In a small room in a large building in the great, grey city of Geneva, a panel of experts begins hearings next week on what must be the oddest case to come before an international trade tribunal in a long time. The dispute, one of the first to be brought before the new World Trade Organization, was triggered when one country passed a law prohibiting foreign firms in a certain industry from using domestic content in the products they hoped to sell there. Not requiring local content: banning it. That muddled country?

Why, Canada, of course.

The "of course" follows once you learn that the industry in question is the magazine industry. For in the name of preserving Canada's "unique cultural identity," no argument is too confused and no policy too counterproductive, so long as the handful of large firms that dominate the cultural industries make more money. That's more or less the text of Bill C-103, the legislation, passed by the Commons last year, confiscating 80 per cent of the revenues generated by "split-run" magazines -- or rather, on the revenues generated by one split-run in particular, Sports Illustrated Canada.

Split-runs, as a thousand hyperventilating stories in the Canadian media will tell you, are local editions of the parent magazine, with stories of particular local interest added to the regular fare. Sports Illustrated's crime is to have hired Canadian writers to write about Canadian athletes for the pleasure of Canadian readers of a magazine printed in Canada by Canadian workers.

Thank goodness that was snuffed out.

Mind you, this is not always as evil as it sounds. When The Toronto Star produces a suburban edition, or Maclean's magazine publishes in Chinese, this is known as "serving the community." When an American magazine brings out a Canadian version, however, it is transformed into a hideous obscenity called "dumping." Having already recovered its costs in the vast American market, Sports Illustrated can undercut Canadian magazines in the competition for advertising dollars. And you know what that means. No more Canadian magazines. No more Canadian culture. No more Canada.

And no more fat profits for Maclean-Hunter and Telemedia.

So instead, to better protect Canadian culture, Sports Illustrated is now required to run no Canadian stories at all. Canadians have had long experience with laws setting minimum levels of Canadian content. This must be the first to forbid it. No one would pretend that SI Canada, with its handful of stories about hockey and Blue Jays, was a Canadian magazine.

But the legislation stipulates that the same confiscatory tax would apply even if it carried as much as 80 per cent CanCon.

That is, so long as it's American-owned. If it were Canadian-owned, it could fill its pages with nothing but New York Yankees stories for all the government cares. But then, there is no Canadian general-interest sports magazine: we are protecting something that doesn't exist. Or rather, we are asked to ban SI Canada on the basis of the competitive threat it presents to Dog World, Bus & Truck and Canadian Grocer.

That's one of many interesting facts that the Canadian media forgets to mention in its coverage of this story. It isn't as if, without the "unfair" advantage of the split-run, SI would be competing fairly with Canadian magazines. It might be mentioned, for example, but rarely is, that advertisers in SI Canada would still be ineligible to write off the cost of the ads, which means that for every dollar they might spend to advertise in a Canadian- owned magazine they would have to spend two dollars in SI Canada. Nor would SI Canada be eligible for the postal subsidies and Canada Council grants that sustain so many homegrown publications.

In any case, it isn't engaged in "unfair trade" or "dumping" at all, assuming these terms had much meaning to begin with. There's a much simpler term to describe the advantage of a split-run. It's called "economies of scale." And while that in itself might seem to doom Canadian magazines, it isn't clear that's the case at all. If, that is, Canadian readers -- and therefore Canadian advertisers -- view American and Canadian magazines as essentially interchangeable, then yes, they will choose whichever is cheaper. Then and only then are economies of scale decisive.

But the whole point of cultural nationalism, the whole reason for the protection, is supposed to be that Canadians and Americans are not the same: that American magazines cannot speak to Canadian interests, tastes and values in quite the same way. In which case, price is not the only factor, or even a particularly important one. In which case, Canadian publishers have nothing to worry about. In which case, they should stop whining, and give Canadian sports fans a break.