Source : Globe & Mail

So, Buzz Hargrove thinks Stephen Harper is a separatist. Well, maybe the old unionist is on to something, I got to thinking to myself, as I took another look at the section on arts and culture in the Conservative Party platform.

This was not, by the way, an onerous task: This chipper little 50-page document, released a mere 10 days before the election, devotes a grand total of 142 words to arts, culture and amateur sport. Many of those words are reassuring platitudes about supporting national cultural institutions, but first up is the only concrete proposal in the so-called plan: a promise to establish a francophone secretariat within the Department of Canadian Heritage, recognizing that language is at the heart of culture and should form the basis for decision-making for the French-language cultural and artistic community.

Distinct society, anyone?

Yup, it doesn't take a particularly hardened political analyst to recognize that proposal as a blatant pitch to Bloc voters in Quebec, but that doesn't necessarily make it a bad idea. When Paul Martin cut a special health-care deal with Quebec in 2004, Trudeau-style federalists may have shuddered, but asymmetrical federalism, as the Ottawa wonks call it, is a creeping reality in national cultural institutions because it has always been the reality on the ground. Despite their occasional attempts to gather news jointly, the CBC and Radio-Canada have always operated as separate entities and even their shared corporate structure reflects that. There is talk at the federal funding agency Telefilm these days of recognizing the huge divide between Quebec, where almost a quarter of the box office goes to domestic movies, and the English-language market so utterly dominated by Hollywood, and of actually establishing separate policies for the two.

A broken leg is a broken leg, whether you speak French, English or Aanishnaabeg, and however much we might disagree about health-care delivery, most of us would recognize that everybody has the same right to get it fixed. The desire for -- and the ability to find -- a Canadian novel, a French-language newscast, a cop show set in Vancouver or a coming-of-age movie from Quebec are much less concrete needs and much harder to define as rights. Quebec and the rest of Canada might as well be separate countries when it comes to the kind of culture created on either side of the linguistic divide and the specific challenges of delivering it to audiences.

On the political scene, the most significant difference is the extent to which culture is on the agenda in Quebec in a way it never is in English Canada -- for proof of the latter just take a look at the total inattention to cultural issues in the current election campaign. Or compare the Conservatives' measly 142 words to what the Bloc has to offer in its much longer platform: an affirmation that arts and culture are the very basis of Quebec identity, followed by 4½ pages of specific proposals. Some of these are familiar old demands (remove the GST on books); some are lifted straight from the cultural lobby's briefs (various kinds of tax relief for artists) and some are refreshingly specific positions on current affairs. The Bloc urges the federal government to uphold its promise to double the Canada Council's funding and is adamantly opposed to the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission's recent decision to approve new satellite-radio services that only offer a few Canadian channels (a plan that was particularly criticized for its paucity of French-language channels).

The Bloc also takes the Liberal government to task for funding culture as a form of federalist propaganda, which is rich coming from the province that has always best understood the political value of the culture portfolio and the arts' ability to nation-build. Let's be honest here: Neither English nor French Canada is forced to suffer government propaganda disguised as art or news. On paper, the CBC does have a mandate to promote Canadian unity, but in practice that amounts to nothing more than airing Canadian programming and giving one region news of another.

The Bloc's accusation that, for Ottawa, Quebec culture is simply another regional culture is also unfair. Success breeds success, and Quebec's cultural dynamism, fuelled by nationalist pride, geographic concentration and linguistic separation, has for years assured it a disproportionate degree of attention, admiration -- and grants.

The reality in Canada is that a single Quebec culture, united if not monolithic, does create a society utterly distinct from the diffuse, multicultural English Canadian scene so overshadowed by Hollywood. Would a francophone cultural secretariat in the federal government recognize that, better manage the resources devoted to Quebec culture by liberating it from fruitless discussions of somebody else's problems and perhaps thereby free up resources and ideas for the English side as well? Or would it be both an unnecessary level of bureaucracy and a further brick in the wall that tends to divide the French and English cultural communities, a separation that is much more to the detriment of English Canada that it is to Quebec? That would all depend on how a nationalist idea that some Conservative pulled off the shelf in a big hurry is actually executed.

© Globe & Mail