Tuesday, July 15 To no one's surprise, the World Trade Organization has lately confirmed its January ruling that Canada's near-total ban on "split-run" editions of foreign magazines violates international trade law. It is no more astonishing to report that the government of Canada, having been rebuffed even more forcefully on appeal than it was in the original ruling, has learned exactly nothing from the whole affair. Heritage Minister Sheila Copps pretends that the decision, one of the first to be resolved by the WTO's new dispute-settlement process, does not mean that the dense web of protectionist policies surrounding Canada's cultural industries needs to be reconsidered in any fundamental sense. If the government is unlikely simply to ignore the ruling, as for many years it ignored similar rulings against our protectionist beer distribution policies under the toothless old General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, it is equally unwilling to do more than is strictly required to open the Canadian market to foreign publishers. Ordered to remove the offending trade barriers, government and industry talk only of the new ones that can be erected in their place, more cleverly drafted than the last.

Why, in an age of open borders, this dogmatic devotion to cultural protectionism? How is the national interest served by protecting, say, Bus and Truck magazine from foreign competition? What, in short, is all this about? To hear Copps tell it, it's about cats. "The trade tiger is very important to us," she purred to one interviewer last week. "But it's also important that the lowly domestic feline be allowed some room to leave her footprints." The meaning of this obscure analogy may not be immediately clear. What she meant, I think, was to rebut the arguments made by the former Trade minister Art Eggleton among others that the recent success of Canada's cultural industries, notably in music, television and publishing, in selling their wares abroad means there is little need and less rationale for preserving barriers to competition in the domestic market. Indeed it is possible these days to speak of a cultural export boom. More and more, the self-interest of Canada's cultural industries will point in the direction of open borders; expect before long to hear leading figures in the cultural sector argue against cultural protectionism with the same purple rhetoric with which they once insisted on its necessity.

As Copps and others point out, however, not every form of culture travels as well. Broadly speaking, we may distinguish two ways in which a culture expresses itself. The first merely describes actual events as they occur, as in a newspaper or a consumer magazine. As such, it is firmly rooted in the here and now, and of little interest or significance to people in other places and times. It is specific to a particular culture. The chances of, say, Maclean's magazine finding a large audience in other countries for its relentlessly Canadian news coverage would be remote, no matter how well it was produced. These are the "lowly domestic felines" of which Copps speaks.

The second means of cultural expression is less concerned with fact, more with fiction: what we usually call "the arts," to distinguish them from mere journalism. These may be no less taken up with purely local phenomena, indeed describing them in more minute detail than any reporter might dare, but with the express aim of revealing the universal truths that lie therein. As such they are, or at any rate ought to be as intelligible to anyone in any place as they are to Canadians. A news story about a murder in Toronto will normally be of interest only to Torontonians. But a poem about the same murder may be read with equal pleasure the world over.

The point the protectionists miss, however, is that neither form of cultural expression, the culturally specific as much as the universally true, is in need of protection. If it is true that Maclean's, being so specifically Canadian, would be of little interest to Americans, it is equally true that that very Canadian-ness insulates it altogether from foreign competition. This is a point, indeed, that the cultural industries themselves stress: that a magazine like Maclean's, that writes about Canada from a Canadian point of view, is irreplaceable. Foreigners could not duplicate it if they tried.

On the other hand we see that Michael Ondaatje's Canadian-ness, like that of Margaret Atwood or Robertson Davies, has not prevented his works from selling in large quantities around the world. If culturally specific works are by their very nature secure from competition from outside their home market, in the realm of the universal it is not meaningful to speak of a home market at all: the world is their market.