by Charles Gordon
The Ottawa Citizen, May 7, 1998
Republished with permission

Since 1971, radio stations in Canada have had to make sure that 30 per cent of the recorded music they play is Canadian. Now the CRTC has raised the requirement to 35 per cent, 40 per cent in five years, and you'd think the world was going to end.

The Citizen editorial board was so incensed by this "tyrannical order" to increase Canadian content that it quoted Thomas Paine, an American philosopher-hero of the Revolutionary War. Ironic, eh? As a Canadian philosopher, George Grant, put it: "To think of the U.S. is to think of ourselves - almost."

A day earlier, a Canadian broadcaster expressed the opinion that there was not enough good Canadian music to fill the extra air time (which amounts to 10 songs a day). Another Tom Paine reader. Another Canadian, columnist Andrew Coyne, referred to broadcast life under the new rules as "all Lightfoot all the time."

As anyone in tune with the scene knows, there are many outstanding Canadian pop performers who don't get airplay now. If private radio were interested, which it isn't, the same applies in classical music and jazz. These artists are not heard much now because of the timidity of the private broadcasters, their cow-like tendency to cluster in the middle of the field. Even under the existing content rules, the Canadian content we hear is restricted to a few superstars.

These are the people cited by the Globe and Mail, in its own editorial, as demonstrating that we don't need content rules any more. "Maybe a generation ago Canadian musicians needed the support and exposure of Canadian quotas," the Globe says. "We're hardly in that situation now. Stars such as such as Celine Dion, Shania Twain, Alanis Morrissette and k.d. lang ring up bigger sales overseas than they do in Canada." The content regulations of 1971 produced the Canadian predecessors of Twain and Morrissette. And while lang and Dion may not now need the protection, it is a safe bet that their successors would never, without content rules, get the air time necessary to succeed. A handful of superstars does not a healthy culture make.

Whatever Tom Paine would have made of it, it's true. The broadcasters, thinking they are supporting their case, cite the fact that Canadian music accounts for only 12 per cent of record sales (although recording industry officials place the figure much higher). If 12 per cent is correct, it only bolsters the case for more exposure of Canadian music on the radio.

The Citizen editorial, seeing in the 12-per-cent figure a telling point about free choice, says: "Stations forced to broadcast at least three times that much Canadian material will be playing a lot of music listeners don't want to hear. And American stations that are free to play whatever their listeners want are just a flick of the button away." Exactly. If you don't like Canadian content, you can flick the button.

The anti-CRTC assumption is that everyone, consumer, broadcaster and artist, is best served by a free market. Wrong. If the free market showed the slightest inclination to expose and nurture Canadian talent, none of this would have been necessary.

Further, it is not a free market, and its getting less free by the moment. There is a limited number of radio frequencies owned by an increasingly limited number of people. Left to their own devices, they opt for the safest route, which is to play the songs that everyone else is playing. As the Canadian philosopher George Grant wrote, "Branch-plant economies have branch-plant cultures."

Although it is not a free market, it is a global one, tending toward a global culture. Global, in this case, means American (plus the Spice Girls). If the so-called free market is left alone, we get an unvarying diet, up and down the dial, of American stars singing a limited range of music. That means we get no Canadian recording industry, which is bad not only for Canadian culture but for the Canadian economy.

The Canadian-content regulations have foolish glitches and anomalies that have been seized upon by enemies of regulation -- examples of clearly Canadian recordings that don't meet the guidelines and clearly foreign ones that do. So fix those. But don't abandon the idea. No one else in the world is going to protect and encourage our artists. If we looked, we could probably find an American philosopher to agree.

Meanwhile, there's always the Canadian philosopher, George Grant: "Canada's survival has always required the victory of political courage over immediate and individual economic advantage," he wrote. Roughly translated, that means: Let's not sit around and let our music disappear.

Charles Gordon's columns appear three times a week in the Ottawa Citizen.