Troubled Canadian Question

Clear away all evil influence

That can hurt me from the States.

Keep me pure among the beaver

With un-Freudian loves and hates.

So, irreverently, Montreal Poet F. R. Scott epitomized a nagging Canadian obsession: how to preserve a distinctive Canadian cultural identity alongside the powerful influence of U.S. television, books and magazines. Last week, in deadly earnest, a three-man Royal Commission on Publications--Canada's equivalent of a U.S. congressional investigation--was sounding the same theme. But along with its concern for Canadian culture, the commission had an unconcealed economic spur: a demand by the Canadian magazine industry for government protection from U.S. competition.

An Old Song. Set up by Premier John Diefenbaker three months ago, the Royal Commission on Publications is headed by the Ottawa Journal's president and editor, Michael Grattan O'Leary, also includes John George Johnston, a Toronto public-relations man, and Montrealer Claude Beaubien, vice president of the Aluminum Co. of Canada Ltd. The committee's assignment: to prepare, for parliamentary action, recommendations that, "while consistent with the maintenance of the freedom of the press, would contribute to the further development of a Canadian identity through a genuinely Canadian periodical press."

The Canadian magazines' story is that they are fast failing financially at the hands of U.S. publications that, entering Canada with an editorial product already paid for by their U.S. circulation, enjoy an unfair edge in the race for Canadian readers and revenues. The plaint is a familiar one. In 1957 a Liberal government zeroed in on Canadian editions of U.S. magazines (principally TIME and Reader's Digest), imposed a 20% tax on their Canadian advertising revenues. Diefenbakers Tories denounced the tax as discriminatory and as an interference with freedom of the press. Since the tax also failed to divert advertising to Canadian publications, the Tories repealed it in 1958 after they came to power.

A Scornful Laugh. What resurrected the cry for protection--besides Premier Diefenbaker's political priming of what he likes to call "pro-Canadianism"--is the fast-spreading U.S. technique of "split-run" advertising; starting late last year, the Saturday Evening Post, McCall's, LIFE and Look opened Canadian-circulation copies to specifically Canadian advertising. Canadian magazines, led by Maclean's (circ. 515,577)-professed to see the handwriting on the wall.

Before the O'Leary Commission, the Canadian publishers and their supporters appealed to Canada's deep reservoirs of anti-American feeling. Said a representative of the Periodical Press Association: "Canadians laugh scornfully when spokesmen of the Soviet bloc call us a U.S. satellite, but are we not in grave danger of becoming a cultural and intellectual satellite when our reading matter becomes so increasingly American?" In rebuttal, representatives of U.S. publications contested the notion that Canadian magazines were suffering unduly, noted that between 1950 and 1959 the ad revenues of Canadian magazines rose from $17 million to $40 million, faster than the growth rate of Canada's gross national product.

The Percentage Ploy. Last week, in Toronto on the last lap of a tour that included hearings in eight Canadian cities, the O'Leary Commission was mulling over proposals that included establishment of a tariff to keep out non-Canadian publications, subsidies and tax benefits for Canadian magazines--and doing nothing at all. The commissioners had heard much testimony in favor of the Canadian publishers' thesis, but here and there another voice was raised. Sardonically noting that as a regional publisher he had to contend with the same competition from Canada's national magazines that they complain of from U.S. magazines' Canadian editions, Publisher Michael Wardell of the Fredericton, N.B. Atlantic Advocate (circ. 22,982) had flatly told the Commission: "There can be no possible justification for a general assault upon American magazines --which would be nothing short of an assault upon freedom of the press."

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