What steel and magazines have to do with each other may at first seem obscure. But the link was inevitable the minute Sheila Copps, the heritage minister, unveiled Bill C-55, Ottawa's latest attempt to protect the Canadian magazine industry from its perennial foe, the Canadian magazine reader.

Alas, too many Canadian readers, if unchaperoned, are inclined to peek into American magazines, there to discover the taboo delights of scented strips and other enticements to commerce. Which tempts too many Canadian advertisers into buying space in American magazines in pursuit of those deviant eyeballs (and nostrils). Unwilling to go so far as to ban the reading of imported magazines, successive governments have instead taken steps to discourage Canadian advertisers from placing ads in them.

The latest skirmish in this Thirty Years War concerns the dreaded "split-runs," local versions of American magazines with some Canadian content -- and a whole lot of Canadian ads. Previously the government had proposed merely to confiscate the proceeds on the sale of these publications (well, 80% of them, anyway). After the World Trade Organization ruled this crudely protectionist policy out of bounds, the government produced what it plainly views as a more moderate, sophisticated alternative: It made selling advertising in split-runs a criminal offence.

This hare-brained scheme has little more chance of surviving WTO scrutiny. Meanwhile, the U.S., tired of Canadian stonewalling, is threatening a swifter and more terrible retribution.

While Canada's existing panoply of protections for what are unblushingly called "the cultural industries" (I thought it was the Americans who think culture is a business) were grandfathered under the the North American Free Trade Agreement, the U.S. retained some limited right to retaliate against any new barriers we erected. How limited? They were allowed to maul other Canadian industries as badly as we had mauled theirs -- in tradespeak, they could limit Canadian exports to "equivalent commercial effect." So, in response to our absurd blackballing of split-run magazines, the Americans may impose tariffs on Canadian steel. Or textiles. Or anything they like. So what, you say?

There aren't any split-runs, except for Time Canada, and it's been grandfathered. Oh, and Sports Illustrated, which put out a couple of Canadian issues before it was run out of town. What's that worth? A couple of tonnes of cold rolled, maybe?

This is where it gets good. In order to buttress its case against Sports Illustrated Canada, the domestic industry was obliged to invoke the spectre of dozens and dozens of American magazines lined up along the border, just waiting for the signal to invade.

Otherwise, it would have had to argue that SI, which has no direct Canadian competitor -- despite 30 years of protection, the famously patriotic Canadian magazine industry has yet to produce a general interest sports magazine -- was somehow a threat to the survival of, say, Chatelaine.

So, as usual, it reached for the doomsday scenario. Millions of dollars in Canadian advertising revenues would be diverted into the pockets of the invaders. Dozens of Canadian magazines would close. And you know what that means. Without Canadian magazines, magazines that let us "tell ourselves our own stories" -- magazines, that is, like Dog World and Bus & Truck -- Canadian culture itself would disappear.

Whoops. Thanks to the industry's purple rhetoric, the U.S. can now persuasively argue for the most extraordinary retaliatory measures, far beyond what they would otherwise have been allowed. If indeed the ban on advertising in split-runs will save the Canadian magazine industry all those millions of dollars those are millions of dollars denied to the American industry. Hey, it's not us, the Americans could say, as they taxed our steel into oblivion. We're just using your numbers.

We have not just shot ourselves in the foot, then, with this legislation. We have put a price on our own heads.