The con we call CanCon

Thousands of Canadians -- no one knows quite how many -- have lately discovered the joys of satellite radio, available in hundreds of different music and audio formats delivered in flawless digital sound, no matter where they may happen to be -- and all for just a few dollars a month.Probably they think they are getting a pretty good deal. But the CRTC has an even better deal for them, and you. Yes, if you act now, you can spend more money to receive fewer stations. Or at least, fewer stations that you want to hear, plus a few more that you don’t, but which the CRTC and some other folks think you should, in the name of making you better Canadians.

They can’t make you, of course, but they can at least pretend they are, which makes many people in the Canadian music business happy, and a much smaller number rich. And while American radio stations already play plenty of Canadian music without being told to, they tend to mix it in with the other stuff. Whereas thanks to the CRTC’s latest edict, the CanCon will be heavily concentrated on a few channels, where you can avoid it altogether.

But never mind. The important thing is that a couple of Canadian companies will be able to cut themselves in for a share of the potentially massive profits in satellite radio by partnering with those same American stations the CRTC wants to save us from to deliver exactly the same content -- well, the same, except for the Canadian head office. And the eight or nine Canadian channels.

So while until now Canadian listeners have been faking American addresses to receive American satellite radio, henceforth American stations will be faking Canadian addresses to deliver it to them. In addition to providing a Canadian mail drop, the Canadian partners in these enterprises are taking the risk that enough listeners can be persuaded it is worth paying more for less on the “Canadian” services rather than go to the trouble of signing up directly with their American parents. And in return for doing its bidding, the CRTC gives them a licence, and a duopoly.

That’s how it works in the CanCon game. That’s how it has always worked: Canadian cultural entrepreneurs get rich importing American product, while promising to divert a portion of the profits to struggling Canadian artists -- and loudly protesting at any suggestion that Canadians should have access to the imported product without their intercession. The Canadian artists the system is supposed to protect remain as ignored as ever by the great Canadian public, until they are discovered by the Americans. These days, that happens quite often: it is no harder for a Canadian act to break big in the American market than for any regional American act.

CanCon has been at best an irrelevance in this development. The most revered figures in Canadian popular music -- Joni Mitchell, Neil Young and, depending on your taste, Leonard Cohen -- all emerged in the pre-CanCon era. Then the regulations kicked in, and for twenty-five years Canadian music went nowhere, other than a few short-lived “corporate rock” hits -- Platinum Blonde, anyone? -- in the classic tradition of protected industries everywhere: mass-marketing to small markets, on the safest possible basis. It was only in the 1990s that Canadian music finally came into its own, for reasons that had nothing to do with CanCon -- or radio, for that matter -- and everything to do with the changing technology of the music industry. Suddenly it was cheaper and easier for groups appealing to niche tastes to reach their audiences, without having to obtain the blessing of either Top 40 programmers or the CRTC.

But what about the underlying policy objective of CanCon: of ensuring Canadians listen to Canadian music? Let’s get this out of the way quickly. One, can anyone define Canadian music? No they cannot, whether we are talking about songs, artists, or labels. Which is how New York-based Seagram gets classed, for cultural purposes, as a Canadian company, while Bryan Adams is not a Canadian singer -- or at least, not a singer of Canadian songs.

Two, what exactly is the intent: artistic or political? If the former, what is the connection between nationality and artistic merit? If the latter, how is the national identity furthered by encouraging more Canadians to make their living singing in various American idioms -- blues, jazz, country, rock -- usually in deep-South accents? And what would be the point if it was? Presumably, it is to preserve the national differences that are commonly supposed to justify the existence of the Canadian nation-state, and (not coincidentally) the army of regulators charged with its defence.

But if these differences are so profound as to justify protection, they should not need it. And if they were to disappear, so too would the rationale for their preservation -- since the foreign culture so unspeakably alien to our values would no longer be so foreign, or so alien -- always supposing a nation hewn out of rock and wood over five centuries must depend for its sense of self on such will-o’-the-wisps as pop songs and magazine covers.

Unenforceable, indefinable, unnecessary and ineffective, not to mention completely pointless. Other than that it’s a pretty good policy.