The Truth About Canada (21 page)

It’s interesting to look at household expenditures on recreation and culture (including spending on newspapers, sports equipment, gardening, movies, books, CDs, DVDs, toys, pets, etc., etc.). If we do this, as a percentage of GDP, Canada is in 11th place in the OECD. At the bottom of the list comes Mexico and, surprisingly, Ireland, both far behind all the other OECD countries. In 2005, Mexico spent only 1.9 percent of GDP per household on broadly defined culture and recreation, Ireland only 3.1 percent. At the top of the list, U.K. households spent 7.7 percent, Australia 6.9 percent, and the Czech Republic, Iceland, the United States, Austria, and New Zealand were all at or above 6 percent, while Canada was at 5.5 percent.
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Let’s look at the sale of books, music, and newspapers in Canada. In total dollar value of book sales, Canada stands 10th in the world. Most of the countries with larger sales than Canada also have larger or much larger populations: the United States, Japan, Germany, the United Kingdom, Mexico, China, France, Italy, and Spain.

On a per-capita basis, measured in U.S. dollars per head, Canada is 16th in book sales, at only about $63 per annum. Norway is number one at $167, followed by Japan at $163 and Germany at $148. The other
countries with per-capita annual books sales higher than Canada are Finland ($124), Belgium ($117), Switzerland ($112), the United States ($110), Singapore ($107), Sweden ($99), New Zealand ($92), the United Kingdom ($90), Denmark ($87), Ireland and Australia ($77), and Spain ($74). Of interest is the fact that Canada’s per-capita book sales are ahead of such countries as Italy and France.

Now, if we look at total combined per-capita book, newspaper, and music sales in a list of 30 countries, Canada is down in 20th place. At the top of the list, in descending order, are Japan, Norway, Sweden, and Finland. Other countries with higher per-capita sales than Canada include Switzerland, Denmark, the United Kingdom, Austria, Germany, the Netherlands, New Zealand, and the United States.
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In CD and DVD sales, Canada is in sixth place in total dollar sales, but only in 17th place in per-capita sales. The United States is far ahead of every other country in the dollar volume of CD sales, more than double second-place Japan, but Norway is first in per-capita sales, while the United States slips to third place behind the United Kingdom.

Looking at the sale of daily newspapers measured in terms of copies per 1,000 population, Japan is in first place with 551, followed by Norway with 544 and Sweden with 481. Canada, way down in 20th place, is at 157, behind the United States at 188. Other countries with higher newspaper sales than Canada include Finland, Bulgaria, Switzerland, Denmark, the United Kingdom, Austria, Germany, the Netherlands, Singapore, Luxembourg, Hong Kong, Estonia, New Zealand, Slovenia, and the Czech Republic. Surprisingly, Canada is well ahead of Italy (138), Ireland (136), France (134), Australia (110), and Spain (105).

Meanwhile, some 85 percent of the space on Canadian newsstands is devoted to foreign periodicals, and yet our right-wing continentalist plutocracy has been enthusiastically lobbying to allow non-Canadians to take over our bookselling and book publishing industry. Foreign books already command almost 65 percent of the book market in Canada and two-thirds of the educational market, but Canadian publishers (with only 35 percent of sales) publish 85 percent of the Canadian authored trade books published in this country.

Canada imports more foreign book titles every year than any other country in the world, and more foreign magazines, almost all from the United States. In the fall of 2005, it was estimated that 650,000 different book titles were on sale in Canada during the previous 12 months. Just under 16,800 new titles were published in Canada during that time, and some 12,400 other titles were reprinted.

In 2005, Canada’s trade deficit in cultural goods grew by 8.4 percent, to just under $1.67-billion, the largest increase in six years. The biggest deficit was with the United States, at $941.6-million. In 2006, the deficit grew again, to $1.8-billion, of which $1.2-billion was with the United States.

Our deficit in written material, especially periodicals and books, was by far the biggest contributor to the overall cultural-goods deficit. In 2006, imports of written materials accounted for about 73 percent of total cultural imports, while film and videos made up 7.3 percent. U.S. products accounted for about 78 percent of our cultural imports, and of these, books, newspapers, and periodicals represented some 76 percent of the total.
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A bit more about books. According to Statistics Canada, contrary to conventional wisdom, the purchase of books in Canada is the third highest cultural spending category, just behind newspapers at $1.22-billion and movie theatre tickets at $1.18-billion. Book purchases were, as mentioned earlier, well ahead of the dollars spent on live performing arts events and far ahead of the amount spent on attending sports events. All of this said, fewer than one in two Canadian households purchased even a single book in 2001.

In Canada, about 18 percent of English-speakers — described as “the book market” — buy on average more than six books in a three-month period, but on the other hand, 45 percent of English-speaking adults rarely buy books at all. In June 2005, Heritage Canada reported that, on average, Canadians spend 23 hours a week watching TV or listening to music, and only 4.6 hours reading. Mind you, close to 90 percent of Canadians said that they read books, more than half said that they read books every day, and 60 percent claimed to have read at least one book a month.
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We must have very busy libraries.

Poor Canadian booksellers. Because their customers read reviews in U.S., British, and Canadian magazines and newspapers, they expect our bookstores to stock a full array of American and British books in addition to those published in Canada. One result is that Canada, year in year out, imports more English language book titles than any other country. In 2005, U.S. and British book publishers between them produced some 378,000 new titles.

In October 2006, a
Globe and Mail
reporter told readers that in the previous five years people had been devoting less time to reading as a leisure activity. But between 1993 and 2003, the most recent years for which Statistics Canada figures are available at this writing, we see that “Canadian [magazine] publishers are pumping out more periodicals than ever before and pulling in far greater revenues.”
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From 1998 to 2003, magazine industry revenues were up 22.5 percent, and profit margins increased from 5.0 percent to 9.7 percent. In 2003, there was a 42 percent increase in the number of periodical titles over five years earlier, despite the competition from foreign split-run magazines published mostly in the United States but containing Canadian advertising, which is now deductible by the advertisers for tax purposes.

It’s interesting to note that some magazines have been doing quite well in Canada.
Reader’s Digest
continues to top the list with 7.08 million readers. But
Canadian Geographic, Chatelaine
, and
Canadian Living
are in second, third, and fourth place.
Canadian Geographic
has 4.4 million readers.
Maclean’s
has just under 2.75 million, and
Canadian House and Home
has over 2.5 million readers.

Mind you, paid monthly circulation figures are much lower. For the period October 1, 2004, to September 30, 2006,
Reader’s Digest
was at 986,000,
Chatelaine
645,044, and
Canadian Living
527,694. None of the top five U.S. monthly magazines in Canada had a paid circulation of more than 374,516. Nevertheless, according to PricewaterhouseCoopers, Canadian periodicals occupy only about 15 percent of magazine-rack space, with U.S. magazines taking some 85 percent. Given the popularity of Canadian magazines, this newsstand share for them is ridiculous, surely attributable to the heavy U.S. ownership of magazine distributors in this country.

While during the past 25 years the total number of magazines purchased by Canadians fell roughly 30 percent, the average circulation for American titles fell by over 50 percent. In December 2005, the Ontario government’s secretariat Magazines Canada, claimed that “roughly 50 percent of all magazine sales in Canada” can now be attributed to Canadian periodicals.

An aside. James Adams pointed out in the
Globe and Mail
on July 25, 2006, that
National Geographic’s
paid circulation in Canada had fallen from over 800,000 copies to about 374,500 in 2005, and
Playboy
had plummeted from over 500,000 to just over 61,000. What does this mean? I hesitate to speculate, but at least in the case of
Playboy
it probably has to do with widely available porn on the Internet.

How does government support for public radio and television in this country compare with the support for public broadcasting in other countries? In 2004, the OECD ranked Canada a dismal 22nd in a list of 26 countries in public funding for national public broadcasting. Not surprising. All in all, in real terms, Liberal and Conservative governments in Ottawa have chopped more than $400-million from CBC funding. Friends of Canadian Broadcasting summarizes things well:

Our radio and television are drowning in a sea of foreign … mostly American … content.

The vast majority of television programming available to Canadians during prime time hours comes from the U.S.

Canadian private broadcasters, like CTV and Global, air mainly American shows during peak hours — shows that reflect American culture, concerns and ideology.

Meanwhile, 87 percent of Canadians say it’s becoming more important to strengthen Canada’s culture and identity, 89 percent say that the CBC helps distinguish Canada from the United States, and 89 percent say that CBC funding should be maintained or increased.

Yet in per-capita comparisons, the BBC gets more than twice as much government support as the CBC. The Scandinavians, the Japanese,
and the Germans also supply far more per-capita public funding to their public broadcasters. Of the G7 nations, as a percentage of GDP, Canada provides a lower level of public support than any other nation except the United States. And while the politicians allowed the CBC’s public funding to decline by $400-million over the last 15 years, the same politicians somehow expected the quality of the corporation’s radio and television broadcasting to be not only sustained, but improved.

In contrast to Canada’s private TV broadcasters, as the CBC’s Richard Stursberg has noted,

From 7 pm to midnight, almost every night CBC’s schedule consists of Canadian comedies, dramas, documentaries, news, current affairs and sports.

Canada spends the least amount of money per capita on its national public broadcaster. Meanwhile, Italy, Spain, Germany and the United Kingdom, France, Finland and others are ahead of us in spending … and they are hardly under the cultural pressure from U.S. that Canada is.
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Canada provides CBC/Radio-Canada with a poor $33 per capita in public funding. This compares with public-broadcasting support of $154 per capita in Switzerland, $124 in the United Kingdom, and in France, Germany, and Italy an average of $81 per capita. In a broader survey in 2004, among 18 major Western countries, Canada had the third lowest public funding for its public broadcaster. What’s more, the survey found that “Canada’s funding for public broadcasting was less than one-half of the average across the 18 western countries.”
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To say that many Canadian radio broadcasters and arts and culture groups were shocked by the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) 2005 ruling approving new satellite and digital radio services would be an understatement. Incredibly, the applicants would be required to begin their service with only 10 percent of their channels Canadian, despite the fact that private radio stations in Canada are required by the CRTC to devote 35 percent of their music to
Canadian content and, for French-language stations, 55 to 65 percent of vocal music must be performed in French.

Ian Morrison, of Friends of Canadian Broadcasting, put the CRTC decision in perspective:

The consequences for those who want to view or listen to Canadian programs, and for Canadian artists and creators, are stunning.

If the American deal is allowed to stand, it will only be a matter of time before conditions that have spawned tremendous Canadian talent, such as the requirement to play 35 percent homegrown music, are a thing of the past.

Funding for development of Canadian programming and talent will suffer as Canadian broadcasters seek to reduce the levels of investment that are several times greater than those required of the new American entrants … made up of nine foreign channels for every Canadian channel.…

For more than 30 years this country has had a Canadian content policy regarding what music must be given airplay. That policy has paid huge dividends, resulting in a thriving music sector that employs thousands of people in high-wage, high-skill jobs and giving our artists the opportunity to succeed on the world stage.

Which, as almost every Canadian knows, they have very successfully done.

This said, looking at music sales per person in Canada in the first half of 2006, Canada is way down in 20th place in a list of the 26 countries with the largest music markets. While it’s perhaps not surprising that the per-capita dollar value of music sales in Canada is well below that of countries such as the United States, Britain, and Japan, we’re also well below countries such as Norway, Denmark, Belgium, France, Austria, Germany, and Switzerland.
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