence of events leading up to Dhanraj’s pyrotechnic departure: much of it is connecting dots but will become easier to piece together once his lawyer Kathryn Marshall files a human rights complaint on his behalf.
The jumping off point appears to be Dhanraj posting a tweet in April 2024 that criticized the CBC for not making then-CEO Catherine Tait available as a news subject on his show, presumably to answer questions about the performance pay.
A public statement issued by his lawyer in February 2025 suggested that at one point he went on medical leave because of the psychological harm caused by CBC management’s alleged retaliatory actions towards him.
In his own public statement, Dhanraj characterized his resignation this way:
It comes after trying to navigate a workplace culture defined by retaliation, exclusion, and psychological harm. A place where asking hard questions — about tokenism masquerading as diversity, problematic political coverage protocols, and the erosion of editorial independence — became a career-ending move.
In further statements, Dhanraj’s lawyer linked “the colour of his skin” to CBC’s alleged exclusion of conservative perspectives and news guests. Specifically, she said that CBC assumed when it hired him that as a brown man his news hosting would focus on liberal perspectives, to the exclusion of conservative guests and issues. A proven connection to race might violate the federal human rights code, if discriminatory.
Marshall welcomed a Parliamentary hearing and suggested that Dhanraj’s experience was “systemic” and goes to the heart of the CBC’s workplace culture and delivering on its public mandate:
Obviously, the issues that Travis has highlighted in his resignation letter and which will be part of a future legal proceeding are very serious, and they’re not just isolated to Travis. I’ve heard from a lot of other CBC employees who have similar stories. It’s a systemic issue, and it’s a workplace culture issue that goes very deep at CBC, which is very concerning given the amount of public funds going to the corporation and its public-interest mandate.
Sooner or later the Conservatives will take this up at the Culture and Identity committee, with MP Rachael Thomas grabbing the spotlight in the prosecutorial role she relishes. But it may bring more thunder than lightning due to the stifling effects of pending litigation.
If the Conservatives go as far as attempting a filibuster of other Parliamentary business (like government bills), the balance of voting power in committee will be held by Bloc Québécois MP Martin Champoux.
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After years of calling the shots as a business CEO and bank governor, the Prime Minister is discovering how tough it is to play the weaker hand when negotiating —-well, trying to negotiate—- with a bully like the United States.
Trump not only wanted the DST to be cancelled, he demanded on Sunday morning it be repealed as a condition of further negotiations over tariffs, trade and continental security. On Sunday evening Canada folded.
Carney cancelled the DST literally hours before the Silicon Valley titans were obliged to send us about a couple of billion dollars in corporate tax remittances, after years of Canada delaying the tax in the hope of coming up with an alternative measure to address the problem of US tech giants reducing their global tax bill by offshoring revenues earned in Canada and countless other jurisdictions. A deal with former President Joe Biden fell through because US Congress would not ratify it.
The rapid chain of events on Sunday had a whiff of Kabuki theatre: it’s plausible that weeks ago Carney made the decision to clear ballast from his trade agenda, much as he did with a carbon tax he once endorsed, but he needed Trump’s threat of walking away from the trade talks to do so. Whether Carney and Canada got anything from Trump in exchange for this unilateral concession we may never know.
It’s an understatement to say there is a disturbing pattern taking hold. Canada spent $1.3 billion on border security to rebuff Trump’s first round of trade tariffs triggered on the phony pretext of fentanyl smuggling.
We enacted and then suspended most of our retaliatory tariffs in hopes of expedited trade negotiations.
We joined hands with NATO allies to click our heels at Trump’s demand that NATO countries more than double their defence spending to 5% of GDP.
And as a ten out of ten on the cringe scale, who can forget Ontario Premier Doug Ford’s bumbling bluff to cut electrical power exports to the United States.
Carney is gambling that Trump won’t see the DST climb-down as weakness and be emboldened. If Canada was the European Union of 400 million souls, an ocean away from the US, the Prime Minister might have chosen a different strategy.
What’s the right way for Carney to play this in the next few weeks?
I spent my trade union career negotiating against powerful companies, usually playing the weaker hand unless the rank and file were angry enough, for a long enough period of time, to face down their employers. One of the key responsibilities of the negotiator is to figure out your own strength.
This is Carney’s challenge. How resilient are Canadians in our collective commitment to economic defence against the Trump onslaught? We get riled up by Trump’s “51st state” threats. But are we tough enough for a grinding trade war of attrition that lasts until Trump’s economy tanks and he has to face mid-term voters next year?
This is a question that the Prime Minister must ask himself every day. It is a question we must ask ourselves.
Our first test of bargaining solidarity is for our politicians, especially our provincial premiers. I suppose we could ask them to just shut up and let the winner of the federal election speak for Canada and certainly not head south to cut their own deal with the US President at Mar-a-Lago.
But voters expect their elected officials to speak up for their constituencies —-Alberta Premier Danielle Smith has every right to remind us that the oil patch is as important as the auto industry— or else they will no longer be elected officials. But there is a line to be drawn and respected.
The same test of solidarity can be expected of non-elected political agents. The chorus of domestic critics of the tax on Uber, Google, and the other digital titans has mischaracterized the tax as just another cynical cash-grab from Big Tech companies that are better left unregulated.
Canadian journalists have tried to correct that misimpression, reporting on the DST as a story of global tax policy. The story is that Canada was a relative latecomer to the international consensus among OECD nations that US Big Tech was offshoring revenues earned in other countries to tax havens like Ireland and that national digital taxes were the best way to combat it until the cheating stopped.
Most European Union nations have already implemented their digital services taxes. While the US President still has those levies in his trade crosshairs, any changes will come at the negotiating table where the EU can pursue a solution to the offshoring problem. In a recent announcement, US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said that the US was prepared to mirror OECD/G20 nations’ tax policies on a minimum corporate tax even though the US will not ratify a tax treaty on the matter.
The details of this recent understanding between the OECD and the US are still hazy.
The EU is keeping its DSTs, for now, because it has some things that Canada doesn’t. Like, the EU nations’ DSTs were already implemented and they had not delayed them out of good will as Canada did. Like the trade of EU nations is less exposed to the United States than Canada’s is. Like, the EU can fall back on an internal trading bloc of 400 million.
The EU will discover, as Canada is, that a solid front at the bargaining table is the only way to defend economic opportunity and political sovereignty against Trump’s trade war.
If it’s all over quickly because we can’t keep a grip on our internal solidarity, we will have lost the trade war. And losing the trade war could mean losing our country.
***
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Just released, the Poilievre platform proposes to more than double the funding of the federal Local Journalism Initiative (LJI), from $20 million per year to $45 million. That potentially adds a further 400 journalist jobs in local print media markets across Canada. The locations of those markets line up nicely with Conservative Party ridings in rural areas and outside major metropolitan areas.
The reaction in some conservative circles to Poilievre’s announcement could be described as vein-bulging disbelief. They had half expected a federal news voucher policy, like the Liberals’ now expired reader tax credit. But this?
In The Hub, a conservative publication that rarely allows daylight to show between itself and the Party, Sean Speer fumed the LJI funding was “a massive concession to the Trudeau agenda and a fundamental failure of conservative politics.” The remarks were made on a podcast, so I am not sure whether the word “conservative” was supposed to be capitalized.
The Hub Publisher Rudyard Griffiths chimed in that the federal government controls news content through the LJI, a serious accusation but without a basis in fact.
The Hub’s dismay with Poilievre’s position on subsidies should be put in context.
If elected Prime Minister, Poilievre will defund the English language services of the CBC with its 2,000 journalists.
Oddly in consideration of his repeated castigations, Poilievre’s platform is silent on the federal $65 million QCJO subsidies to about 3,000 print media journalists, dispensed at 35% of salary.
He has promised immunity to Meta for liability under the Online News Act, which puts at risk Google’s compliance with their commitment to pay $100 million per year compensation to news outlets employing 9,000 journalists (at about 15% of salary).
He has also promised $20 million to fund “Indigenous journalism” without providing specifics.
The Hub’s feeling of betrayal by Poilievre runs deep. In the past few months the publication has gone out of its way to celebrate its refusal to take federal subsidies or compensation from Google, proclaiming its disdain for this financial support as part of its marketing campaign for more paid subscriptions.
What’s not well advertised is that two years ago The Hub publisher Griffiths sought and obtained official designation from the Canada Revenue Agency as a “QCJO” news publisher and, more recently, the seal of approval from the Canada Journalism Collective that is administering the Google money.
I asked him about this apparent contradiction and he confirmed that The Hub has the designations, but spurned the money. A month ago The Hub very publicly donated its $22,000 in Google cash to a charity.
As for the QCJO designation, he says The Hub wanted it for the purpose of Press credentials and never applied for the salary subsidy or reader tax credit program. As for seeking and then giving away the Google money, he said The Hub wanted to follow its application through the CJC process so it could verify the integrity of the distribution.
The Hub’s argument with subsidies is about the independence of the press from government, a non trivial concern of course, but the relevant discussion is “independence” from the many vectors of power in our liberal democracy, not only government but big corporations, sponsors, political parties, billionaires, readers demanding ideological conformity and powerful local families.
The Hub‘s success in winning official status raises the concern of how best to administer QCJO designation when it results in the certification of a news outlet so utterly committed to a northstar political party, one that may be governing Canada come Tuesday morning.
That concern is usually shrugged off by those who point to the historic practice of print media mixing its news reporting with politics through opinion journalism and explicit party endorsements. It got us where we are today, so why worry about the close ties between some media and their political champions?
One way to stop worrying about those political allegiances is found in program design for the subsidies. One of the best ways for a news outlet to prove its bona fides of good journalism is through its committment to original and accurate news gathering as the main course in the journalism meal, with opinion as the dessert.
The QCJO criteria for designation has always required that news outlets engage in original news gathering with a fairly high bar for professional standards. The weakness of those rules is that lack of a high bar for volume of news gathering, requiring only that news gathering be carried out on “ongoing basis.” The “ongoing” is left to eyeballing by a certification committee after a news organization has submitted details of its self selected “best three weeks” of news reporting.
If an outlet like The Hub with its acres of opinion writing and occasional news story can get QCJO designation, the bar for frequency of news reporting can’t be very high.
In fact Griffiths told me that as a non-profit he nevertheless decided against seeking the charitable status that would allow him to issue tax receipts to donors because the rules of the government’s less known “RJO” program for non-profits sets the news gathering bar at 51% of published content, a test he says he could not meet.
And then there is accuracy in news reporting, another thing that demonstrates good journalism and, when not done well, undermines public trust.
Recently, The Hub has repeatedly described federal subsidies to news journalism as totalling “$425 million per year.”
Included in that figure is the $100 million Google money as an “indirect” federal subsidy, a highly editorialized way of describing government-enforced news licensing payments between private parties.
More seriously, its “$425 million” figure includes $154 million from the Canada Media Fund, a media fund that spends all of its money on Canadian television dramas, documentaries and children’s programming and exactly zero dollars on news journalism. That’s a hugely misleading reporting error.
There is yet another way to demonstrate good journalism: keeping a safe distance from corporate influence. News organizations of all stripes have a chequered history on this, frequently allowing advertisers and sponsors to pay for content in one way or another. Nevertheless “advertorial” that is written and paid for by a sponsor, clearly marked as non-journalist content, is generally accepted and long tolerated.
But the arms length independence from corporate money can get squishy.
The Hub published an article in October that opposed the federal government’s Online Streaming Act, also contested in a “Scrap the Streaming Tax” public campaign launched the previous month by the American Digital Media Association (DiMA) against the CRTC’s ruling that music streamers pay five per cent of revenue to Canadian media funds.
DiMA’s member organizations Spotify, Apple, Youtube and Amazon are notorious news subjects in their opposition to the CRTC’s implementation of the bill and DiMA’s campaign art was used by The Hub to illustrate the content of the article.
DiMA even paid for the article, a fact that was acknowledged at the bottom of the article but still, in my opinion, constituting a repudiation of independent journalism.
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While I’m on about The Hub, they posted a terrific podcast in their Full Press series hosted by Harrison Lowman and starring independent journalists Tara Henley and Peter Menzies. The topic was the notorious “shit show” of Rebel News turning the election debate press conferences on their end on consecutive nights.
It got going on the first night when a Rebel News reporter chose to ask the only non-Christian leader why he wasn’t speaking out against “ongoing attacks against Christians” and Church burnings, a provocatively staged but nonetheless legitimate question.
But the second night was when it all went to hell and the press conference became so unruly that the election commission cancelled it.
The Full Press podcast has some very intelligent commentary on the whole mess, very relevant to the Internet-induced era of wide open journalism.
***
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Of all the silver linings in Donald’s Trump’s aggression against Canada, I’ve been gratified to discover the renewed popular passion for Canadian culture.
The pinning-jelly-against-the-wall quest for a distillation of Canada’s national essence always interests me: I’ve pondered it myself in a previous post and celebrated the thoughts of others on the subject.
Unfortunately, what Marche offered us last week was a fact-free rant against the CBC.
His starting point is a much celebrated allegation: that Justin Trudeau is a proud “post-nationalist” who does not value Canada’s rich history because it is marred by the dispossession of Indigenous peoples and wrongs committed against minorities. Says Marche, our “cultural industries” eagerly signed on to Trudeau’s project of denigrating “so-called Canada” and “the self-critique quickly narrowed into a negligible, impotent stream of identity politics to the exclusion of virtually any other perspective.”
Having named all “cultural industries” in the indictment (including his own, the book publishing industry), Marche’s chief culprit is the CBC. Just to give you a flavour:
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.
There are no facts or examples provided for this grave condemnation of the public broadcaster as “a big national scold” that “sneers” at “patriots.”
I watch, listen and read the CBC every day: I’ve never witnessed scolding, sneering or anything of the kind. What’s the CBC guilty of? Broadcasting North of North? Or Sort Of?
Once rolling, Marche doesn’t stop:
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.
A small point, Marche’s link is to a podcast that doesn’t verify his statement: former CEO Catherine Tait declined Paul Wells’ invitation to identify “the most interesting conservative commentators on CBC,” she didn’t say she didn’t know any.
A bigger point is whether the CBC invites conservative commentators onto its shows. On that point, I seem to recall Andrew (“defund the CBC”) Coyne making some rather good conservative arguments on CBC’s flagship At Issue panel for the last decade or so. From my own observation, the CBC regularly seeks out conservative voices on its television news panels, although I suspect it’s difficult when there appears to be a Conservative boycott on the public broadcaster.
Marche’s zippy one-liners continue: the CBC engages in a “ritualized fetish for self-purification”; “its politics seems to derive from the sociology department at York University,” and “the CBC is a force of [information] pollution, they are an active vector of polarization.”
Anyway, you get the gist. By the end of the tirade, Marche tables an unobjectionable list of principles underlying a strong Canadian cultural nationalism. Count me in.
But in the end, Mr.Marche is not a satisfied CBC customer and I am. What about everyone else?
Here’s some feedback from the Reuters-Oxford study of the Canadian news market, the first graph covering radio and television and the second chart covering online news:
These aren’t the numbers you hear about when critics are taking a run at the CBC.
When they do, one of those cherry-picked numbers is the “CBC’s two per cent market share.”
If you look it up, that’s a reference to the CBC National News channel’s share of the cable audience. It may surprise you, but two per cent for a single channel in the 500-cable channel universe isn’t bad. CBCNN’s cost is covered by cable subscriptions and advertising, basically Pierre Poilievre’s formula for a defunded CBC.
The other sore thumb is the CBC’s five per cent share of prime-time evening television ratings. It’s competitors CTV and Global no longer disclose their ratings, but they are believed to be higher. That’s not surprising: the evening prime time is when CTV and Global carry popular US programming, while CBC does not.
Here’s a chart from CRTC data (unfortunately a year behind) you might find interesting.
Since 2015 (Table 30), the CBC has slipped in the relevant television ratings (network stations) against the private broadcasters.
Since 2009 (Table 32), the CBC’s production spending on Canadian content slipped a lot, while the CanCon spending of the private networks and specialty channels climbed. The explanation is that the CBC’s Parliamentary funding is stagnant and, in response to new viewing habits, it has shifted its budget from television to online.
This is neither an apology for those television ratings nor a scolding for those that ignore the CBC’s strong ratings on radio and online.
“Not bad” or “good enough” is not the bar, not for the public broadcaster. The CBC should be appreciated and reasonably well loved across the country and if it’s perceived as projecting itself as too urban, too central Canadian, or too progressive that’s a problem it needs to address like it’s life depends upon it.
Which it probably does.
***
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Today the Conservatives became the last political party to publish their “full platform,” which in 2025 seems to be a euphemism for “not nearly as full as before and very late.”
The 30-page Conservative document is down from 160 pages in the 2021 edition. The Liberals have chopped their 2021 page length from 86 pages to 55. That means less real estate for each policy section, including culture, arts and media.
Perhaps because of brevity, the Conservative document is a challenge to decode.
Of course, the Tories say upfront they would defund English-language CBC and permit it to carry on as a “non-profit supported by listeners, donations, sponsorships, ad revenue and licensing revenue.” They expressly exempt Radio-Canada from defunding and in fact promise “to maintain all funding in support of Quebec and Francophone culture.”
The Conservatives would also “repeal Liberal censorship laws.” Since there are none, we’ll just assume that’s a reference to the entirety of the Online Streaming Act which Pierre Poilievre has long promised to reverse.
The Conservatives would “restore Canadians news on Meta and other platforms.” That either means repealing the Online News Act and returning $100 million to Google, or simply granting Meta an exemption from the Act so that it will agree to end its Facebook and Instagram bans against most Canadian news outlets. The CPC reference to “other platforms” is unclear, as there are no other Big Tech companies banning Canadian news.
The Conservatives say nothing about undoing the Liberals’ federal “QCJO” subsidies for journalism salaries at private Canadian print news outlets, but it’s doubtful they’ve had a change of heart about abolishing the $65 million annual program.
Nevertheless the CPC platform proposes to double government full funding of journalist salaries in the Local Journalism Initiative federal program, from $20 million to $45 million annually. A further “$25 million in support of Indigenous language media” is promised, although there are no details beyond that.
The Conservatives also promise to “fund the first made-in-Canada documentaries about Canadians’ contributions to winning the World Wars so future Canadians do not forget the courage and sacrifice of those generations and their stories live on.”
Not to quibble, such state-commissioned documentaries would notbe “the first.” The phrasing of the promise raises the question of whether the federal cabinet would be directing one of the CRTC, the National Film Board, the Canada Media Fund, or private broadcasters to make patriotic content. That might be a first.
The Liberals have a light cultural platform when compared to previous election platforms. They restate Mark Carney’s recent campaign promise to increase CBC funding by 11% and commit to long-term stability in funding.
Other than that the Liberals promise to “increase funding to agencies such as the Canada Council for the Arts, Telefilm, the Canada Media Fund, and the National Film Board.” For those of you that don’t track these things, in practice “increasing” funding often turns out to be adjusting budgets to keep up with inflation.
What’s noticeably absent in the Liberal platform is the government’s Online Safety Act, Bill C-63, which died on the order table in February. Perhaps it fell to the editor’s red pen.
The NDP did not publish a single platform document but provided a series of issue-oriented documents, none of which dealt with the culture, media or the arts; traditional NDP policies.
The Greens and the Bloc Québécois published lengthy documents with detailed cultural proposals that I won’t attempt to summarize.
The Bloc is the only party to propose extending tax rules that provide corporate tax relief to Canadian businesses that advertise in legacy Canadian media to the placement of ads online.
Here are the party platforms (except for the NDP):
The gladiator stands staggered on the sandy floor of the Colosseum, waiting for the thumbs up or down. On federal election day, April 28, the CBC will discover its fate: live or die.
The Mark Carney Liberals have promised to defend the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and even increase its funding.
On the other hand, Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre “can’t wait” to keep his promise to defund all English-language services of the public broadcaster as no longer needed. “The CBC provides opinions and coverage that are widely available in a competitive media marketplace,” states the CPC with confidence….
The future of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation hangs in the balance, waiting for the verdict of thumbs up or down. Live. Or die.
We know where the two major political parties stand on this.
If Pierre Poilievre wins a majority in the April 28th federal election he will move quickly to “defund” English-language CBC services. An omnibus bill will remove legal impediments in the Broadcasting Act and his budget will eliminate up to $1 billion in federal spending. If he has that Parliamentary majority don’t be surprised if he also breaks his campaign promise and slashes the Radio-Canada budget, to fend off a caucus revolt over sparing Québec.
Meanwhile the Carney Liberals will be for “saving” a “new” CBC. Voters in Québec expect no less. And in English Canada there are NDP supporters to be poached.
We’ll see if it gets any more complicated than that, but I doubt it. “Defund” or “save.” That’s the choice.
Naive souls like myself would have preferred to have framed this choice within a thorough public debate, even a royal commission, to investigate what it means to defund, save or reinvent the CBC.
There’s a public appetite for this thoughtfulness. It’s worth remembering that an October 2024 poll put the hard core “defund” forces at only 11% of Canadians. An earlier poll found that 76% of Canadians want to keep the CBC but half of that support wants to see “changes.” Heavens knows what “changes” means. That’s where a more considered public policy debate might have helped.
The stale polls on public satisfaction with the CBC may no longer matter. Donald Trump moves the opinions of Canadian voters in a tweet. Fighting off his annexation plan without a CBC: what a scenario that is.
My hat is off to the grass roots campaigns to save the CBC; not just the Friends of Canadian Media‘s cheeky campaign to “FU__ the CBC,” but also the chat groups popping up on Facebook and Reddit.
But now having the benefit of the views of others, I have something to say that’s a little different.
The Senator (“don’t call me Senator,” he likes to say) ticks a lot of boxes for me. He’s a Canadian cultural sovereigntist. He asks more questions than he makes speeches. He’s unfailingly civil. Like most of the Independent Caucus senators appointed by Justin Trudeau, he carries on Senate business in a collegial and non-partisan manner despite his Liberal connections.
Having said that, I don’t agree with everything he recommends. But he got the big stuff right.
***
Cardozo’s big idea is this: cultural sovereignty is essential to Canada. And the CBC is at the heart of a news and media ecosystem that delivers this sovereignty to Canadians. The CBC employs a third of the country’s journalists and is by far the biggest spender on televised Canadian dramas and comedies set in locales across the country.
To agree with Cardozo’s view, you have to let go of the notion that a free market in news and cultural content — a free North American market– is sufficient to nourish and defend our cultural independence. It also means giving up on the argument that the existence of the CBC is only justified where there is a demonstrated “market failure” of Canadian media, like our far north. That’s a journey into the black hole of “which market?” and “how much failure?” from which I suggest no light will escape.
Cultural minorities in Canada have always understood in the pits of their stomachs what cultural sovereignty means to them. It means survival. It means to breathe. Francophones in Québec and the rest of Canada get it. Indigenous peoples get it. Anglophones in Québec, too.
Us garden variety English-Canadians, not so much. American culture is everywhere and tasty too. Until recently, the Americans kept their crazy politics on the other side of the border, so why worry? Vancouver’s sassy libertarian YouTuber J.J.McCullough liked to say we are cultural “North Americans” and “I’m fine with that.” It’s not an uncommon opinion.
Then Donald Trump announced his plans to reduce our economy to rubble and annex us. Or just turn us (and Greenland) into a vassal state.
The crazy politics have now swept across the border. As Senator Cardozo says in his report, the times demand an independent Canadian media ecosystem. It’s unlikely any Canadian disagrees. The CBC is the key institution in that ecosystem, he says, and the polls suggest Canadians agree with that too.
Cardozo recalls that the 1928 report of the Aird royal commission proposed a cross-country network of publicly owned Canadian radio stations —later christened the CBC— as essential to defending our popular culture and democratic spaces from being dominated by American voices. If anything, the situation a century later is far more urgent.
***
Here’s the Cardozo plan.
First, forget more money for the CBC, at least for now in this moment of national crisis. That means putting off the widely applauded proposal that the CBC relinquish it’s $270 million cut of the advertising market, which would be a 14% reduction of its finances when we need the CBC the most.
I admire the Senator’s pragmatism but would prefer to rephrase his idea as “let’s get the CBC house in order before we ask Canadian taxpayers for more money.”
Second, make a big bet on local news. No more thoughts and prayers about the growing pockets of news poverty and news deserts in rural and small town Canada, but action lead by the public broadcaster shifting resources away from national news coverage and “radically reducing the budget of national headquarters (Toronto, Montréal and Ottawa).”
In advocating for local programming, Cardozo has picked up on the points made in this country by the Michener Foundation and the Friends of Canadian Media and in the US by Rebuild Local News. Our democracy is fraying because of political polarization fuelled by national politics, while Canadians’ less polarized engagement with local democracy and community events is threatened by the financial precarity of local news outlets.
Public opinion polls repeatedly say that Canadians “trust” local news above all media sources. There’s a craving there to be satisfied.
Cardozo’s proposal for the CBC to double down on local news is compelling. But there are many devils in the details. One is whether this is a good time to cannibalize the CBC national news budget at a time of national emergency. Another is how to divert the CBC’s journalism resources into local markets without elbowing private media outlets in the face. That might have been what the CBC just did by expanding its local coverage into local markets with its $7 million in “Google money.”
The senator’s report does have a practical idea that could be put to good use: “sharing content.”
There have long been proposals for the CBC to share its editorial content with private news outlets, waiving copyright. That could go much deeper with a bigger CBC commitment to joint investigations with private news outlets in local markets. Or the CBC could take a page out of the BBC’s book: the 165-journalist Local Democracy Reporting Service that assigns BBC-paid journalists to work for local news outlets.
Next, the third Cardozo idea is really several issues rolled into one: how to drain the political venom about the CBC out of the public sphere. That means confronting issues of public trust, alleged bias, and accountability.
It must be said first that the griping about “CBC bias” doesn’t measure up to the facts.
Repeat after me: CBC News is the country’s most trusted news source. The slightly overweight negative trust ratings suggest the “defunder” hostility is taken into account.
from Pollara Poll, July 2024
But citing this impressive verdict on the CBC’s trustworthiness is not a get-out-of-jail-free card for its journalism. When you report in the opinion minefields of Gaza, pipelines, and (insert controversial issue here), mistakes are going to loom large. Doing better, more disciplined news reporting is an ongoing project for any news organization. Being publicly owned, the CBC has a higher bar to meet.
Cardozo has some good suggestions.
He’d like the CBC to regularly commission and publish external audits of its news coverage. It won’t convince the CBC haters, but it’s useful if it’s something that CBC managers would go to bed worrying about. I imagine they already do. But Cardozo would make this an important tool in public accountability and transparency.
He’d also like to see more debating of public issues on CBC platforms to foster a stronger Canadian culture of intellectual curiosity and tolerance of different opinions. Amen to that.
Another of his proposals is to eliminate the CBC’s in-house editorial Ombud as the arbiter of public complaints, rerouting critics to the industry-administered Canadian Broadcast Standards Council instead.
I’m not thrilled by this idea. There’s too big a volume of complaints to dump them on someone else’s desk. The Ombud reports are quite fair, if you read them. And you can always appeal to the CRTC. Cardozo acknowledges this an optics issue.
But the elephant in the room is that too many Canadians view the CBC as —how shall we say—- insufficiently representative of what makes them feel Canadian.
Too urban. Too central Canadian. Too insulated from those that pay the tax bill.
You can dismiss these dyspeptic public attitudes if you want. After all, the polling supports a far higher degree of satisfaction than dissatisfaction. For sure, some of CBC hating is a culture war cynically fomented by political foes who want to diminish mainstream media, the better to fill that void with right-wing opinion.
But we have a historic opportunity to make popular satisfaction with the CBC deeper and wider if we face the dyspepsia head on.
Cardozo’s big idea (and others including the government’s expert committee have proposed it too) is to implement a version of the British practice of a social contract between the public broadcaster and the people’s elected representatives.
That negotiated BBC charter secures multi-year funding for an eleven-year term, freed from the gyrations of annual government budgets, in return for specific performance expectations. At the expiry of the charter term, it’s judgment day for the public broadcaster.
A CBC charter would be about more than long-term planning and financial stability. It could be a new and different way to make the CBC accountable to the people and for it to feel real in doing so.
Contrast the charter idea to the accountability we have today. Currently the Broadcasting Act provides apple-pie policy objectives for the CBC, but few specifics. The Prime Minister handpicks the President of the corporation to manage the place for five years. The CRTC weighs in with five-year licensing conditions for the CBC to earmark spending for different programming genres. The last time around the CRTC botched it and was directed by cabinet to try again.
This type of governance of the CBC might hit the right balance of accountability versus keeping the ruling party’s mitts off of programming decisions and the day-to-day management of the corporation. But it does nothing to make Canadians feel that it’s “our” CBC.
A CBC charter would be better. Going in that new direction still retains a threat to the CBC’s independence from government: which political party will be in power when the charter expires and is up for renewal? The BBC just dodged that bullet when an election expelled “defunder” Conservatives and welcomed a Labour government. But Cardozo would argue it’s still better than our current approach. It is.
MediaPolicy has two other ideas to institutionalize more public confidence in the CBC.
First, move CBC headquarters from Toronto to Winnipeg. Sounds crazy, I know, but hear me out.
Much of the disaffection with the CBC is articulated as the public broadcaster being a central Canadian hyper-urban “woke” institution. Fairly or not.
So “leafy downtown Toronto”.” So “île des génies.”
The gloss on that critique is that the CBC’s programming content gets torqued towards audiences and advertising dollars in the Toronto and Montréal television markets.
And one can only add this respectfully: a staff of journalists and content creators living in big cities are naturally inclined to be culturally simpatico with the urban neighbourhoods where they reside. That’s a problem for a national institution.
Moving headquarters and staff anywhere is a big, hugely expensive deal. It’s a lot to ask in the name of moving the needle on staff culture and assuaging hinterland hostility to the Toronto and Montréal metropoli. And if it’s done, it should be gradually and without hemorrhaging experience and talent.
The second MediaPolicy idea is even more out of the box, but bear with me.
We should legislate a constituent assembly of randomly chosen CBC listeners, readers and viewers ——200 from one end of the country to the other—- to convene every two years and publish its assessment of the CBC’s performance and direction. This would be especially helpful in shining a light on what Cardozo describes as the CBC’s “blind spots.”
In the corporate world, they call these shareholder meetings. In the public world, they call them town halls. A constituent assembly would give CBC managers and elected politicians better feedback than high-level polling results. It would offer cogent (or not) thoughts about the CBC from Main Street Canada.
***
The idea of a robust CBC anchoring an independent (of the US) Canadian media is of the moment. “To let it go,” says Cardozo of defunding, “would allow for the complete domination by America of our communications system.”
It’s commonplace to observe that American-owned social media platforms are the perfect conduit for misinformation to flood into Canada in a prolonged Trump campaign to destabilize and annex us. It’s also hard to ignore that the Republican blueprint to move the US much further to the right, the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025,advocates the elimination of government funding to public broadcasting on the explicit basis that it’s “left-wing.”
But there are still those that would argue that a strong Canadian media can and should do without the CBC except in localities where audiences are so sparse that the private news enterprises can’t succeed.
That’s tied in to yet a longer discussion of the financial viability of Canadian news reporting (as opposed to news opinionating) and whether to continue federal subsidies to news journalism.
The same policy conundrum applies to non-news programming. With Canadian private broadcasters so pinched that they are demanding relief from CRTC mandates to produce local news and Canadian entertainment content, how big a cultural hole might there be to fill if the CBC isn’t there to do it?
***
If the CBC survives and isn’t defunded by the next government, there’s an opportunity to make profound changes, as outlined in this post.
But even without big changes, the new President of the CBC Marie-Philippe Bouchard has an inbox full of strategic and programming decisions to make right away.
Forty million Canadians have forty million opinions on how to do that, some of them based on nothing more than our idiosyncratic cultural tastes and technological preferences.
Bouchard must manage unreasonable and unmeetable expectations with tough management decisions on complex questions.
Should the CBC stay on every major media platform, treating each as equally important? Or should it make bigger bets on fewer digital channels?
Would we be better off with one CBC Radio network instead of two, despite the strong ratings?
Should the CBC invest more of its television drama budget in high-budget iconic Canadian shows or keep faith with charming serials in authentic local settings?
Should the CBC find its way back into sports, avoiding the unaffordable price tags of big league programming rights?
If the CBC puts more into local news, what programming is going to get less?
These are management decisions that almost none of the forty million have an educated opinion, informed by a detailed knowledge of audience data and budget dollars.
As Richard Stursberg signed off on his advice to the new president Bouchard, “good luck.”
***
That’s the MediaPolicy view.
Let me close by recalling that one of the experts MediaPolicy interviewed in December, Peter Menzies, may have nailed it when he said the CBC’s “biggest problem is not that – at least for the English part – so many Conservatives want to kill it, it’s that a large number of people just don’t care if it lives or dies.”
I doubt that’s true any more, thanks to Donald Trump’s plan for Canada. But if the next election keeps the CBC alive, instead of killing it, a rebirth of the public broadcaster is an historic opportunity not to be squandered.
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Last week MediaPolicy published a new interview with Globe and Mail culture columnist and reviewer Kate Taylor.
The veteran reporter has lead a double life as a Canadian arts journalist and novelist, which arguably makes her especially qualified to comment on Canadian content.
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Culture & Identity minister Steven Guilbeault – Photo credit Canadian Press
We have a new Liberal Minister of Heritage (rebranded “Culture and Identity”) and it’s a familiar face: Steven Guilbeault who served in the role from 2019 to 2021.
During that first tour of duty he tabled the first version of the Online Streaming Act, Bill C-10.
He also instigated two big public consultations. The first was on the regulation of online harms which invited comment on an edgy, German-inspired model of content take-downs and appeals (later junked and reprised in Bill C-63 with platform self regulation of “awful but lawful” posts on social media and steeper penalties for criminal hate posts). The second initiative, completed under his successor Pablo Rodriguez, was what became the Online News Act, Bill C-18.
News of Guilbeault’s appointment provoked the twitter ire of his nemesis, law professor Michael Geist. One of the criticisms was that Guilbeault “delivered the original [Online Streaming Act] with disastrous, inaccurate communications.”
That’s harsh, if partly true. In May 2021 Guilbeault did mangle two English-language national interviews three days apart on CBC and CTV, the latter an old-school grilling from Evan Solomon who recently got the nod as a star candidate for the Carney Liberals.
But people forget that Guilbeault followed up those interviews one week later with a very strong performance at the Heritage Committee. In English and French.
Whatever the case, it’s not clear if Guilbeault is just keeping the chair warm in Culture and Identity because the uber-competent Pascale St-Onge is retiring from politics and perhaps if the Liberals are re-elected we’ll see yet another MP from the island of Montréal in the role (following Melanie Joly, Rodriguez, Guilbeault, Rodriguez, St.-Onge and Guilbeault).
But the Culture and Identity file has only one priority in the coming session of Parliament: the CBC. More precisely, the English-language CBC. That will take a Minister with smarts but mostly great instincts. It will take a Minister from the rest of Canada.
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51st state? Here’s two thumbs up for two Canadians, journalists Scott Roxborough and Etan Vlessing of the Hollywood Reporter. They’ve put together a new list of the greatest 51 Canadian flicks of all time. Check your seen-it score, make your watch list.
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The magic of Donald Trump is that almost anyone invited to his reality show in the Oval Office is automatically his foil and a civilized person: Trudeau, Macron, Zelensky, Starmer and maybe soon Mark Carney, all avatars of the old international rules-based order. Somewhere, somebody is making book on Trump’s soon-to-be-released diss for Canada’s 24th Prime Minister.
Yes, the civility of the old order is long gone. MAGA’s toxic masculinity is about to have a very long run. You avoided these guys in high school, but now they are in your face.
The credo was so dominant (and the US market so inviting) that in 1988 Canada laid all bets on an open trading relationship and an integrated continental economy: something Canadian governments had pursued on and off since Confederation in 1867.
So having played by America’s rules, it’s galling that Trump now wants to use tariff warfare to devastate our economy and take our jobs. Deep down we always knew the US colossus had a taste for conquest. We just didn’t think it would be us.
It’s especially grating when Trump lies to the American public, makes up fake numbers about trade deficits, counts goods but not services, and then insists that deficits are inherently unfair (except where America is in surplus).
Last weekend I posted a video of former Unifor economist Jim Stanford providing context to the US-Canada trading numbers. Here’s the detailed text version.
Stanford makes a number of important observations about size of the cross border trade deficit in goods and services and, as any first-year university student would, reminds us that a trade deficit is not a thermometer of economic health, wealth, or fair play.
The US has run a global trade deficit for fifty years in a row. The gap is now approaching one trillion dollars annually. But as a percentage of American GDP, the US deficit is in modest decline to about three per cent of its economy.
What’s not often cited is the fact that the US is a global juggernaut and net winner in services —digital products, e-commerce, tourism, transportation, financial services and so on—all of which tamps down that trade deficit generated in industries that sell “goods.”
Canada is the US’s biggest export market yet our trade of goods and services is the closest to balanced of any major US trade partner.
The US sells 92 cents of goods and services to Canada for every dollar of goods and services we sell to them.
That trade “imbalance” puts us way ahead of the US benchmark of selling less than 80 cents to the dollar with its major trading partners, with nine of those other trading partners more “out of balance” than Canada.
And the south flowing of trade includes duty-free Canadian oil, gas, electricity and coal. Those vital energy products account for the majority share of the US deficit in goods. It may be that Trump wants to wean the US off of Canadian energy (although it will take years to do so) as if we were the unreliable ally.
In fact most Canadian exports to the US are raw materials and inputs to American products. That’s good for American consumers and good for American exports of finished products (including back to Canada, affirming the half-truth that Canada exports raw materials in exchange for finished products).
But commerce in goods is only half of the trade picture. In services alone, the US has a strong surplus with Canada. For decades, Hollywood boasted of the surplus-building role it plays in exporting cultural services (television shows and movies) to Canada and the world. Its Californian cousins in Big Tech are now doing the same thing in digital services.
In addition to counting services whenever measuring trade, says Stanford, the cross-border repatriation of profits and investment capital made by Canadian and American companies in each other’s markets results in an unofficial trade surplus for the US.
Another unofficial trade number that doesn’t show up in conventional statistics, says Stanford, is that Canada (and the rest of the world) buys more US government bonds than the US buys from Ottawa.
The US is mired in massive government debt but bondholders in Canada and abroad are delighted to snap up its treasury notes. That drives up the US dollar and makes US exports more costly than they might otherwise be.
Remember that when you buy Florida orange juice.
Stanford says that most economists agree that its hard to pin down the value of trade in services —which affects the calculation of trade balance— because of how easily masked that value may be:
One challenge in understanding the impact of services trade is the incomplete and approximate nature of statistics on services trade. It is harder to account for cross-border transaction in services (much of which occurs digitally) than to measure cross-border flows of physical merchandise (which is regulated and logged at border crossings).
Another factor is the ambiguity of intra-corporate accounting for transactions between non-arms-length subsidiaries of international corporations; intra-firm accounting for items like administration costs, intellectual property charges, and profits can be easily manipulated, often motivated by efforts to reduce corporate tax liabilities (by artificially shifting bottom-line profits to subsidiaries located in lower-tax jurisdictions).
Officially, the US export of services to Canada is significant and in surplus to the tune of $32 billion. In fact that US surplus with Canada ——what US Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick would label as “trade dumping” were it the other way around—— is the US’s second biggest service surplus with any of its trading nations.
Oh, and the largest US service surplus is with….hold your breath now….Ireland.
The holding companies technically own the intellectual property for Big Tech conglomerates that pay themselves for their own IP assets to reduce taxes on revenue earned all over the world.
That’s my parsed version of what Stanford has to say.
His prescription will sound similar to things you have already heard from others:
[We] need to include aggressive efforts to expand trade links with other countries; equally aggressive efforts to reorient Canadian production around domestic (rather than export) markets; emergency fiscal measures to support domestic spending power and household financial stability in the wake of industrial disruption and unemployment (potentially funded in part with revenues from export taxes and/or tariffs imposed by Canada in the event of a trade war); and a national strategy to build alternative domestically-focused industries (including affordable housing, sustainable energy, and human and caring services) to fill the void left by a downturn in export industries.
This is a daunting scenario, but not impossible.
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Over the past four years of posts to MediaPolicy.ca I have written about US-Canada trade relationship in cultural products.
The narrative is always a story of Canadian legislative initiatives and the corresponding US trade threats.
There are three books that are helpful to read if you are interested.
In 2004 Peter Grant and Chris Wood published “Blockbusters and Trade Wars: Popular Culture in a Globalized World.” It’s a superb explainer but begs to be updated. The analysis in Part One (the economics of the global cultural economy) and Part Three (US trade power) still rings true.
In 2019 Richard Stursberg published “The Tangled Garden: A Canadian Cultural Manifesto in the Digital Age.” The third chapter on “The Mulroney Years” is a good read because Stursberg was a senior civil servant and insider in the midst of the US-Canada free trade deal that set the rules in cultural trade for the next generation.
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