But surely this is the wrong question. It is not so much Americans that the magazine industry is being protected from, after all, as it is Canadians. Never has this been clearer than in the matter of Sports Illustrated, which provoked this latest fit of cultural protectionism with the launch in 1993 of a Canadian edition. That's right, a Canadian edition - printed in Canada, with (some) Canadian stories, of interest to Canadian readers.

Is this not everything the nationalists could have wanted? Instead of forcing an alien sporting culture down our throats, SI would be "reflecting Canada to Canadians." Nor would it be displacing a home-grown alternative; there is no Canadian general sports magazine. If the venture succeeded, it would only be because Canadians wanted to read it. Even at that, domestic publishers would remain at a competitive advantage, since advertisers in foreign-owned magazines cannot claim the same tax write- offs.

No matter: Acting on the demands of the domestic publishing industry, the government has effectively shut down SI Canada and any future Canadian editions of foreign magazines, via a new 80-per-cent excise tax on advertising revenues - to be extracted not from the foreign publishers themselves, but from their Canadian printers and distributors.

Welcome to the wonderful world of cultural nationalism, which has nothing to do with culture and less and less to do with nationality. Perhaps aware of the contradiction in insisting that Canadian culture was best served by restricting Sports Illustrated to zero-per-cent Canadian content, the large and profitable corporations that dominate the $838- million Canadian magazine industry instead fell back on that old standby, the "unfair trade" complaint. Such "split- run" editions, they claim, are a form of "dumping."

Since most of the stories in SI Canada appear also in its American cousin, the publishers argue that its costs are already recovered from sales in the United States. That means it can undercut the Canadian industry on advertising rates. A federal task force claimed that if split- runs were allowed, they would gobble up 40 per cent of industry revenues within five years. One former magazine editor foresaw a "holocaust."

Why dumping - selling abroad for less than you do at home - should be thought such a crime is a question for another day. But the publishers' real complaint is based on a much simpler concept. It's called economies of scale. The publishers are like the chandlers in Jean-Baptiste Say's satire, complaining of "unfair" competition from the sun: the unfairness of the Americans is that they are so many.

Yes, the domestic content in SI Canada is pretty slim. But it hasn't proved quite the all-consuming Godzilla the publishers would have us believe. At barely $1- million, advertising sales are well below projections; two issues last year were cancelled for lack of interest. And the new tax would apply to any magazine with so much as 20-per-cent foreign material - i.e. up to 80-per-cent Canadian content.

There's a more basic contradiction at work here - one built into the very structure of cultural nationalism. To say that economies of scale inevitably doom Canadian culture is to say that domestic and foreign cultural products compete strictly on price: that is, Canadians do not distinguish between them on any other basis. But if there is one article of faith among nationalists, it is that the two are not perfect substitutes, that Canadian tastes are distinct and therefore indigenous production fills a need that foreign art can't. In which case, Canadians should be more than willing to pay any premium.

On the other hand, if we aren't all that different from the Americans, the advantages of economies of scale should be just as open to us as them. A rash of recent Canadian TV shows, for example, have been hits south of the border - Love and Hate, The Boys of St. Vincent, The Kids in the Hall and so on - while remaining Canadian from eh to zed.

There is scant evidence that the fevered efforts to promote a distinct Canadian identity over the past three decades, especially through the arts, have succeeded in unifying the country, and even less reason to suppose that they should. They have only encouraged those who consider themselves more different than others to make their own claims of nationhood.

A final thought: What has any of this to do with art?