00:00:00.000What exactly does it mean to be Canadian content, you know, like does a, a rural, uh, like Montana
00:00:08.120hunting show, for example, from the U.S. that, you know, you've got hunters, uh, uh, on the same
00:00:13.460land essentially that's in Alberta and Saskatchewan hunting the same animals that are in Alberta and
00:00:18.280Saskatchewan. Is that, is that an American content that, uh, you know, diverts away from
00:00:24.200canadiana so to speak in a way that's significantly more egregious than a uh say a a drag queen story
00:00:32.240hour show based in ottawa like what is that canadian by virtue of just being based in in
00:00:37.300canada like what what do these terms really mean mr carpe please define them
00:00:42.120you got this like downtown toronto ndp liberal lgbtq equity diversity inclusion
00:00:53.380mindset. It's gotten worse in recent years. That's always been their definition of Canadian.
00:01:02.480You're not going to get much in the way of firearms owners that are hunting deer or
00:01:11.340conservative Christians that are worshiping at church. I mean, it's got kind of the left-wing
00:01:19.380downtown toronto slant to it we we've talked a little bit about this over the last year just
00:01:26.400partially because we've been having so many conversations about what canada used to be and
00:01:31.240what canada is now and i feel like that's that's the difference is that there are many people who
00:01:37.540are they're somewhat nostalgic for the the culture and the way that canada used to function
00:01:43.740and in a way now this canadian spirit is a surface level i've used the term like a maple
00:01:52.400syrup branded canadian identity where it's superficial essentially what you have with
00:02:00.460some of these uh with the programming that they're prioritizing is you have something that
00:02:06.820looks like it could take place in los angeles just from the stories being told or just the
00:02:12.480ideological framework except it's just filmed in ottawa or toronto and it just has a canadian
00:02:20.140backdrop with the most surface level identifying things that makes maybe there's a bit of snow
00:02:26.500maybe there's that little bit of an accent but other than that the framework behind it is
00:02:33.860is no different than like new york or los angeles from what it's drawing upon from a cultural
00:02:40.140standpoint. And I would ask the question, like, why do we need a government body to, you know,
00:02:45.240help us out, so to speak, when we can, you know, watch a TV show, just decide for ourselves what
00:02:52.940TV shows we want to watch, what radio stations we want to listen to without somebody that, you know,
00:02:58.840we're paying millions of dollars to the, what, nearly 700 employees that they have. And why are
00:03:10.040we doing this in the first place? Why do we need that supervision, that regulation in the first
00:03:19.420place? Does it imply that Canadians are too stupid to be able to choose what they want to watch or
00:03:27.180we're too fragile that if not for this benevolent organization, like we would be harmed, automatically
00:03:37.640harmed by consuming too much American content or, well, that seems to be the underlying premise,
00:03:43.900right? This is why, again, we've had this around now for 57 years, the CRTC. Before the CRTC was
00:03:50.560created, even going back to the 1930s, we had a radio broadcasting act, which was federal
00:03:57.380legislation. And then in the 30s, we got a replacement broadcasting act and the Canadian
00:04:06.120Broadcasting Corporation, the CBC was created, was probably, I would make an assumption it was
00:04:12.960probably more mainstream at that time and didn't, you know, hadn't been taken over by, you know,
00:04:20.080Marxist woke ideologues. I'm making an assumption. I haven't looked at what the CBC was producing in
00:04:26.460the 30s, 40s, 50s, and so on. But definitely there's this idea that, yeah, Canadians are
00:04:34.540fragile. We need to be protected from American content. Otherwise, we're somehow going to lose
00:04:40.580our identity. And I think there's a kernel of truth in that. You might remember the late
00:04:50.320Ted Byfield, who died within the past four or five years and ran Alberta Report magazine.
00:05:00.140And he was 70 years old in 1993. I forget his exact age, but he was born, I think, in 1920-ish. And he said in his youth, and until Pierre Elliott Trudeau took over, took power in 1968, until Pierre Elliott Trudeau became prime minister,
00:05:27.780Canada's identity was British. We were British North America, according to Ted Byfield. And we
00:05:34.740had the Royal Mail and the Royal this and the Royal that and the Royal everything. And at movie
00:05:41.780theatres, people sang God Save the Queen long before Old Canada became popular. As back in the
00:05:49.160day, you just apparently, you know, when people gathered in a movie theatre, it was kind of like
00:05:54.580a public meeting. So people would sing the national anthem, which was God Save the Queen.
00:06:00.540And so everybody was very, very, very British. The country had a British feel to it. We drove
00:06:08.800on the left side of the road at one point in history, although I think it was quite a long
00:06:12.060time ago that we switched to the right. But so we were this British North America is what Canada
00:06:17.960was. And Pierre Elliott Trudeau didn't like that. And so he successfully repudiated that
00:06:25.920British heritage and came up with ideas of biculturalism, you know, French-English and
00:06:32.540then multiculturalism. And then his son, Justin Trudeau, told us, you know, Canada's a post-national
00:06:39.620state. Like, we don't really, I think he might be correct or at least partially correct, right?
00:06:46.760Like when you repudiate the old British heritage and you don't really have anything too
00:06:54.840definitive to replace it with, you're down into this post-national state and then all
00:06:59.920you have left is sort of this knee-jerk anti-Americanism.
00:07:11.740Yeah, well, that's kind of the heart of the matter, isn't it?
00:07:15.400I mean, how are you supposed to have anything resembling an objective definition of what Canadiana or Canadian content means if your prime minister deems the country to be a post-national state?
00:07:29.620Like you say, I mean, it's not, you're not, this is a, this has been a concern that a lot of our guests have, have talked about and we've talked about as well in that Canadians, at least in the modern conception and, you know, say in the last 10, 15 years, it's, it's become very overt, this negative definition of what a Canadian means.
00:07:52.040Like you say, it's not American. That's what a Canadian is. We're we're we live sort of in the same area and we kind of we speak the same language and we're sort of the same, you know, demographics for the most part. But we're not them. We're we're we're just not. Well, yeah, you're if you're not making a positive claim on what you actually are. How are you meant to defend that as some sort of cultural institution?