Canadian culture isn’t in crisis – it’s in recovery

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Stephen Marche is a writer based in Toronto.

I can’t remember a time when Canada’s cultural industries were not in crisis. This fall is no exception.

A host of organizations that have given material support to artists in this country for many years – Artscape, HotDocs and Just for Laughs, among others – are at the breaking point; some of them have broken completely. The CBC is under assault, particularly by the party expected to form the government in the next federal election, and the broadcaster’s defenders grow rarer and rarer. Meta’s ban on users sharing news on Facebook and Instagram in response to the Liberal government’s Online News Act hasn’t hurt the platforms in any demonstrable way, but it has resulted in Canadian news outlets losing an estimated 11 million views a day. And Canada’s literary prizes will no doubt be racked by further protests about the war in Gaza.

But despite this turmoil – or maybe because of it – I also can’t remember a time when I’ve felt such a strange optimism about the future of Canadian culture. Its institutions are not so much in crisis as in recovery. The piety that has dominated our cultural institutions is finally beginning to crack.

It’s been a long time coming. Canadian culture, by its nature, lives by spectacles of virtue; in the past few decades, that virtue has taken on the explicit contours of left-wing identity politics. But the tendency toward piety goes back much further, through the Protestant spirit that defined the country throughout the 20th century, and was reflected in the proprieties of settlers such as Catharine Parr Traill and Susanna Moodie. The virtue-mongering of our culture dates back to the origin of the country. We were the Loyalists, after all – the upstanding good little boys and girls who resisted the rebellious Americans. Welcome to Canada: We invented virtue-signalling.

Canadian art serves to echo that origin. It is not allowed to be ambitious; it must instead be high-minded. The politics of Canadian writers, so consumed by their pieties, is usually crude. Leonard Cohen, in Beautiful Losers, articulated the pan-victimology that the country’s writers have slotted themselves into since the sixties: “The English did to us what we did to the Indians, and the Americans did to the English what the English did to us. I demand revenge for everyone.” There is a direct line between that sentiment and the current attempts to alter the course of the war in Gaza by vandalizing bookstores and disrupting literary prizes.

Making a spectacle of your morality is usually a cover for dark urges, and that’s been as true for Cancon as it is for the Catholic Church and Southern preachers. It feels like any given prominent figure in the Canadian cultural landscape is just as likely to be living a secret life as not. (See: Jian Ghomeshi, Grey Owl, Alice Munro etc. etc. etc.)

But we live now in a season of pieties withering on the vine. People throwing fake blood on the windows of an Indigo store wasn’t enough; a different vandal took to lighting books on fire in the stores. Who do they think will be moved, and to what actions, by such gestures of pure illiteracy? And the attacks on the Giller Prize are proving as epically self-defeating as they are illogical. Why would they target the Gillers rather than, say, the Amazon First Novel Prize? Amazon has poured billions into Israel, including its military artificial-intelligence network. And it goes without saying that nobody has bothered to consider what Canadian companies have financial entanglements with the United Arab Emirates, which has been actively sponsoring the civil war in Sudan. Curiously, nobody’s trying to throw sand in the gears of that genocide.

Let’s be honest here: The Giller Prize is a target because of the last name of its founder. Rabinovitch – such a fat, Jewish name. Such a ripe target for the new breed of sanctimony that blends so seamlessly into race hatred. Only that name allows for the proper pose.

And to be clear, it is all posing. You have not, nor will you, hear about any winner, potential or past, giving prize money back because of their stand. The kind of people who take cash from prizes that they then accuse of supporting genocide have so little integrity that they can be of no use to their allies; it is much better to have them as enemies. Not that they are particularly nice as enemies, either: Several nominees for this year’s Giller have had to remove their social-media accounts because the online assaults grew too toxic. Giller jury members have been inundated with vicious, hate-filled, torture-porn e-mails. The correct response to the writers who have excluded themselves from the Gillers is to understand that their departure is terrific news: Don’t let the door hit you on the way out. (I should probably point out that I was, very briefly, on an advisory committee to the Gillers. I attended one meeting by Zoom, said nothing, and was not paid.)

These activists aren’t fighting to keep the systems alive that fund Canadian work. Instead they rip themselves apart over things that won’t actually make an impact in the world. That’s the beautiful thing about so much of today’s progressive left: You don’t have to bother to purge them. They throw themselves out of institutions so ably. They make themselves irrelevant so conveniently. And the institutions they build for themselves have the briefest of half-lives.

What’s killing these pieties is that the vast majority of Canadians understand the utter phoniness of the activists’ moral postures. At the Writers’ Trust of Canada’s Politics and The Pen dinner in Ottawa in May, the crowd shouted at a writer who jumped on stage uninvited and took the microphone to lecture everyone about Gaza. Many of the guests at other award ceremonies have cheered when they see security throw protesters out. And it’s not because they somehow approve of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu or his brutal campaign in Gaza, or do not understand the scale of the horror overwhelming the Middle East. The reason the crowds are relieved to see the shouters excluded from Canadian cultural life is that they see right through their malignant narcissism.

The current self-cannibalism of the left provides a once-in-a-generation opportunity to reshape the basis of Canadian culture. Money will be the vehicle of that reshaping.

A 2023 Nanos survey revealed a sharp decline in Canadian donations to arts and culture organizations. And why wouldn’t there be? People who give money to cultural institutions do so because they love Canada and they love art and they want a little status bump – what fundraisers call “the halo effect.” They do not typically care about identity politics, and most of the time, they find the institutional pieties as unbearable as ordinary people do. That goes as much for the VP committing a bank to sponsoring a festival as it does for the lifelong opera lover who puts a $25 cheque in the mail. Why would anyone give money to, say, The Walrus when there are so many other options that do more than tick the boxes of left-wing social-media consensus? How long will donors continue to feed the habit of the junkies of self-righteousness?

Other institutions are losing their once-entrenched connections to progressive orthodoxies. They have no choice. As a freelance writer, I am a bit like a stray cat; I wander into a lot of different houses and down many dark alleys, and I have seen the era of the slash-activists (the novelist/activist, the curator/activist, the administrator/activist, the journalist/activist, the professor/activist) coming to an end. Editors and publishers and administrators have learned: Too many activists work in bad faith, and only harm the institutions foolish enough to employ them. Once fired, they call their ex-bosses monsters online. They bemoan the system. They warn that their industries won’t survive without their unique perspectives. But nobody ever regrets firing a slash-activist. Their colleagues, even the ones who like them, are relieved when they go. Their institutions and their industries do better without them.

Soon enough, the only places left that will have any slash-activists will be agencies of the state, which have been subject to an entrenched ideological capture that will be harder to overcome. The CBC and the humanities departments of universities, which are both in rapid decline, probably won’t be able to recover, at least not as forces capable of shaping Canadian culture. The enrolment in humanities departments in Canada has declined by half over the past 30 years. While Angus Reid found that 47 per cent of Canadians oppose the defunding of the CBC, a full 36 per cent want it defunded entirely, and a majority want, at minimum, significant change. The CBC has drifted to such an extreme political fringe that it no longer reflects, even modestly, the actual political conversations happening in the country. And some university departments are directly contributing to the climate of toxic othering that is consuming our discourse; the sociology department at York University, for instance, was chaired for several years by a woman who was later charged with mischief in the Indigo vandalism, which police characterized as hate-motivated. When such institutions become active vectors of polarization, who can justify their continued existence, especially on government funding? Why would any society fund its own undermining?

Voters, rather than donors, will control the fates of such places. But the professors who are still teaching activist journalism – as they still do at Toronto Metropolitan University, Carleton and other Canadian schools – are being manifestly irresponsible to their students, preparing them for career oblivion. It’s a buyers’ market for outrage now. The supply side is flooded.

That’s why, even in this dark moment, I feel oddly optimistic. The forces of self-righteousness are dimming every month. The most strident voices of the moralists are easier to ignore all the time. The pain of the moment is the pain of transformation. As Picasso famously said, “Every act of creation is first of all an act of destruction.”

Quitting piety is a bit like quitting smoking: It hurts for a bit, but then you can breathe and everything tastes good again. Canada wants to breathe. It deserves to breathe. At last.

Editor’s note: A previous version of this article incorrectly said a former chair of York University's sociology department was charged with hate-motivated mischief following the vandalism of a downtown Toronto Indigo store. The charge was mischief, which police characterized as hate-motivated.