Canada may have temporarily avoided a trade war with the United States, but it’s unlikely that our country’s sudden burst of cultural pride will pop any time soon. Certainly not as long as Donald Trump keeps his watchful eye over his would-be 51st state.
Yet as calls grew over the past few days for patriotic Canadians to cut ties with anything American – including any and all U.S. culture, starting with the likes of Netflix and Disney+ – Canadians found themselves in a streaming-war conundrum. Do cultural boycotts work, or are the calls to cancel Amazon’s Prime Video as foolhardy as Jeff Bezos’s space-cadet dreams?
The Globe’s screen critics Barry Hertz and J. Kelly Nestruck debate the merits of signing off amid the tariff threats.
Barry Hertz: I’m going to play devil’s advocate here and say that cancelling a Netflix subscription and shifting my entertainment budget over to a Canadian streamer doesn’t make sense. Crave, CBC Gem and the few other Canadian streamers out there rely (heavily!) on U.S. content. When I subscribe, I’m paying for everything that service has acquired, including Crave’s huge slice of HBO programming. Bell Media might get my money, but Crave isn’t an entirely made-in-Canada solution that will teach anyone a lesson.
J. Kelly Nestruck: If folks are cancelling Prime Video or Netflix and subscribing to Crave – good for them! While I’m not personally or professionally boycotting American TV, making sure the Yanks aren’t entirely in control of your streaming diet makes a lot of sense as we see an increasingly collaborationist mindset among the tech CEOs south of the border. Of course, streamers have a mix of content from different countries – but Crave has both a stronger selection of (good) Canadian shows than any other commercial streamer, including the great patriotic comedy Shoresy, and Canadians ultimately control what is on it.
I worry about the weakness of our public media combined with the lack of local control over private media, never mind social media, in Canada. Don’t you think the moment is exposing how weak we are in terms of cultural sovereignty?
Barry: I don’t think it’s exposing anything that the vast majority of Canadians aren’t already aware of – and have proven time and again to not care much about. You won’t find a bigger booster of Canadian-made content than I, but we have to be realistic about our approaches, too, and not just boycott something because it feels cathartic.
I’m all for castigating U.S. streamers, but if we’re going to get mad at them, let’s do it for the right reasons – such as their bully tactics over complying (or not) with the Online Streaming Act.
Kelly: Absolutely, let’s get angry at Disney+ and Apple TV+ for being part of the court challenge of the Online Streaming Act that will see them put a measly 5 per cent of their Canadian revenues into funds to produce Canadian content – while they have just signed deals to invest 25 per cent and 20 per cent, respectively, of annual sales in France into French and European series and films.
Personally, I’m much more concerned about Disney chief executive Bob Iger signing off on the ABC defamation settlement with Trump – a decision that has chilled American journalism – and Apple CEO Tim Cook bending the knee to Trump at Mar-a-Lago and paying US$1-million to his inaugural fund. These are fine reasons for a Canadian to move her entertainment bucks over to, say, the ad-free level CBC Gem.
Barry: Understandable, but if that is going to happen on a large scale – a big “if” – then CBC Gem needs to up its catalogue game immensely. Which means either investing heavily in domestic content – which isn’t going to happen any time soon, and requires the construction of a true Canadian star system – or securing better international partners. Which is where the crux of the Cancon issue today sits.
Part of the obstacle that consumers come up against with embracing “Canadian” entertainment is that they feel it is isolationist, insular by design. The real path forward for the industry is to thread Canadian stories through international partnerships. Sad to say, but more Canadians will be interested in consuming Canadian content if it’s also being watched abroad. Call it the Schitt’s Creek factor.
Kelly: My favourite new comedy this winter is CBC/APTN’s North of North – and it’s true more Canadians will stream it when it lands on Netflix in the spring than are now while it’s on Gem and Lumi.
Snooty “ugh Cancon” urbanites aside, however, I think it’s mainly a discoverability thing. Not only does Netflix have more marketing muscle, but there are hundreds of TV journalists around the world writing about its shows, while most Canadian newspapers are culture-coverage-free rumps of their former selves owned by an American hedge fund.
If nothing else, the Trump threats and the grassroots push to buy Canadian is a great opportunity to increase the visibility of our streamers. I recommend TVOKids, Télé-Québec and Knowledge: Kids – the provincial public ones I steer my kids away from YouTube toward for reasons that have nothing to do with trade wars.
Barry: On the marketing and coverage elements, we can agree. It’s genuinely depressing that a show like North of North is available on Canadian services and yet I haven’t heard a peep about it. The Canadian marketing machine is truly creaky. I’ll also take the moment to boost such free (albeit American-based) streamers as Hoopla (free access if you belong to one of many Canadian municipal library systems) and Kanopy (ditto).
The tariff scare should inspire curious Canadian audiences not to so much cry “boycott!” as try to expand their cultural options and dive into what’s made inside our own borders.
Kelly: I’ll shake on that sentiment – for 30 days at least. The American streamers and the viewing revolution they sparked have opened up our televisual horizons – and not only brought Canadians more American content, but allowed us to watch South Koreans die horrific but cool deaths, be depressed as much by Danish politics as our own, and get acquainted with the drag queens of every LGBTQ-friendly country in the world.
As we stand up to American bullying, and for our own culture and industries, we want to make sure not to close our windows on the rest of the globe in the process – because we’re going to need all the friends we can muster in the years ahead.
