Canada's Great Artists Don't Need Trudeau's CRTC To Succeed

“I know who the gatekeepers are. They are still here, telling us in Bill C-11 that we have progressed, that we are more understanding and that our value system has evolved to be inclusive. This statement is a transparent endowment to those whose support they need and whom they desire to influence, but it is a terrible insult to the great writers in my country that I know.” —David Adams Richards

One of the gratifications in writing is finding someone who can express your feelings in a superior fashion. Even more gratifying is when a friend finds the perfect expression of those thoughts. Imagine my happiness to see my old friend David Adams Richards—raconteur, novelist and cranky Canadian loyalist— take the floor in the Senate to defenestrate the execrable Bill C-11. (His prior work helped capsize C-10)

So please forgive us if we quote liberally from his January speech in the upper chamber on the attempt to turn the CRTC into a national ministry for public enlightenment or the culture section of a Central Committee.   

David’s lucid, heartfelt resistance to ceding the power of censorship to the sort of bureaucracy that can’t get you a passport or remove fallen trees from a VIA Rail line is impertinent and necessary. These are the very reasons why he— or those like him who complain— will be among the first targeted when some Ottawa trust-fund plutocrat needs a whipping post to hold off truckers or farmers or whichever “others” come next to the doors of Parliament to make the PM’s acquaintance. 

A product of New Brunswick’s Miramichi, Richards knows those “others” the prime minister sought to make non-persons. “I grew up in a place in the east of Canada called the Maritimes and have fought for every inch of soil in my fictional world that, for years, dismissed who I was and especially whom I wrote about.” 

From his time jousting with the Canada Council or New Brunswick paper pushers he knows the crushing power of bureaucrats and time servers who will want to make themselves, not the artists, the story. “We have filled the world with our talent, but not because of the Minister of Heritage. We have spread our books and movies across the world, but it is not because of some formula. 

“We have insulted so many of our authors, singers, actors and painters by not paying attention to them, and then claiming them when they go somewhere else. They come back to get the Order of Canada and to be feted at Rideau Hall. Drake is known worldwide not because of the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission, or CRTC. Thank God Drake was not up to them, or Leonard Cohen or Gordon Lightfoot either.”

This notion of success without a committee is heresy, of course. Particularly in an age where the pews of civil servants are being filled with radicals and quota appointees who see the process, not the outcome, as the point. Twenty years ago the grey suits and time servers on arts panels were often former artists and creators. Now they are virtue-saturated bullies who think the idea of Black Out nights at the theatre represents racial progress.

They, like Mao, believe that unification is achieved through relentless division and struggle "by the socialist system itself”— in other words, under the power and influence of the cult and its doctrine. Artistic expression under C-11 will come to serve the ongoing struggle for a more perfect culture. Those not fitting the prescription will be cast into a snow bank of irrelevance. 

Richards hears— and fears— their approach. “I think, overall, we have lately become a land of scapegoaters and finger pointers, offering accusations and shame while believing we are a woke society. Cultural committees are based as much in bias and fear as in anything else. I’ve seen enough artistic committees to know that.”

It was hoped that the gross overreach  in the Emergency Measures from this time last year might have swayed Mr. Trudeau and his faculty lounge of compliant stooges from another attempt at locking down more of what was once a liberal, free society. Guess again. Like all good party members and fellow travellers Trudeau’s constituency is elsewhere, not in Canada. 

Egged on by the one-world government pep squad the PM believes one flaw disqualifies an entire system. His locked-down mind can’t see that the system flaws he fears so much are in fact the diversity he craves. They signify our vibrancy. He calls it disinformation. “The very bill suggests a favouritism brought forward by a notional knowledge of what Canada should be and what groups we are now allowed to blame.”

Richards concludes, “This is not opening the gate to greatness but only to compliance. The writers I know don’t need to advance to fit an agenda, and neither do the songwriters or bloggers. When this bill mentions how we have evolved, it is simply a suggestion to comply.”

Vive la Resistance C-11.

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Bruce Dowbiggin @dowbboy is the editor of Not The Public Broadcaster  A two-time winner of the Gemini Award as Canada's top television sports broadcaster, he’s a regular contributor to Sirius XM Canada Talks Ch. 167. Inexact Science: The Six Most Compelling Draft Years In NHL History, his new book with his son Evan, was voted the seventh-best professional hockey book of all time by bookauthority.org . His 2004 book Money Players was voted sixth best on the same list, and is available via http://brucedowbigginbooks.ca/book-personalaccount.aspx