As former CBC president Al Johnson put it, we are “absorbing American interpretation of events … soaking up the value system of the U.S.,” which results in “coming to expect Canadian traditions and institutions to look and behave as if they were American traditions and institutions.” There is no better example of this than the widespread adoption here of American-style Black Friday sales promotions related to their Thanksgiving celebration in late November.
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.
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.
Canada still has strong bulwarks protecting its cultural sovereignty beyond the increasingly irrelevant and unwatched CBC. Quebec is partly insulated by the French language. But English Canada repeatedly demonstrates its continuing appreciation of our uniqueness whenever it can flaunt its sense of moral superiority to the U.S., as in recent widespread support for keeping the American border closed because of our slightly better health outcomes during the pandemic.
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