Talk:Canadian content

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This page is titled Canadian content, but it has information on Australian content. Why not rename this page to Local content, and then have a heading and info for Canadian content and Australian content?

There is only one line for Australian content. The rest of the page is Canadian-related.

You're replying to a comment that was posted here three years ago, before the article was expanded. It consisted of two sentences at the time, one of which was the Australian one. So the comment made sense at the time; the article's just been improved significantly since then. Bearcat 18:48, 7 June 2006 (UTC)

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I think that the article is well beyond the stub stage and the standard stub notice can be deleted. GreatWhiteNortherner 22:32, Jan 21, 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Origin?

According to 1959 in Canada, Canadian content was first applied to television in 1959, yet this article nor Television in Canada makes no reference to that. Anyone know when the laws first started? -- TheMightyQuill 16:10, 13 May 2006 (UTC)

I agree but I'm not equipped to write the section - "History" - starting in 1959 and progressing through the '60s and '70s, as rules changed and "evolved". This coincided with similar subsidy, if more in funding than policy, to the subsidized literature known as CanLit. I didn't read the Controversy section closely but the issue of ho-humness resulting from subsidized creativity was a hot-button issue for a while, if no longer as said culture has itself now so firmly entrenched; this is a broader issue that is harder to cite but it's out there, whether from newspaper/magazine columnnists or certain literary/cultural critics over the years. I was a personal acquaintance of one William Hoffer, a Vancouver antiquarian and publisher who had one of the world's largest, if not the largest (probably was), collection of CanLit in the country/world, yet sat on it and hated the stuff. Probably because he'd bought it up and couldn't sell it, but he claimed to detest it at an intellectual level as trash turned out by subsidized "hacks". Though personal friends with many of them - Ondaatje and Kinsella, I believe, among them - he styled them "war criminals" - Bill was Jewish, which gave it an extra sting; his father was a prominent and maybe world-famous as well as very rich surgeon, I think a famous oncologist, can't remember his first name. He subscribed to the axiom that cultural worth should stand on its own right, and no cabal of bureaucrats and entrenched artistes should have a lock on funding, as they do/did. He also had one of the very largest, again if not the largest, collections of Yiddish literature in the world, also upstairs (60 Powell) or stored wherever. He finally closed the shop, after endless adventures in Vancouver's arcane and often rowdy booksellers' world, and published a number of pamphlets, more tracts, condemning either individual publishers or writers or railing against CanCon and CanLit as vile institutions. I wish I'd had a tape of all Bill's orations from behind his desk; the store was old-style fabulous in atmosphere, like Giles' study in Buffy or the archetypal pre-Great War mix of quality and what now seems rustic.....theatrical as hell, bald with a huge black beard, Bill would engage anyone who came in the door into his arch perspectivce on the state of literature and the business of bookselling; Vancouver's bookseller's world including other characters like Richie Bond and long-standing sellers like Antiquarius Books (now closed or moved upstairs, I think), Colophon Books, MacLeod's Books;, the city's antiquarian bookshops/sellers deserve a series of articles, as do others around the continent although I suspect some already have articles (Lighthouse Books, let's see if that works, in SF). Bill, though, is citable as his publications are out there; I had and may still have some in my stuff back in BC, though water-damaged; nice printing; specialty book printers are another topic, perhaps; Harbour Publishing is probably here, right, like Howard White? But what about Barbarian Books, a hand-press publisher in Steelhead and other specialty printers like them. All notable and one day article worthy, but in cases like Hoffer's or his contemporaries, some of whom are still around like Stephen Lunsford, bookseller, they have a continental profile (Vancouver's bookstores have had a broad phone/mail base with their own published catalogues for decades), in many cases because of their political or critical profile, or their influence on the development of (or in Bill's case, the criticism of) Canadian culture as a whole. Bill must have been a thorn in their sides, but I knew they liked him; and they had to do business with him because he had a lock on the market; he bought up their stuff when nobody else would, sat on it for years hoping it would accrue value in the way books do, but hated the stuff and said so loudly, often in print. After he sold it all he moved to Moscow to pursue his interests in Yiddish literature collecting, came down with cancer and returned to Canada, I think, and is no longer with us. Many are no doubt relieved, and Bill would like it that way, no doubt. His printed stuff was brilliant but too contextual and person/issue-specific to have broader interest; it's his orations that are lost, unless some writer has preserved his personality in a novel or play, perhaps. Bill surviving in a piece of CanCon, ah, the irony.

Anyway aside from, at least briefly, maybe having a bit on such critical views of subsidized culture, which like I said was readily observable in opinion writing in the print media over the years. But in preparing to write my response here, I checked on Canadian literature and then searched for Canadian cultural policy, which of course doesn't exist History of Canadian cultural policy would be a more accurate title for what I'm thinking about. Here's the search. I was surprised to not see Culture of Canada come up right off the bat; it's sixth, at Canadian identity at number five. Given the integral part of each of these with the others - necessarily so in a calculated, subsidized national culture/identity - you'd think the phrase would occur more; I know that's a quantitative approach but it struck a bell; I find both the Canadian content and Canadian literature (History of Canadian literary policy...) rather dry and also not very wiki-esque, perhaps; more like reading a policy paper and also absent of any sense that this was a directed policy, argued for by academics and nationalists but argued against by others worried about lack of creativity (when not being redneck about disbursements of money to flakey artsy types), and that the policy has evolved over time - especially during the Trudeau years. But also since Mulroney, as the increasingly more prosperous and also prolific CanCon industry, through film and music and other media and into literature and art, has created an entrenched artistic class with its own level of clout, which has made them all the more politically powerful (relative to how it used to be anyway), and also in the case of classical-music personalities the darling and adornment to the upper classes and, now, to large institutions and companies and, in the case of the Canadian ministries and agencies operating this, including the Canada Council (which Bill hated) and right through to popular culture like Canadian Idol as much as it does for Bill saw it all coming, and others like him were out there.

...reading that back I thought I'd better add that the thing about the upper class' dotage is as old as music, especially classical music prior to the days of well-funded music schools (at university level anyway) and the development of musical institutions independent of the church or court; impresarial entrepreneurship, commercial music and theatre, goes even farther back but also with the boom in "musical cosumerism" since the musical age is likewise part of the glamour associated with fame and wealth; this isn't meant to sound like a socialist analysis, by the way, just an observation that the way things are now with "artists and the rich" is thus as it has ever been; only much larger and with an independent inertia of its own; in fact now the US' largest export product, when including film and the rest of media...it's just that here in Canada it's somewhat state-directed, and also bureaucratic unto itself, unlike the richer popular and classical cultures alike in Europe and the US; yes we have great artists, great talent transcends institutional paradigms, or can, but it comes down to style and control thereof; as with the observation about various artists not succeeding form CanCon's cllimate but having to do it elsewhere because of a lockdown by a few artists; it's actually also that way with actors and voice actors in Vancouver, where a certain observable (or audible) few get all the work; that's beside the point but an illustration of the hazards of bureaucratic control; the safe bet, always going for someone you know. But that, too, like popular and ritual/court music, is as old in the hills; it just never used to be in control of the musicians; who in some cultures, indeed, were all musicians.....g'nite I'm gonna go play my tunes...Skookum1 (talk) 02:56, 16 February 2008 (UTC)

I obviously could go on about this but have gone on long enough, the idea was to give Bill's angle (and discuss his potential Wikinotability maybe) and also the history and the broader side of the controversy issue; a lot of ground. I was originally going to play music when I saw your post and decided to respond, and knew the risks of how long it would take to tell you about Bill :-), so I'm gonna go play music now. All of the above food for thought, and perhaps proof I'm not a raving, if occasionally articulate, barbarian...Skookum1 (talk) 02:25, 16 February 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Programming from France

I find the following surprising: " The French-language networks, both public and private, also rely largely on Canadian series, relying on dubbed American movies - with a handful of dubbed series - for most of their foreign content." Why don't they buy programmes from France? Merchbow 06:21, 3 July 2006 (UTC)

For many of the same reasons that English Canadian and American commercial networks don't turn to British or Australian imports very often: it's coming from a different cultural frame of reference, and spoken in a different dialect of the language, so it doesn't always translate to the somewhat insular North American audience very effectively. It's not entirely unknown for Quebec networks to import a program or two from France once in a while, but it's far rarer than you might think. Bearcat 06:49, 3 July 2006 (UTC)

Most American shows aired in the French Canadian market are translated in France. It is usual to hear Paris slang when listen to a US made show or movie. L'Union des Artistes (the major union in the Quebec showbusiness industry) is fighting to get more and more translation done in Montreal, but some people complaint the French language spoken in Québec is not good enough. On another hand, another groupe said the French (and the parisians, in particular) have the bad habit to be trendy by using too much english words in the french dialact. So, it exists a quite political debate on what's the International French language. Also, the French Canadian daily life is in North American. So, most of the references (cars, climate, housing, food...) are shared with English Canada and the United States. In Quebec, the French movies get better exposure (mostly on speciality channels) rather than TV shows. Barraclou.com 03:49, 17 September 2006 (UTC)

Also, in the last years, French Canadians have rather bought some French show concepts (Tout le monde en parle, L'école des fans...) and staffed it with local talents to make it sound more local. Barraclou.com 19:01, 19 September 2006 (UTC)