"After all," we would write, at the end of yet another penetrating analysis of the mess that Can Con has made of Canadian broadcasting, "there is no Canadian Magazine and Theatre Commission." Meaning, of course, that although broadcasters may be required, thanks to the ever-watchful CRTC, to play a certain number of Canadian songs or show a certain proportion of Canadian programs, no such rules apply in other media.

The point was unanswerable. Once again, Canadian cultural policy was shown up for the incoherent fraud that it is. Game, set and match.

Ah, but that was in the pre-Coppsian era. In addition to beefing up the existing channels of state supervision in the cultural industries – more money for Telefilm, higher content quotas in radio – the Minister of Canadian Heritage has lately taken to proposing some bold new bits of bureaucratic busywork. If pursued, they would push government further in the direction of regulating the cultural choices of Canadians than it had ever dared go before.

First we learned, thanks to a departmental discussion paper, that the minister was considering imposing minimum content quotas on the films that are shown in Canadian theatres. Now we are told, via the usual highly placed sources, that the same may soon be the case for Canadian magazines.

If Copps has her way, Canadians would be forbidden from advertising in magazines that contained less than 60 per cent domestic content. That's right: forbidden. Quite apart from the constitutional issues involved in banning commercial speech – or at the least, banishing it to an officially- sanctioned corner of the marketplace – we are offered the image of platoons of government regulators, tape measures in hand, counting the column inches in each issue of McLean's to see how much of it is "Canadian." Which is to say, exactly what the CRTC does.

This is a step beyond previous government intrusions into Canadians' readership habits. The 1960s-era legislation known as Bill C-58, still in effect, confined itself to targeting foreign-owned magazines, and then only by denying their advertisers the ability to deduct the expense for income tax purposes.

More recently, Bill C-103 – since overturned by the World Trade Organization –confiscated 80 per cent of the advertising revenue from "split- run" editions of foreign magazines, where the amount of recycled foreign content exceeded 20 per cent. Copps's latest plan may get around the WTO ruling – since the quota would apply equally to Canadian and foreign-owned magazines – but at the cost of significantly increasing the power and purview of the state.

All of this increased activity would be distressing enough, were it not coincident with the increasing inability of the regulators to come up with a reasonable definition of "Canadian." Traditionally, ownership has been the preferred criterion of nationality: Canadian-owned media were given preference, even if their main business was to import the more lucrative foreign product. Indeed, it was insisted, it was especially important that Canadian firms control the import spigot, on the theory that some portion of the profits they earned would be diverted into Canadian production. Of course, the quid rarely followed the quo, but never mind: at least we knew which side of the border to send the dividends.

But now? Word out of New York is that Seagram, the liquor and entertainment conglomerate controlled by the Bronfman family, is about to buy PolyGram, the Dutch-owned music and film distributor. If you think it amusing that PolyGram might become a Canadian company – this is the outfit, remember, that has hauled the government before the WTO over its policy of restricting distribution rights for foreign films to Canadian distributors – try sorting out the nationality of Seagram.

While the company's headquarters are in Montreal, its entertainment subsidiary is based in New York, as is its CEO. The last time the issue arose, after the takeover of Universal Studios, it took a team of investigators from Investment Canada several weeks to determine that, yes, Seagram is Canadian. But it's really just a flip of the coin: the same as will now determine whether Chrysler is a "domestic" – that is, American – car company for purposes of the Auto Pact, or whether its proposed merger with Daimler-Benz makes it a "foreign" company, and therefore ineligible.

So we are presented with the irresistible prospect that Copps's new content quotas will arrive in the theatres just in time to register E. T.: The Extra- Terrestrial (Universal) and Four Weddings and a Funeral (PolyGram) as officially Canadian movies. Or will the CMTC invent some new criterion?