Movies, CBC, and the Erasure of Canadian Stories

I open up the movie guide to our local art house theater and discover a movie that seems quite remarkable. In French and Inuktitut, The Necessities of Life tells the story of an Inuit who is sent down to Quebec City to receive treatment for his tuberculosis. It is a quintessentially Canadian film. Will it appear on the big screen in popular theatres? Will many Canadians see it? Heck, will many Canadians ever hear of it? No, no, and no. Why? Because Canada doesn’t value its own stories nearly enough.

A movie theatre experience up here is primarily an American experience. Most stories are American stories: here’s the princess landing in Manhattan, the football hero from Syracuse, the American soldiers raising the flag. When a Canadian story makes it into the mainstream theatres—Passchendale, for instance—it’s big news, as much for its rarity as for anything else.

The media most able to compensate for the appalling absence of Canadian stories in movie theaters is the CBC. Canada is a huge, sparsely populated country, home to diverse cultures, and CBC, I submit, helps to create the ties that bind its citizenry together more than any single institution. How do immigrants to Canada “get” Canada? For me, it was the CBC.

When I first lived up here, I lived in Toronto but for all intents and purposes it was just as easy for me to live in my American mindset via American media. It wasn’t until I moved to a rural area where the U.S. stations weren’t available that I started watching CBC. Suddenly I began receiving different news told from a different point of view. Canadian politics started to intrigue me, Canadian comedy made me laugh, and CFL football was a fresh take on an old game.

And yet here comes the CBC having again to slash jobs and programming due to a nearly 200 million dollar deficit. CBC seems to be dying a death by a thousand cuts. The government looks on, expecting its national broadcaster to fulfill a mandate that it is unwilling to fund sufficiently. A study from 2005 by Nordicity Group Ltd. revealed that of 18 western countries, Canada has the 3rd lowest level of public funding per capita, ahead of only New Zealand and the U.S. And the gap between it and the leading country, Switzerland, is $154/person vs $33/person in Canada. Since that study, CBC’s funding has continued to erode.

The saddest part of this story is that Canadians aren’t particularly outraged, at least not according to the comments added to the news articles appearing on the internet. That so many Canadians think it’s not worth watching is merely a reflection that it's been allowed to become so. The CBC has become less capable of doing what a national broadcaster ought to do: to go not where the money is or where the biggest demographic lies, but to find the compelling untold story, the forgotten history, the issue that’s been shunted aside because its complex or ugly or difficult to tell. National broadcasters can introduce us to those strangers who are our fellow citizens, be they in Lunenberg or Luskville, Gjoa Haven or Prince George.

An American ex-pat pleading for the CBC—that's a sad commentary on Canada's commitment to its own stories. Canadians know they struggle with what it means to be Canadian, beyond we’re not American. The message of movie theatres is that Canadians are, in fact, American, or perhaps more accurately, wannabe-Americans, but the CBC attempts to provide some glimmers of an answer—even as its resources fall away—as to what “Canadian” might mean. Why not show it some respect?