Actually, if you just like lively take-no-prisoners journalism, Whyte's piece has that too.
Here he is quoting Dan Wells, proprietor of Biblioasis Bookstore and publisher of Biblioasis Books, on the consequences of the federal government's allowing free trade in publishing houses (commitments notwithstanding):
"It would be easier for me, as a bookseller,” he said, “to build a section of Australian or East Indian history from the available titles of the multinationals than it is for me to build a Canadian history section. There are more new books available to me on the US Civil War or American neocon political posturing than Canadian history. And it’s not just that our market is flooded with American and British books, which is bad enough. It’s that their direct access to the Canadian market undermines the ability of Canadian publishers to increase their own revenues which they can then, in turn, invest in the publication and promotion of more and better Canadian books
You want SHuSh #168, entitled "It started out as polite talk..."
Yes, it's about the webinar I was talking about the other week. Told you you should join in.
Update, October 16: SHuSH #169 includes a reader's comment on the column discussed above. It has some very odd opinions to offer. First, it suggests that novelists reflect other Canadians in having no interest in Canadian stories because they are so boring. (Assignment: make a quick list of, say, 100 Canadian novels set in the Canadian past.) Then it says "Fiction is a buttress of non-fiction, imagining the past into a palpable reality." Well, I guess you can imagine a reality, but you know, imagining something does not make it real. It is still just an imagined reality. Fiction is imagined reality, nonfiction is a search for what is true about reality (past or present).
This idea that fiction makes things real, rather than imagining them so they seem real, is a powerful one in some literary circles. We need to call it what it is: fiction bigotry
