The Hand-over

by Elaine Dewar

  Some Canadian publishers say that Canadian book publishing is a glamour business. Well, one former publisher said so—Avie Bennett. This reminds me of that old joke about the man who ran away from home to join the circus.15

  There are certainly a lot of parties, literary festivals, prize brunches, lunches, and galas that publishing people attend, if that’s what glamour means. Some of these events are sufficiently well publicized that Important People like Hilary Weston and a Big Bank have bought naming rights. Consider that annual televised unreality show, The Scotiabank Giller Prize. Publishers who have brought forth nominated books get invitations. And they go, dressed in their best. They are seated at tables peopled with real celebrities and “people of influence” who are invited to attend the show in order to drag the public’s attention toward Canadian writing. Nominated writers, on the other hand, have been known to appear at The Giller like so many Cinderellas in rented or borrowed finery. In 2013, some Canadian publishing people—Avie Bennett for one—got to attend a Nobel Prize Ball, thanks to Alice Munro’s Nobel Prize, though McClelland & Stewart, the company that published a lot of her work in Canada, had by then become just another imprint owned by Bertelsmann SE & Co. KGaA.

  This brings me to another fact about Canadian book publishing that should be better known. The industry’s operating revenues amounted to about $1.7 billion in 2014, way down from over $2.1 billion in 2006.16 Are you surprised to learn that only about seven percent of those revenues17 were paid out to writers as royalties?

  No writer will be. The average annual gross income for writers in Canada in 2015 was a munificent $12,879, which was 27% lower than their average income in 1998 (after taking inflation into account). It was $36,000 below the average income earned by Canadians in general. Female writers (the majority) made only 55% of what male writers earned. A similar pattern of decline in revenues and increase in the poverty of writers is evident in the US and the UK. This pattern parallels the intense worldwide consolidation of the publishing industry and the withdrawal of important copyright protections.18

  I tell you these things so you will understand something of the world that Avie Bennett bought into when he purchased M&S in 1985, and which he washed his hands of fifteen years later.

  Every public policy, like every person, has a history. Major public policies are usually born in the sunshine of a fresh political morning, the brainchildren of brand new governments. Such policies eventually die in the darkness of what former British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan is said to have called “events, dear boy, events.” The birth of Canada’s nationalist publishing policy was different. It was not a new government’s splendid baby: it was in fact birthed by events, “on the fly,”19 as one writer put it, a small part of the various policy responses to the dangerous events and electoral requirements of the early 1970s.

  It was basically an add-on to a larger strategy devised by federalists shaken by the rise of radical separatism in Quebec. Small nationalist policies were offered to English-speaking Canadians as vaccinations against a more serious political infection.

  By the late 1960s, nationalist ideas had become very attractive to the English-speaking boomer generation—a generation so large and volatile that it decided elections. English-speaking boomers (yes, I am one) were well-educated, ambitious, and utterly disdainful of the fear of ethnic nationalism and political radicalism ground into our parents by the Great Depression and World War II. We were both fascinated and repelled by the separatists in Quebec: repelled because they wanted to leave us, yet fascinated because their anti-colonialist ideas resonated. We weren’t all the descendants of British immigrants emotionally tied to the Mother Country and the Queen: many of us had different roots, neither French nor English. We were fed up with being under the economic thumb of American multinational corporations whose decisions about investment, research, and development were made at head offices in New York or Chicago or Houston, leaving Canadians with dominion over nothing. And while we were no longer a colony of Britain, we weren’t free of it either, and wouldn’t be until the repatriation of the Constitution in 1982. We had become a comfortable Puerto Rico North, a resource-rich protectorate of the American Empire. As various government reports and commissions had made clear since the 1950s, about 30 percent of Canadian businesses were subsidiaries of American multinationals, and by 1973, a staggering 90% of Canadian oil and gas revenues went to the foreign-owned multinational oil companies known as the Seven Sisters.20 Young English-speaking Canadians wanted to change that, to become maîtres chez nous of a new Canada, if we could just figure out what being Canadian meant.

  When I was growing up, English-Canadian magazines and newspapers constantly posed this question to their readers: what is the Canadian identity? Is a Canadian just a Briton without the class antagonism? Is a Canadian an American without the right to pursue happiness? French-speaking Quebecers knew who they were because they remembered themselves en Français, which made them marvellously distinct in a sea of les maudits Anglais. English-speaking Canadians shared a language with the Americans, the British, and the entire Commonwealth. With the exception of First Nations, we were immigrants or the descendants of immigrants. What cultural touchstones were ours alone? We remembered next to nothing about ourselves because hardly anybody wrote about us. The Americans next door, along with our former masters, the British, treated the Canadian book market as extensions of their domestic ones. Our textbooks and trade books were mainly written abroad. Our scholars and authors usually had to find a foreign-owned publisher if they wanted to get their ideas into the world. Pierre Berton’s first book was published by a foreign-owned publisher: the same was true for Farley Mowat and W.O. Mitchell.21

  In 1971, one year to the day after the FLQ Manifesto was read out on the CBC during the height of the October Crisis, Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau rose in the House to issue a counter manifesto. It was presented as a response to the recommendations of the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism published two years earlier, but everyone knew it was more along the lines of a counterpunch. Instead of Canada as a nation founded by the English and the French alone, Trudeau proposed an image of Canada much closer to the truth, a wonderful mosaic made up of people from the four corners of the earth. Our multiplicity of ethnic identities would become Canada’s real identity, he argued, with no one group representing Canada.22 Instead of the US melting pot model, we would encourage Canadians to keep hold of their ethnic differences, all of which would have equal value. This Multiculturalism Policy, as it was called, followed major changes in immigration rules which had opened Canada’s doors to anyone with the right qualifications, regardless of country of origin, regardless of ethnicity and race. The leader of the Official Opposition and the leader of the NDP rose to support Trudeau. Everyone seemed to grasp the need to promote a diverse society over one based on French versus English identities. This determination grew more urgent after the Parti Québécois swept to power in Quebec in 1976. Referenda on the break-up of the country loomed. The idea of diversity as the central fact of Canadian culture would either hold the country together or drive it apart, no one really knew.

  One thing everyone did know is that no one could create an identity out of a multiplicity of identities just by making a speech in the House. After the Massey-Levesque Royal Commission of 1949 to 1951 on arts, letters and sciences in Canada, policy makers in Ottawa had come to believe that English Canada’s curious lack of identity was due to the absence of cultural mirrors. How could Canadians know themselves if they so rarely saw themselves reflected in stories, books, movies, songs, television shows, went the argument? And how could we see ourselves reflected if our cultural artifacts were made elsewhere for other markets? The CBC and the National Film Board had both been created with mandates to generate national conversations (in the case of the Film Board to make wartime propaganda films) so as to protect Canadian airwaves and film screens from an American cultural onslaught. Book pu
blishing was different: Canadian publishing had been established early in the life of the country, yet by the time of the Massey-Levesque Commission, Canadian publishing had fallen on hard times. The first Canadian press, the Ryerson Press, was started in 1829, at around the same time and with the same purpose as Bertelsmann in Germany—to publish religious tracts. Then it began to find audiences with more secular works. Canadian publishing companies had done well publishing Canadian writers in the 1880s and done well again by producing patriotic books during World War I. Ryerson brought out 84 Canadian titles in 1930.23 But while the publishing trade in Quebec grew rapidly during World War II, in English Canada publishers did poorly with Canadian authors. They relied instead on selling works originated elsewhere, and on educational publishing in which the number of buyers was guaranteed by provincial contracts.24 Massey pointed out that the output of Canadian books had plummeted from that high point in 1930: in 1948, only 14 novels and 35 works of poetry and drama were published in English Canada by Canadian companies.25

  The Massey-Levesque report led to the creation of the Canada Council in 1957 and the National Library of Canada. (The Commission found that more Canadian books could be found in the US Library of Congress and in other American libraries than in Canada.)26 But getting more English Canadian companies to publish Canadian authors remained the hard problem. A state-owned book publishing company smacked of something the Soviets would do. The Canada Council only issued its first grants to publishers in 1972.27

  Every trade book is a risky, stand-alone offering. Well known and successful authors produce books that fail, and in a market as small as Canada’s, even a big success may fail to defray the costs of production, marketing and distribution. The problem was complex: how could Canadian-owned publishers compete with the foreign-owned publishers already active in Canada yet centred in much larger markets? The foreign-owned companies could amortize their costs over much larger sales in their much larger home markets. Foreign-owned trade publishers (as opposed to academic or educational publishers) active in Canada had no incentive to publish Canadian authors writing on Canadian subjects. How many US readers would want to buy a biography of Sir John A. Macdonald? Why would a British reader want a coming of age novel set in rural Saskatchewan? That’s why book traffic moved in one direction only, from a foreign source to Canadian readers.

  Canadian storytellers needed Canadian publishers willing to take the risks necessary to find Canadian audiences. But Canadian publishers could only make a go of it by acting as Canadian agents for foreign publishers, or, by printing textbooks ordered by provincial education departments. (For that story, read The Perilous Trade by Roy MacSkimming.) It took the canniest and most determined of Canadian trade publishers, Jack McClelland, the owner of McClelland & Stewart Ltd., to ignore most of these realities, to put aside the profitable educational publishing business and concentrate instead on finding and marketing Canadian authors of fiction and non-fiction. By the early 1960s, McClelland & Stewart was the leading publisher of Canadian works, but every year was a struggle.

  In 1971, McClelland realized that if he wanted his company to survive, he had to attract serious support from governments. At that point, there were no grants offered to publishers by any level of government. McClelland & Stewart was in trouble: it was carrying too much debt, a hangover from doing too many books for the Centennial Year, 1967, and McClelland’s refusal of the offer of a cash infusion from the Bronfman investment vehicle, CEMP, and the McConnell family’s Starlaw. The deal they’d offered would have required McClelland to give up control.28 Later, they’d backed an M&S bank loan for close to $1 million with the Toronto-Dominion Bank. He was having trouble paying it back.

  He picked the time to make his pitch for help with great skill. John Robarts, the handsome, fiery, and innovative Premier of Ontario, had been replaced as leader of the Progressive Conservative government by former Education Minister, Bill Davis. In 1970, Davis had set up a Royal Commission on book publishing due to concerns about foreign textbooks flooding Canadian schools and the sale of the original Canadian publisher, Ryerson Press, and Gage, to foreign interests. Just as those hearings began, in February 1971, Jack McClelland announced that he hadn’t made any inroads on what had become a $2 million debt. He said he needed immediate investment to the tune of about $1.5 million or he would have to consider selling out—to foreign interests.29

  Jack McClelland was also a founding co-chairperson of the brand new Committee for an Independent Canada. He’d been recruited to the nationalist cause, along with Quebec publisher Claude Ryan, in 1970 by M&S author and Maclean’s Editor Peter C. Newman, economist Abe Rotstein, and former Liberal Finance Minister Walter Gordon. They were joined later by the Edmonton-based bookseller/publisher Mel Hurtig and many others. The group had garnered 170,000 names on a petition which they sent to Prime Minister Trudeau asking the government to curtail foreign investment in Canada.30

  Given the popularity of this new nationalism, and an election coming in Ontario that would turn on southern Ontario’s boomer voters, those guiding the provincial government’s re-election campaign decided that M&S couldn’t be allowed to fail. Only one month after McClelland made his announcement, the Commissioners (one of whom was Dalton Camp, a leading Tory political organizer and a television personality) issued an interim report. They recommended that the Davis government should back a $962,000 ten- year debenture issue by M&S that would accrue no interest for five years and be convertible to shares, in order to keep M&S afloat. The Commissioners described the M&S publishing program as “a national asset worthy of all reasonable public encouragement and support.”31

  The Davis government accepted this recommendation. As Roy MacSkimming (to whom I am indebted for this material) put it in his fascinating history of modern Canadian publishing, The Perilous Trade, this ushered in

  …a new era in Canadian public policy. Book publishing would no longer be regarded as a business like any other; it was a key cultural industry, producing what economists call ‘merit goods,’ things of intrinsic value to society that must not be abandoned to the mercies of the market. By throwing himself on the public’s mercy, McClelland had judged the political mood with uncanny accuracy.

  Davis’s Progressive Conservatives won the election. In 1972, both the Canada Council and the Ontario government began to offer grants to Canadian publishers.

  The Ontario NDP, like the Ontario Progressive Conservative Party, was greatly troubled by its own nationalists, a well-organized and noisy rump group known as the Waffle. The Waffle wanted Canada to nationalize foreign-owned oil and gas companies and to take back control of other key areas of the economy. It also supported an independent Quebec if Quebecers wanted out. James Laxer, one of the Waffle’s leaders, had the temerity to run for the federal NDP leadership against David Lewis after Tommy Douglas was pushed to resign by Lewis’s son, Stephen (who promptly ran for the leadership of the Ontario NDP). David Lewis may have thought the federal party crown would be his for the taking: after all, he had been the anti-Communist disciplinarian within the NDP from its inception, and before that for the international union movement, and the CCF. Yet the nationalist movement within the NDP was strong enough that Laxer didn’t lose to David Lewis until the fifth ballot.32

  Stephen Lewis soon organized the ejection of the Waffle from the Ontario wing of the NDP.33 But that didn’t mean nationalist ideas were ejected from Canadian politics. Southern Ontario had given the federal Liberals a great majority in 1968. But in the federal election of 1972, southern Ontario’s boomers turned their backs on the Liberals: the Liberals returned to power as a minority—supported by David Lewis’s NDP which had greatly increased its seats due to its campaign against corporate welfare bums. Lewis, who had almost been defeated by nationalists, promptly pushed Waffle-ish policies on the federal Liberals, starting with a demand for the creation of a national oil company.34

  The Liberal Party had been split for many years b
etween those who defined themselves as continentalists in economic and foreign policy, and those who styled themselves as independents or nationalists. Nationalists had been an unhappy minority until the Pearson years, but by 1968, they had begun to make gains.35 The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission was created to regulate Canadian broadcasting and communications. It set out a rule stipulating a required percentage of Canadian-made programs to be broadcast as a condition for licensing. In 1971, similar content rules on Canadian music were extended to radio. In 1972, American programs aired on Canadian television channels were required to be broadcast simultaneously so that Canadian television stations would get the benefit of Canadian advertising dollars. (Canadian periodicals eventually got postal subsidies and Canadian advertisers in those periodicals got tax benefits. Split run magazines—American magazines printed in both the US and Canada with American content but with Canadian advertising in their Canadian versions—were banned. Decades later, when that rule was defied by Sports Illustrated, foreign split run publishers were punished with a very high excise tax on their Canadian advertising revenue.)36