Cultural Policy as the Articulation of Cultural Hegemony: The Nationalist Dreams and Desires of Canada’s Online Streaming Act
Author: Christine Rose Cooling
Home university: York University
Education level: MA, Communication & Culture
Marshalling a rhetoric of Canadian nationalism, 91 years ago, the impassioned Graham Spry, co-founder of the Canadian Radio League, testified for the establishment of a national broadcaster as a witness for the 1932 Special Committee on Radio Broadcasting: “The choice before this Committee is clear; it is a choice between commercial interests and the people’s interests. It is a choice between the State and the United States” (p. 46). Spry participated in setting the stage for a particular cultural policymaking cause: to promote, protect, and preserve the Canadian identity against the looming threat of Americanization. In contemporary Canadian broadcasting legislation, officially amended on April 27, 2023, after 32 years, definitions of ‘broadcasting’ now encompass new media streaming platforms in addition to radio and television, both traditional mass media. The economic and, subsequently, cultural disruption posed by transnational, American-based Web streaming giants has, indeed, posed a great challenge to nationalist dreams and desires entrenched in the 1991 Broadcasting Act. Cultural policymakers in Canada have thus successfully called for online streaming services to be defined as broadcasters and subject to Canadian content expenditure and exhibition requirements under Bill C-11 (formerly Bill C-10), the Online Streaming Act.
Employing critical discourse analysis, this paper will apply Stuart Hall’s theory of articulation to a non-random critical case sample of passages from a Hansard speech surrounding the Online Streaming Act. This paper will affirm that Canada’s Minister of the Department of Canadian Heritage borrowed common sense discourses of nation, culture, and identity to articulate a historical nation-building project against American cultural imperialism, thereby attaching sliding signifiers of nationalism to the Online Streaming Act.
Historical Broadcasting Policy and Canadian Nationalism
Broadcasting policy in Canada is the product of historical debates, sociopolitical tensions, and cultural and global contexts. The Canadian broadcasting landscape is traditionally modelled as a hybrid or mixed system, comprised of a national public broadcaster, commercial broadcasters, and community/campus broadcasters (MacLennan, 2001, 2020; Raboy, 1990; Skinner, 2005; Vipond, 1994). Briefly, the history of broadcasting legislation in Canada officially began in 1905 when the Wireless Telegraphy Act in Canada made the Department of Marine and Fisheries the regulatory and licensing body, closely mirroring earlier legislation in Britain. Acting again under the influence of Britain as well as new technological advancements and uses, the Canadian government was prompted shortly after to devise more comprehensive legislation than that from 1905 (Armstrong, 2016). The Radiotelegraph Act of 1913 was passed with the advent of wireless radiotelephones amidst rapid technological developments in wireless telegraphy, widespread adoption for navigational safety, and a transnational agreement (the London Convention) signed by Britain and the colonies in 1912 (Vipond, 1992). Almost a decade later in the year 1922, radio stations were first commercially licensed (MacLennan, 2013). The need to regulate airwaves inevitably emerged with the proliferation of radio, given that major signal interference from culturally imperialist American broadcasters on dials allocated to Canadian stations was a problem throughout the 1920s and 1930s (MacLennan, 2010).
A national public broadcaster was developed in 1932: the Canadian Radio Broadcasting Commission (CRBC), known since 1936 as the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC). Until 1968, the broadcaster held the responsibility of regulating the Canadian broadcasting system to reinforce Canada’s political, economic, and cultural structures (MacLennan, 2001, 2016, 2018, 2020; Potvin, 1972; Raboy, 1990). Gilles Potvin (1972) emphasizes how the CBC operated as a conduit for reflecting the bilingual and bicultural nature of the nation—ringing true in the twenty-first century, instead with the replacement of biculturalism by Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau in 1971 with Canada’s official policy of multiculturalism within a bilingual framework. Critically, however, Eve Haque (2012) argues that the national formulation of this policy entrenched a “racial order of difference and belonging through language in the ongoing project of white settler nation-building” (pp. 4-5), creating the paradox of Canadian multiculturalism.
The scope of broadcasting legislation was expanded after the 1929 report from the Royal Commission on Broadcasting—better known as the Aird Commission—authorized by the Liberal government of Mackenzie King in December 1928 to precede the Canadian Radio Broadcasting Act of 1932, and the Act to amend the Canadian Broadcasting Act in 1936 (MacLennan, 2018; Raboy, 1990). Chaired by Sir John Aird, the president of the Canadian Bank of Commerce, the Royal Commission on Broadcasting sought victory for English Canadian nationalists. To English Canadian nationalists, the notions of ‘public’ and ‘national’ were synonymous; on the other hand, French Canadians and other Canadians on the margins rejected the dominant social vision for the idea of public broadcasting (Raboy, 1990).
In the late 1940s and early 1950s, the advent of television broadened the scope of the CBC’s programming, consequently enhancing its cultural function with television services reaching almost across the entire nation. Simultaneously, with the recovery of the early growth of television broadcasting in Britain and the United States after the Second World War, Canadian viewers began having greater access to television stations across the border (Armstrong, 2016). Both the Royal Commission on National Development in the Arts, Letters and Sciences chaired by diplomat Vincent Massey from 1949 to 1951 as well as the Royal Commission on Broadcasting chaired by president of the Canadian Pulp and Paper Association Robert Fowler from 1955 to 1957 expressed concern over the commercialization of the airwaves. These commissions echoed fears of Americanization imbued with ideologies surrounding definitions of Canadian culture (Filion, 1996), albeit with different nationalist visions of the regulatory role that the CBC and private television broadcasters should play in the Canadian broadcasting system (Armstrong, 2016).
This historical overview is significant in critically interpreting the relationship of nationalist values within Bill C-11 amongst the political-cultural work of Canadian broadcasting policymakers throughout the past century, hegemonically influencing our domestic cultural industry today. In light of the dominant ideological debates surrounding the politics of cultural policymaking, Marc Raboy (1994) suggests a theoretical conceptualization of broadcasting “as a multifaceted activity taking place in the public sphere and contested by actors situated in the areas of the state, the economy and civil society” guided by political, economic, and social objectives (p. 5). Furthermore, Raboy (1994) adds that the development of Canada’s broadcasting system is defined by and reflective of three sets of tensions: “(a) between private capital and the state, over the economic basis of broadcasting; (b) between the state and the public, over the sociocultural mission of broadcasting; and (c) between competing visions of the relationship of broadcasting to the politics of Canadian nationhood” (p. 9). While these three tensions are inextricably linked to one another, certainly not existing in mutual exclusion, this paper is concerned with the third tension: between competing visions of the relationship of broadcasting to the politics of Canadian nationhood, with cultural broadcasting policy functioning as the articulation of cultural hegemony.
Methodology
Political discourse does not occur in a cultural vacuum; Norman Fairclough (2013) describes critical discourse analysis as placing specific emphasis on the symbiotic relationship between discourse and social phenomena including power relations, dominant ideologies, institutional structures, and identities (p. 9). According to Fairclough (1993), critical discourse analysis is explanatory at the micro- and macro-level, aiming to:
systematically explore often opaque relationships of causality and determination between (a) discursive practices, events and texts, and (b) wider social and cultural structures, relations and processes; to investigate how such practices, events and texts arise out of and are ideologically shaped by relations of power and struggles over power; and to explore how the opacity of these relationships between discourse and society is itself a factor securing power and hegemony. (p. 135)
The critical discourse analysis performed in this paper situates the discursive practices of former Minister of the Department of Canadian Heritage, Pablo Rodriguez, in the House of Commons considering the wider social and cultural structures and processes that have facilitated protectionist political intervention into the broadcasting landscape over time. Cultural policy as a practice, then, can be understood as arising out of relations of political power and struggles over political power, ideologically shaped by common-sense assumptions of Canadian culture and nationhood. Using a non-random critical case sample of political passages from a 2022 Hansard speech by Pablo Rodriguez, this paper illuminates the political-cultural work of nationalist rhetoric in securing power and cultural hegemony in Canada’s liberal democratic society at large. The speech excerpts from Rodriguez are apt for critical discourse analysis as constituting texts which arose from a contextual discursive event; as this discourse originated from the House of Commons, its composition was implicitly shaped by normative expectations and political pressures of this socially powerful institution.
The Political-Cultural Work of Articulation
Ideological constructions of the political nation-building project were historically and continue to be intertwined with hegemonic norms along gender, class-status, sociocultural, and racial lines, with the contributions of Indigenous peoples, racialized communities, French Canadians and other social groups to Canadian culture and identity often ignored (Potvin, 1972; Raboy, 1990; Roth, 2005). As it stood prior to April of 2023, the economic and, subsequently, cultural objective of strengthening the nation’s cultural fabric through broadcasting policy was mediated exclusively through mandating Canadian content exhibition and expenditure requirements for licensed radio and television broadcasters. Thus, the major twenty-first century shift in the media landscape raises regulatory challenges that cannot be easily justified with historical arguments of nation-building, even if unregulated online streaming platforms threaten traditional broadcasting’s ability to promote cultural sovereignty (Raboy, 2008; Rowland, 2013; Taras, 2012; Taras & Raboy, 2004; Taylor, 2013); yet these arguments are precisely what politicians are putting forth. The Online Streaming Act has consequently faced substantial criticism by Canadians in the public sphere, and an analysis into the nationalist rhetoric used by politicians to attempt to articulate cultural policy as cultural hegemony (as they did in the twentieth century) is due.
John Clarke (2015) asserts that Stuart Hall, in his understanding of articulation as central to work on ideology, domination, and hegemony, theorized in the mobile space “between an Althusserian concern with ideology (not least the question of interpellation) and a Gramscian focus on hegemony and the organization of consent (not least in the complex relations with the field of common sense)” (p. 2). Speaking specifically to the theory of articulation, Stuart Hall (1985) states,
By the term ‘articulation’, I mean a connection or link which is not necessarily given in all cases, as a law or a fact of life, but which requires particular conditions of existence to appear at all, which has to be positively sustained by specific processes, which is not ‘eternal’ but has to be constantly renewed, which can under some circumstances disappear or be overthrown, leading to the old linkages being dissolved and new connections—re-articulations—being forged. (p. 11)
In this passage, Hall (1985) expresses a fundamental foundation of the theory; Clarke (2015) highlights how Hall perceived discursively constructed connections between seemingly disparate elements as needing to be sustained through continuous political-cultural processes, and these processes are the very products of articulation. Clarke (2015) states that Hall paid close attention to the conditions that permit articulations to exist, first and foremost, as well as the political-cultural work, or the practice, that is required for the production and reproduction of certain articulations. Additionally, recognizing the possibility of ‘re-articulations’, Hall notions toward the fluid nature of articulations; an articulation is never eternalized, which further emphasizes the significance and precarity of political-cultural work in forging connections between parts through a specific linkage—one that cannot be made concrete.
Furthermore, Clarke (2015) draws a powerful connection between Hall’s work in cultural studies and Antonio Gramsci’s work on the relationship between hegemony and common sense. According to Gramsci (1973), “commonsense is a collective noun, like religion: there is not just one common sense, for that too is a product of history and a part of the historical process” (pp. 324-325). In 1987, Stuart Hall thus declared that “Gramsci is one of the first modern Marxists to recognise that interests are not given but have to be politically and ideologically constructed” (p. 20). Clarke (2015) argues that, for Hall, this practice of articulation demands political-cultural work, “selective work vis à vis the many common senses, involving both the selective mobilisation of some aspects and the obverse: the selective demobilisation of other elements by rendering them silent, ridiculous, unrealistic, out of time or place and so on” (emphasis original, p. 6). This practice serves the hegemonic class, the class which, according to Chantal Mouffe (2014), has successfully articulated the national-popular interests of other social groups to its own through ideological struggles over power.
Bill C-11, Cultural Hegemony, and Nationalist Dreams in the Twenty-First Century
When tabling Bill C-11 in the House of Commons in 2022, the Honourable Minister of Canadian Heritage, Pablo Rodriguez, prepared a speech that quite clearly demonstrates the political-cultural work of articulation. The enactment of the Online Streaming Act specifically amends the 1991 Broadcasting Act to, among other things, “add online undertakings — undertakings for the transmission or retransmission of programs over the Internet — as a distinct class of broadcasting undertakings” (summary (a)). With provisions for regulating media content in digital displays, Bill C-11 took a remarkably contentious step in navigating the new media landscape by placing Web streaming giants under the same scope as traditional domestic broadcasters for the sake of Canada’s cultural industry.
Rodriguez opened his speech on February 16, 2022, by painting the following picture:
Mr. Speaker, imagine a day without art and culture: no music, no movies, no television or books. It would be really boring. This is why I am so happy to speak today about Bill C 11, the Online Streaming Act. This legislation will update Canada’s broadcasting rules to include online streaming services and will require them to contribute in an equitable way to our culture. [...]
When the Internet came along, we all thought that it was great and wonderful, that we would let it develop on its own, that we would not get involved at all, and that it would create new opportunities, strengthen democracy and connect people. [...]
We need to take action to address these issues now. If not, they will continue to harm Canadians, chip away our cultural sovereignty and weaken our digital society. This is about making the Internet a better place for all Canadians. [...]
The Online Streaming Act would bring online broadcasters under similar rules and requirements as our traditional broadcasters. Unlike traditional Canadian broadcasters, platforms profit from our culture but have no obligation to contribute to it. With money leaving traditional broadcasters, day after day, to go to these platforms, this is putting our creators, our industry, our jobs and even our culture at risk. We have to act. (pp. 2319-2320)
Rodriguez introduces Bill C-11, for the first time, by prompting Members of Parliament to imagine a day without art and culture, proceeding to present the economic, and subsequently, cultural justification for regulating online streaming services in a globalized Canada: to require them to contribute in an equitable way to [Canadian] culture. This justification for protectionist cultural market intervention is certainly not new; although radio frequency spectrum scarcity has remained a contemporary justification for broadcasting regulation (Armstrong, 2016; MacLennan, 2018), the cause of enhancing and maintaining cultural sovereignty by promoting conceptions of Canadian national identity to resist culturally imperialist American media messages (Raboy, 2010) quickly emerged in cultural policymaking debates of the early twentieth century.
Immediately, Rodriguez articulates cultural policy as cultural sovereignty—politically and ideologically constructing Bill C-11 as a confrontation with the dreaded goliath that is Americanization, without yet mentioning our neighbors to the South directly. Through political-cultural work in Parliament, Rodriguez deliberately assembles a link between cultural policy and cultural sovereignty on Cyberspace. The Internet was an initial space of utopian optimism, with its globalizing possibility to facilitate the cultural diversification and accessible democratization of media production and consumption; however, with the rise of the Internet, Rodriguez acknowledges that platforms profit from our culture but have no obligation to contribute to it. According to Rodriguez, this political economic issue puts not only Canadian creators, the Canadian cultural industry, and Canadian cultural employment opportunities at risk, but also Canadian culture itself. As such, Rodriguez calls for action, signaling the possible end of Canadian consciousness due to the political and cultural power possessed by Web streaming giants. The imposition of twentieth century broadcasting rules, at face value, seemingly goes against the principles of Cyberspace, and throughout his time as Minister of Canadian Heritage, Pablo Rodriguez continuously reproduces this connection using nationalist rhetoric in political and public discourse to garner support for Bill C-11. American-based online video distributors have the potential to overthrow the articulation of Canadian broadcasting policy as cultural sovereignty—and Rodriguez engages in political-cultural work to prevent the nationalist dreams and desires of preserving traditional cultural hegemony in the digital age from shattering. Speaking to the House of Commons, Rodriguez (2022) adds,
How are we going to [make the Internet a better place for all Canadians]? It starts with this bill, the Online Streaming Act. It starts with making sure that online streamers contribute to the strength and vitality of Canada’s cultural sector. Let us remember Canada’s strong culture is no accident. We made that decision. We decided and we chose to be different. We chose to be different from our neighbours to the south. We chose cultural sovereignty. (p. 2320)
Rodriguez’ operationalization of common sense underscores the political-cultural work of articulation, which “select[s] elements or fragments of commonsense with dominant conceptions to create the appearance of a shared, unitary and coherent understanding of the world” (Clarke, 2015, p. 5). Using the same rhetoric as Graham Spry in 1932, Rodriguez selectively mobilizes Canada’s “choice” to be different from our neighbours to the south, to “choose” cultural sovereignty through broadcast regulation, as a unanimous, unitary decision on behalf of the Canadian public, as opposed to one that dominantly served the national-popular interests of power-struggling English Canadian nationalists of the twentieth century—or the hegemonic class. By doing so, Rodriguez selectively demobilizes the dreams and desires of other social groups in Canada, silencing voices by grouping them together using generalized rhetoric such as “we” and “all Canadians”.
As evidence, according to Marc Raboy (1990), the development of broadcasting policy is widely remembered in Canadian collective memory as a conflict between the private sector and the public sector, between commercial and government interests; however, Raboy (1990) asserts that this battle was also waged between contrasting perspectives of Canadian national identity. The hegemonic narrative of Canadian nationalism in the 1920s “was that of an emerging nation struggling to find its place between a British colonial past and the American dream of the future, anxious to preserve the trappings of the former without denying itself the promised pleasures of the latter” (Raboy, 1990, p. 18). Nationalist conceptions of Canadianness were born from specific political, social, classist, and regional inequities of the time which favoured urban-elite, English-speaking Canadians in central Canada (Raboy, 1990). Raboy (1990) interrogates how the dreams and desires of rural and French Canadians as well as women, farmers, and labourers were effectively excluded from nationalist rhetoric. These groups were rendered as no more than passive consumers of its sentiments, acknowledged only for the purpose of garnering support for the fabrication of Canadian consciousness and cohesion. Therefore, the 1920s were a critical period for Canada’s movement from colony-to-nation—an imagined construct, something dreamed and desired by Canadian nationalists, manifested ideologically through communication media.
Rodriguez (2022) continues,
We are reminded of this [choice] every day, especially yesterday on National Flag of Canada Day. When we chose the maple leaf as our flag, we were choosing a symbol of our national identity, a symbol that is distinct and set us apart from the cultural superpower to the south. After 57 years, the maple leaf is the most widely recognized Canadian emblem in the world. To each and every one of us, it is a symbol of a Canada, a country, made by all of us together. [...]
Culture is an extremely powerful and foundational form of expression. It enables us to share moments, feelings and dreams. It enables us to forge a shared identity. Its scope and influence are greater than ever. (pp. 2320-2321)
Rodriguez’ use of Canada’s National Flag—the image of the maple leaf—as a symbol of our national identity in the articulation of cultural policy as cultural hegemony is particularly interesting. Political-cultural conflicts take place on nationalized terrain, played out through nation-state apparatuses, and articulated through dominant national and nationalist imaginaries— not always truly ‘national’ in their pursuits, even if they hold promises for liberated and sovereign nations (Clarke, 2023). As Chantal Mouffe (1994/2005) asserts,
What we commonly call ‘cultural identity’ is both the scene and the object of political struggles. The social existence of a group is always constructed through conflict. It is one of the principal areas in which hegemony exists, because the definition of the cultural identity of a group, by reference to a specific system of contingent and particular social relations, plays a major role in the creation of ‘hegemonic nodal points’. (p. 107)
At this conjuncture of cultural identity, then, where political struggle is both located and defined, conflict constructs the hegemonic class—the social existence of this group—through social relations of power and privilege. Hence, nationalism becomes a sliding signifier or glissement: what Jacques Lacan deems the process by which the meaning of a signifier varies depending on the signified, thereby forming a relationship where the signified slides beneath the signifier (Campbell, 1999).
In Rodriguez’ House of Commons speech, cultural identity is the site and subject of political struggle. In conflict to distinguish Canada spatially and ideologically from the cultural superpower to the south, the maple leaf as a nationalist symbol—the sliding signifier—is heralded to address the contemporary political economic issue of domestic broadcasters competing on an unlevel playing field with disruptive, transnational online streaming services. The signified, here, is a nationalistic nostalgia, a promise for a culturally sovereign nation through reifying Canadian content as a cornerstone of national identity—the same promise that was made by cultural policymakers and influential political actors in the 1900s in the spirit of a technological form of Canadian nationalism.
Developing the framework of technological nationalism in 1986, Maurice Charland emphasizes the CBC’s 1974 romanticized production of the National Dream about the Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR) as a mediation of the hegemonic narrative that Canada is a technologically mediated nation, dreamt of and imagined into existence through space-binding technology. For Charland (1986), the CBC is emblematic of the facilitation and legitimation of the political process of nation-building through technology. The rhetoric of the CPR as the national dream—“the power-laden discourse of a state seeking to legitimate itself politically by constituting a nation in its image”—constructed the ideology of Canadian nationhood, thereby influencing the politics of broadcast policymaking (Charland, 1986, p. 197). The political-cultural work of articulating communication media and technology with cultural hegemony for the purpose of nation-building in Canada continues in much the same guise today.
In his parliamentary speech, Rodriguez (2022) goes on to declare,
Our culture is all of us. I say that often. It is our past, present and future. It is how we talk to one another and how we tell our stories. For more than 50 years, the Broadcasting Act has helped us share our stories. That is how we built a strong Canadian culture. That is how we forged our Canadian identity, and that is how we brought Canadian voices to the world. We want to build on this for the future. We must recognize that times have changed.
The last time our system was updated was in 1991, and the world was a very different place. People were going to Blockbuster Video to rent movies. I am sure you used to go there yourself, Mr. Speaker. We all went to Blockbuster to rent VHS tapes and paid a fee when we brought them back late. We had Walkmans. That is how we used to listen to music.
So much has changed in the last 30 years. Online content delivery has changed how we create, discover and consume content, and the system in place today needs to reflect this. Canadian broadcasters have been investing in the system for decades to create the content we love, so it is only fair that online broadcasters be asked to contribute. We are only asking them to do their part, nothing more, which is fair.
Companies like Netflix, Amazon and Disney, to name a few, are already investing in the Canadian economy, which is great. We all benefit from that. Some of their content is really entertaining. This means money for and significant investments in our country. We are very pleased that they continue to invest here and pursue their projects in Canada.
Let us be honest, though. There is another reason why they are investing in Canada. It is because we have incredible talent here, including directors, actors and technicians. We have amazing talent, by any measure, so it makes good business sense to come and invest in Canada.
Basically, what Bill C-11 does is it updates the rules so that all broadcasting platforms contribute to our culture. That is all. That is what the bill is all about.
The Online Streaming Act would bring online broadcasters under similar rules and requirements as our traditional broadcasters. Unlike traditional Canadian broadcasters, platforms profit from our culture but have no obligation to contribute to it. With money leaving traditional broadcasters, day after day, to go to these platforms, this is putting our creators, our industry, our jobs and even our culture at risk. We have to act. [...]
We want to make sure that our children as well as future generations grow up as we did, having the chance to watch our stories and to listen to our songs. (p. 2320)
Rodriguez articulates the national-popular interests of “all of us” and “we” to the hegemonic class—that is, those with political power and privilege in Canada’s liberal democracy—by describing the nation’s ideological struggle over economic and cultural power enshrined by the 1991 Broadcasting Act. The histories of Canadian stories, Canadian culture, and Canadian identity are politically and ideologically utilized to construct a unitary collective cultural memory, a shared and coherent common sense. Speaking of the past of Canadian culture, Rodriguez selectively omits the dreams and desires of non-hegemonic groups in Canadian history in favour of nationalist dreams and desires, therefore rendering an important, controversial element of our broadcasting history silent.
Leading up to the 1970s from the 1950s, the contributions of waves of immigration to the development of Canada as a ‘cultural mosaic’ were virtually disregarded (Potvin, 1972). Moreover, in the article, “Cultural imperialism of the North? The expansion of CBC’s Northern service and community radio”, Anne F. MacLennan (2011) argues that the marginal Northern residents of Canada in the 1970s were unenthusiastic about the endeavour to expand Northern broadcasting via CBC television and radio. The infrastructural expansion of the network served as a physical vessel to rebroadcast certified Canadian content from the South to the North, leading Northern residents to resist the expansion out of an increasing desire for local content. According to MacLennan (2011), about two decades of operations passed until the CBC network came to disseminate greater quantities of local programming. Thus, the effects of the CBC’s delivery of Southern programming were felt far more acutely than the CBC’s efforts to deliver local programming pertinent to the languages and cultures of the North. Hence, Christopher Ali (2012) contends that the concept of localism in Canadian television policy has been eclipsed by debates over Canadian nationalism and commercial-versus-national broadcasting in communication policy, with cultural policymakers seeking to protect a narrow vision of Canadian culture from the overwhelming influence of American cultural commodities before all else.
Conclusion: The Unseen Future of Broadcasting Policy
To conclude on a more optimistic note, despite Canada’s problematic history with inclusion of non-hegemonic groups in cultural policymaking debates, advocating for the Royal Assent of Bill C-11, Rodriguez (2022) does mention,
People need their culture to reflect who they are. For example, as francophones, we depend on culture to preserve our language. If we want our children to speak our language, we need to keep our culture strong. To do that, we need a system that is both just and fair.
Indigenous peoples are counting on it too. Diversity and inclusion are Canadian values and they must be key elements of our cultural policy. This is a key pillar of the Online Streaming Act. Racialized Canadians, women, LGBTQ2+ persons and persons with disabilities deserve to have a space to tell their stories to other Canadians but also to the world.
This bill claims that space and makes sure that online streaming platforms contribute to Canadian culture, to our culture. (p. 2321)
The bill itself stipulates that under the supervision and regulation of the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC), the Canadian broadcasting system shall,
(iii) through its programming and the employment opportunities arising out of its operations, serve the needs and interests of all Canadians — including Canadians from Black or other racialized communities and Canadians of diverse ethnocultural backgrounds, socio-economic statuses, abilities and disabilities, sexual orientations, gender identities and expressions, and ages — and reflect their circumstances and aspirations, including equal rights, the linguistic duality and multicultural and multiracial nature of Canadian society and the special place of Indigenous peoples and languages within that society,
(iii. 1) provide opportunities to Indigenous persons to produce programming in Indigenous languages, English or French, or in any combination of them, and to carry on broadcasting undertakings,
(iii. 11) provide opportunities to Black and other racialized persons in Canada by taking into account their specific needs and interests, namely, by supporting the production and broadcasting of original programs by and for Black and other racialized communities. (Bill C-11, 2023, 3(3))
It is extremely important to emphasize that this apparent effort toward including diverse social groups more equitably in Canada’s cultural industry—both on and behind the screen—suggests the potential for a flexible re-articulation of cultural policy as cultural hegemony, one that reflects the dreams and desires of all Canadians, in a genuine use of the phrase, before the economic and, subsequently, cultural need to resist American cultural imperialism.
Conducting a critical discourse analysis of a non-random critical case sample of passages from Honourable Pablo Rodriguez’ Hansard speech, this paper has applied Stuart Hall’s theory of articulation to affirm that Canada’s Minister of the Department of Canadian Heritage attached sliding signifiers of nationalism to the Online Streaming Act by abstracting common sense discourses of nation, culture, and identity to articulate a nation-building project against Americanization. Ultimately, the future of contemporary Canadian broadcasting policy and its strong historical connections to English Canadian nationalism remains to be seen, especially considering the backlash received by the Online Streaming Act by Canadians themselves as inherently anti-competitive, anti-consumer, and paternalistic.
As Raboy (1994) keenly argues, the politics of broadcasting regulation are enacted “in different ways in different societies and at different moments in history, to the extent that mass communication systems generally, and broadcasting in particular, are characteristic of the broad currents that mark the development of any particular society” (pp. 8-9). To borrow from the old adage, only time will tell how the nationalist dreams and desires of Canadian broadcasting policy will change in the twenty-first century—in the unprecedented territory of media abundance.
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