Submarines all the way down: Carney's cultural policy cuts UPDATED

So this happened:  

In February Colin Coates, professor of history, wrote in his role as president of the Canadian Historical Association to Marc Miller, Minister of Canadian Heritage, expressing the CHA's concern over the way the budgetary choices made by the Carney government have led to serious closures, service reductions, and staff reductions at almost every federal agency charged with creating, preserving, and distributing historical and cultural knowledge, and particularly Library and Archives Canada, the Canadian Museum of History and the Canadian War Museum, Parks Canada, and Statistics Canada. As he says:

I am sure that you are aware of the key roles these agencies play in encouraging interest in Canadian history. At this particular juncture in the history of our country, active engagement with the complicated Canadian past is more necessary than ever. Canadians need to understand, for example, the features of our past that distinguish us from our neighbours to the south and that have led us to adopt different paths to our concepts of citizenship, democracy, and civic engagement. 

On March 18  (lightspeed by Government of Canada standards) the minister replied, saying (I paraphrase): hey, we only make the budget, these agencies make their own choices, why complain to me?

We have had a deluge of propaganda about how "wokeness" is somehow killing Canadian history.  Now we can consider where the real problem begins.

This Carney government is beginning to shape up as the most philistine Canadian government in a long time. I did not love the Harper government's historical priorities (war, hockey and the crown, mostly) but at least they had some history they valued. This government: seems like it's just submarines all the way down.

See also this

Global News has put up two charts of how much the Carney government plans to cut spending or increase spending in each department.  This below is the hit list. Take a deep breath. And Canadian Heritage is not even one of the big losers, despite the damage summarized above.

Random cultural history notes.

I 

I ought to be a sucker for a general interest magazine entirely focused on Canadian issues, personalities, culture, and politics. But in the past, I never really managed to get interested in The Walrus, even when I subscribed. If I looked at an issue, the impression I got was often a publication most interested in content it could get cheaply  -- often long windy opinion pieces by lazy writers based on minimal amounts of real journalism (i,e., research, interviewing, digging).  

Lately, I'm interested.  Here's a reason why:  Eight Experts on What You Are Not Being Told About the Iran War. Quick, timely, well-informed, Canadian perspectives, assembled very quickly by the Walrus staff and delivered digitally within days of the war's start. As analysis, it's a hell of a lot better than what you would find trudging through the New York Times. And with Canadian perspective.

I do subscribe to The Walrus again, but my attention was drawn to this particular item by Wesley Wark's Substack, another very well informed, very timely, and very Canadian perspective on security matters.  

II

It was cheering to see news stories of many thousands of Nova Scotians rallying in Halifax to protest the deep cuts in cultural funding the provincial government led by Tim Houston is pushing through.

Have we got the dumbest crew of provincial governments in history right now?  B.C. where they are reneging of adhering to the United Nations Declarations on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (and ending the biannual time change), to Alberta ('nuff said), to Ontario (ditto) and on to Nova Scotia, where cutting one's way to prosperity seems always to be in fashion.  And let's not even talk about the collapsing health care system, a provincial responsibility where premiers always blame Ottawa. Few of them seem to act as if provincial governments were actually important.  (Okay, is Manitoba something of an exception at the moment?)

The Nova Scotia protests actually concern big cuts in social service cuts, tourism, and other fields as well as to the cultural sector, But I was impressed to see the lead in building public opposition being taken by the cultural community, which is being hammered by the Houston cuts in a way that almost suggests some personal animus against the arts. 

We need something similar in Ottawa, perhaps, where the Carney government seems to believe kneecapping Canadian cultural programs and institutions is somehow going to defend us against the American onslaught against our nationality.    

Book Notes: Scott McIntyre and Erna Paris

I've been reading two recent books about the history of Canadian writing and publishing in the last half-century or so: Scott McIntyre's A Precarious Enterprise: Making a Life in Canadian Publishing and Erna Paris's Hunting History: A Writer's Odyssey (and with Richard Stursburg's Lament for a Literature: The Collapse of Canadian Publishing, previously noted here, in the background.)

Scott McIntyre had a remarkable career as a publisher, from holding a senior executive position at McClelland & Stewart at the age of 25, to building Douglas & McIntyre, one of Canada's best and biggest trade publisher, and having a lot of fun all the way through. Also he published one book by me and one by my father -- a good experience for each of us.

But looming over his story is 2012, when Douglas & McIntyre went into receivership -- a defining moment in the collapse of Canadian publishing in the "free trade era" when all the promises of cultural exemptions proved hollow. And when several writer friends of mine were left with royalties never to be received. Stursburg's book is the big picture; McIntyre's is the lived experience.

Erna Paris's memoir is not about a failing publisher. From a very early age, Erna Paris developed a profound involvement with justice, human rights, and how societies deal with the horrors of their past. She did it entirely as a journalist and a writer, always outside academia, but well supported by publishers. Her memoir does take readers into her life experience, but the book is structured by her books, one after another, to reveal her remarkable lifelong continuity of interests and concerns. 

As a Jew (from a relatively privileged beginning in Toronto), she began with painful questions of how to confront the Holocaust. After studying in France and marrying a Frenchman, she wrote Unhealed Wounds, using the trial of Klaus Barbie to interrogate how France denied and dealt with its collaborationist past.  

In The End of Days, she went back to how early modern Spain went from multi-cultural tolerance to the Inquisition and the expulsion of the Jews.  

She studied Israel and Palestine in The Garden and The Gun. Long before Gaza loomed over all, she concluded, "The policies of the State of Israel as they had evolved challenged my most deeply held convictions of ethics and justice."  

In Long Shadows, perhaps her best and most original work, she travelled the world to explore the much-contested rise of Truth and Reconciliation Commissions as a way for conflicted societies to confront their past.* (I'm proud to say I was part of the jury that awarded Long Shadows the Writers' Trust prize in nonfiction.) In The Sun Climbs Slow, she moved on the International Criminal Court and its possibilities for redress and judgement. 

I knew and admired Erna Paris, but before reading Hunting History, I really had not grasped the magnificent scope of her achievement. Nor had I had known how much of an international audience, and worldwide translations, and even political influence and respect she had earned over the years

So maybe she was sheltered somewhat from the travails of Canadian publishing.  But this memoir -- lovingly completed by her children and published after her death in 2022  -- is published (quite beautifully) by the ominously named At Bay Press, a small Winnipeg publishing house I had never heard of before, when it deserved to come out triumphally to national acclaim from a major Canadian house with the resources to give it the attention it deserves. Those days have ended too. 

Will Erna Paris be remembered in Canada as she deserves? We will need a Canadian literature and a Canadian culture to make it so. 

____

* Long Shadows was published in 2000. Erna Paris was already living with cancer as Canada's own Truth and Reconciliation Commission transformed how we discuss Indigenous and settler-colonial issues in Canada. Her brief closing remarks on that matter in Hunting History are sensitive to the topic, but not what she might have given us had she lived longer.     

Book Notes: Richard Stursberg, Lament for a Literature

Richard Stursberg’s Lament for a Literature The Collapse of Canadian Book Publishing hit me with a shock of recognition. I’m not in it, but it sounds like the story of my life and career.

When I left the historic sites service of Parks Canada in the mid-1970s, there were lots of books being published, lots of publishers, lots of independent newspapers, magazines, radio stations, bookstores, and libraries to welcome writers and promote their books. I figured Pierre Berton alone could not fill the demand he had created for Canadian historical nonfiction. Why shouldn’t I seize a share?

So I did. At the end of the 1970s I became a freelance writer about Canadian history. My first book  was published in 1982 with the contract for a second already signed, and I had no other career until I decided it was time to let others to take up the torch.  If people ask if I am a famous writer, I usually say “Well, I am if you have heard of me.” But books I wrote got published and noticed and promoted and sometimes awarded. And the books led to a host of ancillary work in historical journalism and broadcasting and to historical consulting projects large and small in forms I could never have predicted. It was a living.

Richard Stursberg’s slim hundred pages are an explanation of how that world came to an end. By the time I was ready to let other aspirants take over, that writing and publishing world had largely faded away. If I had potential heirs, their path were harder or at least very different than mine.  

And boy, does Richard Stursberg show why. In true Canadian spirit, he divides the rise and fall of Canadian writing and publishing into Canada’s five seasons:  Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter, and Even More Winter. 

Stursberg is not always persuasive as a cultural critic – he calls Marian Engel’s Bear “a book about bestiality,” cites Solomon Gursky Was Here as Mordechai Richler’s best novel, and thinks Canadian writers should be obliged to set all their stories in Canada. He seems to miss a lot of the sort-of-samizdat by which Canadian writers endure and distribute their works despite the collapse of all the big institutional supports. He even believes ‘wokeism’ and DEI have helped cause the downfall of Canadian nonfiction writing when in reality the reassessment of figures like John A Macdonald is our best hope, not just for reconciliation, but for a new and livelier writing of Canadian history.

But mostly Stursberg has found the causes of Canadian publishing's collapse – and lays them out with copious tables and charts.  

Canada fought hard to place a “cultural exemption” in the 1988 free trade agreement.  But -- surprise! -- it never took. As soon as it was signed, all the major Canadian publishers were turned into branch plant operations.  Soon Amazon and Kindle were given a free hand to undermine Canadian bookselling, tax free. The Carney government’s recent surrender on the Digital Services Tax and its cutbacks to federal cultural agencies suggests the tide has not turned. Significantly, Stursberg notes that where film and broadcasting are governed by an independent commission required to publicize its decisions, which can be litigated, decisions to support or undermine Canadian publishing have always been made by secretive bureaucracies.

As he writes, “For over fifty years, the government has failed to abide by its signature and most basic policy: ensuring that the Canadian book business, both publishing and retail , is owned and controlled by Canadians." 

If Richard Stursberg’s little book can help stem the ongoing assault on Canadian writing and publishing, he will have done the country a service. Can a book still make a difference in Canada?

History of the Giller: money and politics in arts, culture, and sport.

I have to agree with a lot of the criticism online after the Giller Prize told Ottawa it might have to shut down if federal subsidy for the big fiction prize is not forthcoming.

If a private nonprofit foundation wants to give a literary prize, no one will stop them, say the critics I was reading. But there is no reason for taxpayers' money to take over when the foundation's aspirations start to exceed its budget. The withdrawal of Scotiabank funding after protests of the bank's alleged support for Israel is no doubt a factor in the Prize's financial woes. But if the feds want to support arts and culture, they can give more to the Canada Council and stop talking about more cuts to the CBC. 

It is not only literary nonprofits that go down the road of assuming the feds should pay for everything, of course. Look at the provinces on medicare and housing!  

Sticking to the arts/culture area: the history NGO Historica launched with a lot of billionaire money, but over the years it has gone to Ottawa for a lot of funding. It sometimes looked from here as if its choices seemed to reflect the historical preferences of the party in power at the time. (Lots of hockey and military Heritage Minutes in the Harper years, lots of diversity achievement Minutes in Liberal times?)  The situation may be a little different, however: Historica does things the feds would not do themselves, so government contracting some work to the NGO makes (some) sense, whereas the Canada Council is designed to support the arts, with the Giller as to some degree a competitor.

A different angle on politics and culture: an anti-Israel protester tried to run in front of the sprinters charging to the finish line at yesterday's Tour de France (and failed to cause a possibly fatal crash, fortunately).  The protest was demanding a boycott of the team Israel-Premier Tech, which this year is led by Canadian cyclist Michael Woods.

There is a lot of sports washing in Grand Tour cycling:  one leading team is called UAE  and another Bahrain Victorious, both subsidized by the governments of those states. There used to be an Astana team, linked very closely to the Kazakhstan government.  Israel Premier Tech is sponsored by a wealthy Israeli private citizen and his partner, a Canadian, not by the Israeli government, apparently.

The solution should be a rejection of sportswashing by the cycling authorities:  no more state-sponsored teams.  (There are no Arabic riders on the Arabian teams, and no Jewish riders on IPT at the moment, I believe.) But that's never going to happen.  Politicize your sport and political activists will respond, I guess.  

Canadian History in trade market publishing: still not dead yet but...

I've been thinking it has been another pretty slow year for trade-market Canadian history. Then I started making a list, and it's longer than I thought, even though I mostly limited myself to books that seemed to get some kind of national attention and/or distribution.

Robert Amos, E.J. Hughes: Canadian War Artist.  West-coast artist Hughes is a longtime favourite of mine. This is the third of a remarkable three-part tribute to and study of his work.

Ted Barris, The Battle of The Atlantic: Gauntlet to Victory. One of Barris's ongoing series of military histories often based on his oral history interviewing.

Mark Bourrie, Big Men Fear Me.  Bourrie shows again that you (or at least he) can still produce buzzy books on obscure Canadians. Had you heard of George McCullagh before?

Tim Cook, Lifesavers and Bodysnatchers: Medical Care and the Struggle for Survival in the Great War.  Medicine and war.

Jon Dellandrea, The Great Canadian Art Fraud Case. I just seemed to keep hearing about this book, so it must be clicking.

Ken Dryden, The Series. Maybe the best, at least the most noticeable, of the 1972 hockey Summit Series retrospectives.  But Gary Smith's Ice War Diplomat, by the foreign service guy who managed the international-relations part of it, seemed to get a lot of buzz too.

Michael Gates, Hollywood in the Klondike: Dawson City's Great Film Find.  

Ted Glenn, A Very Canadian Coup.  I'm not sure why Mackenzie Bowell is having a moment, but this may be the most substantial of the recent examinations of his brief tenure as prime minister.

Doug Hunter, Jackson's Wars: A.Y. Jackson, the Birth of the Group of Seven, and the Great War.  I didn't realize this was an academic press book until I looked for the publisher link, but since book and author both seem mostly "trade," I'm keeping it in.

Dean Jobb, Acadian Saga: a People's Saga of Exile and Triumph. I see this is a revision of a 2005 book, but no matter.

Russell Potter et al, May We Be Spared to Meet Again.  Letters from the Franklin Expedition, from its most vigorous student. (Okay, another academic press title.)

Alasdair Sweeny, Thomas Mackay, Laird of Rideau Hall. Also an academic press, but Alasdair has been grinding it out in the public history trenches long enough to qualify on any score.

Mark Zuehlke, Ortona: Canada's Epic World War II Battle.  Zeuhke continues to build out his substantial World War II series.

Nathan M. Greenfield, Hanged in Medicine Hat. A prisoner-of-war murder. And a miscarriage of justice?

So: not too hard to find a substantial list of worthy titles. And my selection criteria (above) mean I left out a great many local or more specialized topics, titles, and authors. Local and regional history thrives perennially, whatever the state of the more (seeking-to-be) commercial market.

Two PenguinRandom House titles, one from HarperCollins is the extent of the big foreign publisher contribution.  Remember when Canadian-owned publishers were a cultural-policy priority? It's obvious the policies remain essential, but government long since dropped that ball. It leaves small still-Canadian-owned houses to carry at least some of the slack. Let's mention Harbour/Douglas&McIntyre, Dundurn, Nimbus, Goose Lane, Biblioasis, Touchstone, and Sutherland House, as well as McGill-Queen's and University of Ottawa Press. 

But I'm a bit appalled to find my list is all white-male authors (quite a few of pensionable age, too, I guess). In any other recent year, I think I would have seen at least some female and indigenous authors delivering notable books. And it's notable that about half the titles are military or military-adjacent (though art history has outpaced hockey history). These are not signs of a healthy field.  

 

 

History of Canadian cultural politics

I've recently been involved in a small oral history project, documenting the cultural history moment that shaped the foundation of the Writers' Union of Canada forty years ago. Recordings and transcripts will eventually be archived and available, but for the moment the Union is presenting brief selections from the conversations as podcasts.

A little of the conversation I recorded with broadcaster and novelist Howard Engel can be heard on the Union website. More to come.

The website also has a brief history of the Writers' Union.

New Disasters at Library and Archives Canada UPDATED -- see bottom of post

Are these guys the enablers?

Chris Cobb and the Ottawa Citizen (and some brave civil service whistle-blowers, probably) break news of another secret plan the government is working on to sell out and sell off the national's archival collection.

Library and Archives Canada has entered a hush-hush deal with a private high-tech consortium that would hand over exclusive rights to publicly owned books and artifacts for 10 years ....

LAC is partnering with Canadiana.org in what is being billed as The Heritage Project — digitizing 40 million images from more than 800 collections of publicly-held LAC material, much bought by Library and Archives over the years with taxpayers’ money.  

Under the agreement, digital images will begin rolling back into the free public domain — known as “open access” — as the 10-year exclusive rights expire.

Worth noting: this plan to take most of the national archival heritage out of the public domain and make digital access available only to subscribers for ten years is being enabled and facilitated ... by the universities of Canada, which are the principal owners of canadiana.org  

Initial funders are promised “premium access” to the digitized material along with other benefits including a say in how future projects will be handled.But according to an internal email seen by the Citizen late Tuesday, 43 Canadian university libraries have committed a total of $1.71 million in startup funds, a fact Canadiana wanted to announce this week — along with correcting “misunderstandings” — but was prevented by the federal government from doing so

Once again, the academic community will be asked to sell out the public interest in support of institutional privilege -- and if history is any guide, the profs will rush to sell us out.  The librarians too, always on the wrong side of rights and access issues.

the Canadian Library Association is all for the deal. “We think it’s fantastic,” said president Pilar Martinez.

That last quotation is from a Citizen follow-up story, in which former Archivist Ian Wilson denounces the project

Canada’s former chief librarian and archivist is harshly critical of the deal to have a private company digitize our public documents and photos.Ian Wilson says it smack of “desperation” by the federal government.Further, he says the contents of our archives are “a public good” like historic sites and national parks, and shouldn’t be sold back to us. 

Any chance we will see any university president or academic spokesperson take this kind of principled stand? There are grounds for fearing our major history policy NGOs are way too deep in the government's pockets to be able to advise independently.

Update, June 26: Dr Bill Stewart of Ottawa comments:

I wanted to comment on the discussion of the LAC's digitization policy. Perhaps you can help me understand the outrage over the LAC's approach, as the Citizen article, like most newspaper articles, was frustratingly opaque on the really relevant issue with the proposal. The big issue in my mind is whether the organization that does the digitization retains the materials they digitize for ten years or do they retain just the digitized copies. If it is the latter case, I am not sure I understand the outrage.
 I heartily agree that the government should properly fund the archives digitization initiatives, but that is unlikely to eventuate until there is a change of government and I doubt that will have much effect. In the absence of public funding, what options does the LAC have to make these materials available to all Canadians in a digital format - someone has to pay for it? Assuming the original copies are still available for consultation, albeit only in Ottawa, I am not sure how the situation is worse than it is now. The choices are materials in Ottawa and no digital versions or under this scheme where the materials are still available and if you want a digital version you have to pay to access them for a period of ten years.
 There are ample grounds for complaint about how the LAC is run but this is an instance where if the protests are successful we will end up with a situation of digitization proceeding only at the pace direct funding allows.

Thanks for the contribution.

My understanding is that the materials -- the hard copy documents -- remain with the LAC.

The problems that arise are of two kinds. First, the LAC has been energetically, even proudly, reducing access to hard copy documents, shortening hours, limiting archival assistance, etc., on the grounds that digital access makes the traditional archival services obsolete and only blinkered minds continue to ask for them.  But now it appears that for a decade, there will be no digital access either, except for paid-up members.

Two, the LAC seems to be giving an NGO a ten year monopoly over digital access to public records.  A company like Ancestry also offers digital access to public documents for a fee, but it does not limit the source institutions' right to do the same if they wish.  Ancestry builds its business by adding extra services, like better search, chart building opportunities, social networking, etc. -- not by denying the originating archives the freedom to offer their records digitally.  So even if you accept the principle of privatizing access to the public record, this does not seem like a very good deal for the public.

History of the arts cuts: the death of the CCA

The Canadian Conference of the Arts, the bi-lingual, multi-cultural, non-partisan, national lobby and research institute on the arts, shuts its doors,  It was sixty-seven years old.

The CCA helped launch the Massey Commission on the Arts, the Canada Council, the National Library, and other cultural institutions.  Its leaders over the years included such luminaries as Alan Jarvis, Jean Bruchési, John Parkin, Pauline McGibbon, Lister Sinclair, and Jean-Louis Roux.

Another victim of the Government of Canada's cuts to arts and cultural institutions (except a few favorites).

Book Notes: Pennington on 1891, Leith on writing English Montreal

While this blog been dabbling in election history, someone has been doing the real work.  A recent publication in Penguin's new History of Canada series -- which is now getting up to speed and promising two new books each spring and fall for several years -- is Christopher Pennington's The Destiny of Canada: Macdonald, Laurier, and the Election of 1891, a booklength study of that one campaign.

Also out in that History of Canada series this spring  is the take of Ron Graham, the veteran political journalist, on that patriation battle:  The Last Act: Pierre Trudeau, The Gang of Eight and the Fight for Canada.  More information on the whole Penguin History of Canada series here.    (I have a book in the works for this series too.)

To balance two men on political history, how's about a woman on cultural history:  Linda Leith's Writing in A Time of Nationalism: From Two Solitudes to Blue Metropolis

I have been at the Blue Met this week, talking about From Then to Now, and I got the chance to hear Leith talk about this book.  She is a central figure in what she calls the Anglo Revival -- of English language writing in Montreal. She has been not only a writer and teacher but a substantial cultural entrepreneur too, involved in most of the organizations and events by which English-language writers in Quebec have forced themselves upon the attention of Quebec, Canada, and the world.  Blue Metropolis is the successful international literary festival in which both the readers and the audiences are as much French-speaking as English-speaking.  Leith was the founder and until recently director of the festival, but the book is more than a record of the festival's creation. 


Her memoir speaks from the embattled heart of Montreal's English-language literary community -- from the 1970s to today.  In Leith's telling, English-language writing in Quebec was threatened not only by Quebec nationalists who resented Anglo attempts at cross-cultural rapprochement and denied there was such a thing as English culture in Quebec, but just as much by English Canadian nationalists who more-or-less agreed.  Her fight, she argues, was as much against Toronto as against those who would exclude English from Quebec.   "If there had not been a Toronto, we would have had to invent Toronto," she writes.

This is a good cultural history, detailed, first person, parti-pris , but also abundantly sourced and referenced.  And as good cultural history should, it's a window onto many wider historical topics too.

They thought it worked with universities, so...

It's not about cultural policy any more, it seems. Canadian Heritage is not functioning like a cultural body. The policy is bums in seats. How do you grow a culture that way?

Malahat Review editor John Barton skewers the new Canadian Periodical Fund policy on support for magazines. Full story in the Globe & Mail begins, "Canadian literary, arts and scholarly magazines are likely going to die."