MON NOV.20,1995 PG: A14

When cultural nationalism has nothing to do with Canadian content

TO horse, noble Senators! Once again that rabble in the Commons has sent you the commercial equivalent of a bill of attainder, a squalid piece of legislative malevolence directed, with torpedo-like narrowness of purpose, at confiscating the property of a single enterprise whose sole crime was to be on the wrong side of the present government's political prejudices. You did a fine job exposing and embarrassing them over the cancellation, without fair compensation or even redress to the courts, of the Pearson airport contract. Now again the chamber of sober second thought is called to lead the charge against such arbitrary measures.

The legislation in question this time, Bill C-103, at least pretends to be of general application, which is more than one could say of the Pearson mugging. The bill, passed by the lower house earlier this month, would impose a tax of 80 per cent - that's right, 80 per cent - of the revenue from advertising in "split-run" editions of foreign magazines: that is, Canadian versions, printed in Canada, with Canadian stories written by Canadian writers, for the benefit of Canadian readers. But though the legislation carries the anodyne label "An Act to amend the Excise Tax Act and the Income Tax Act," nobody's fooled: This is the Shut Down Sports Illustrated Act.

Existing split-runs, after all, such as SI's stable-mate Time Canada, are grandfathered. It was SI's announcement two years ago that it planned to run 12 editions a year of Sports Illustrated Canada that prompted the barons of the domestic publishing industry to call in their lobbyists. And it is the fledgling SI Canada that the government, under pressure from the publishers, an interest group uniquely well-placed to press its case, is determined to make an example of. Why, of all the nerve: Imagine those Americans, publishing a Canadian sports magazine! Why it's, it's unCanadian, that's what it is. You'd never catch a Canadian publisher doing that.

No, indeed. One of the many pertinent facts that you will not find highlighted in all the many pages the domestic industry, with its usual brazen self-interest, has devoted to this case is that there is no Canadian general-interest sports magazine. The industry is forced to argue, straight-faced, that SI Canada is draining revenues from, say, Chatelaine.

True, SI Canada itself gives over but a few pages of each issue to Canadian content. But a few, I submit, is better than none, which is what such devoted cultural nationalists as Maclean-Hunter have given us. Indeed, under the terms of the legislation, a certain unnamed magazine could contain as much as 80-per- cent Canadian content and still be treated as merely a northern knockoff of its alien parent.

To the uninitiated, it might seem, shall we say, counter-intuitive that a magazine with no domestic competitor should be ordered, in the name of Canadian nationalism, to carry exclusively foreign content. But then, cultural nationalism is a remarkably malleable concept. Canadian magazine publishers already enjoy a host of special benefits and protections not given to their foreign competitors: The deductibility of advertising expenses, of course, but also a battery of postal subsidies, tariff walls, ownership restrictions and the like.

But what really gets the domestic industry's patriotic blood pumping is not so much protection for Canadian content, but the exclusive right to peddle the more easily profitable American stuff. If they could find a way to force Time-Warner to give them SI Canada, they would, and all the arguments would be inverted. The split-run would then become an essential vehicle of Canadian culture, notwithstanding its largely American content, since only with the revenues it generated could its now-Canadian owners underwrite all those Canadian vehicles they had always been meaning to produce.

This cross-subsidization argument has been behind every asset grab and power play engineered on behalf of what are pleased to call themselves the cultural industries for the last 30 years: Give us fat profits, they say, and we will give you culture. It was behind the CRTC-backed seizure of Country Music Television's licence for the benefit of a would-be domestic competitor. It underlay the extortion of Viacom when it took over the American-owned Paramount, which for some reason required that it should hand over the historically American-owned Ginn publishing house to a Canadian firm. And it was a prominent part of Expressvu's bid to block Power Direct from setting up a competing satellite TV service: Not for the sake of Canadian content, but to keep the revenues from American programming exclusively for Expressvu.

The difference between Canadians and Americans, we are often told, is that in the United States culture is a business. Whereas here, it's a form of organized crime.