Mark, the writer

Paul Litt, The Muses, the Masses and the Massey Commission. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992. 331 pp. $50 (cloth); $19.95 (paper).

I remember when our family got our first television in 1956. It arrived from Eaton's on a Saturday morning and I spent all that afternoon watching opera on the CBC, which was the only station we could get because we didn't have an antenna. That wore pretty thin for a ten-year-old, so I reverted to my earlier habit of visiting the kids next door who had an antenna and could get Dragnet and the Jackie Gleason Show.

We loved a lot of CBC programs, in particular The Plouffe Family. But as recent immigrants in Montreal, we really felt more affinity for the popular programs on the U.S. stations. The American programs were set in lower-middle-class apartments. They had immigrant uncles with funny accents like Danny Thomas's Lebanese Uncle Tanous. American programs had Jews and working-class Irish and Italian characters. Ralph Kramden was a bus driver and Ed Norton a sewer worker. Lucy and Ricky Ricardo's apartment was banal like ours, and Fred and Ethel Mertz seemed an awful lot like people in our apartment building.

The reality of our lives--my parents' Polish immigrant friends, my schoolyard German and Italian friends, our economic status--seemed more faithfully mirrored on American than on Canadian television. But I've never forgotten how all of our family, in fact most of the apartment building, watched the Plouffes. They were French, but they were us. Those were our streets, our schoolyards; when there was a bus strike in Montreal, the whole episode of the Plouffes that week was about Onésime, the bus driver, arguing with his family about the morality of bringing Montreal to a grinding halt. When television or radio touched our lives, and portrayed our realities, it was electrifying. When it got preachy, didactic or superior, we drifted to an American channel. Because by then we had gotten the third most important Canadian purchase after a car and a TV: a roof antenna to catch U.S. stations.

This personal history may seem an eccentric prelude to a review of a history of the 1951 Massey Commission on culture, but interplay between American and Canadian culture is central to Paul Litt's excellent study of this landmark in Canadian artistic life. Besides, as fate would have it, I ended up working for the CBC for twenty-two years, trying to fend off the lure of American programs. From the day I joined the Corporation, I've been part of its ongoing internal debate between two camps, two fundamental views of culture and the role of broadcasting.

One camp holds that it's the CBC's role to preserve and promote the highest humanistic values, to support art without concession to fashion or mass culture, and certainly to resist the allure and corruption of ratings; we would produce the best, and those who wanted to find us would find us; it was not our job to do rock music, police dramas or sitcoms. The other camp, which I call the Salvation Army school, embraces mass culture, and believes that we must reach out to all people, all classes. We should produce sitcoms and cartoons and serials as well as high culture. Like the Sally Ann, we should take the band down to the street corner, and not keep it as a chamber orchestra in the parlor. Much of the time, but not always, I'm in the second camp, but I hope that neither side ever wins a decisive victory.

That ancestral CBC cafeteria debate was the essence of the Canadian cultural debate of the late forties and early fifties, the climate in which the landmark Massey Commission held its deliberations and shaped much of Canada's cultural funding policies. The Massey Commission issued the first dire warnings about the power American culture might exert on our identity, and it constructed the strategy of state-sponsored cultural development that led to the Canada Council, federal funding of universities, and the affirmation of the twenty-year-old CBC. But it also did far more. In the commission's own words, its target was "nothing less than the spiritual foundations of our national life." Culture would bind Canadians together and distinguish them from other nations. As Litt demonstrates, Massey "was driven by cutural nationalist ideology."

To the Canadian artistic and academic lobbies, Massey represented a great victory of liberal humanism and Canadian nationalism over the untrammelled vulgarity of the American mass market. To the private broadcasters and the business community, the commissioners were, in Litt's words, "a bunch of stuffy college dons trying to force a good dollop of `culchah' down the throat of a gagging Johnny Canuck." There's some truth in each caricature.

Emerging from the Second World War with a sense of self-assured autonomy from Britain, Canada enjoyed stature and pride in the international community for the first time. We were now an industrialized nation, and a new nationalism bound the leaders of postwar Canada. That nationalism, shaped by the mobilization required for war, was based on a shared general conviction that "the state, moved by enlightened public opinion and guided by expert judgment, should be the prime agent of social progress." Like the earlier visionaries who had built national broadcasting, Graham Spry and Alan Plaunt, the Liberal and CCF intellectuals and civil servants of the forties had inclinations that were "educational, nationalistic and interventionist." Brooke Claxton, Jack Pickersgill and Lester Pearson led this generation, known today as the "golden age of the mandarins."

But if Canada was emerging as an industrial economy with a sense of itself, it was widely felt that it lacked a cultural identity. We were a nation orphaned by the death of the British imperial ideal and perilously exposed to the loud vulgarities of a mass American market. And our cultural infrastructure was a mess: a few bones passed for a Museum of Natural History, we had no coherent university funding, writers and artists could not make a living, and the CBC was perilously underfunded and getting increasingly hooked on commercials.

The cultural and academic lobbies pressed hard for government intervention, and the Liberal Party, aware that it was losing its support among intellectuals to the CCF, saw political merit in winning back this generation of activists and taking the leadership of postwar nationalism.

Brooke Claxton, one of the most powerful Liberal ministers, brought the commission together under the leadership of the aristocratic Anglophile Vincent Massey, a deeply decent and cultured man with a positive fear of mass market culture. This patrician figure was joined by the powerful intellect of Hilda Neatby, head of the history department at the University of Saskatchewan, who shared Massey's fears of mass culture and, like him, turned instinctively to British cultural authority. The spiritual touchstone of the Massey Commission was Matthew Arnold: there was culture, or there was anarchy. The other commissioners were broadly in sympathy with this view of the universe. Norman MacKenzie was president of the University of British Columbia; Arthur Surveyer was, at seventy-one, an elder statesman of the business community; Georges-Henri Lévesque was a Dominican priest who had founded the social sciences faculty at Laval University and was an outspoken opponent of Quebec's Premier Duplessis.

Although the commission had a broadly liberal, humanistic vision and was driven by the excitement of a nascent nationalism and a social zeal to spread civilizing knowlege, it was also a deeply conservative group. Paul Litt's literate and detailed account of Canada's great cultural debate leaves us wondering whether we are reading about the dawn of a progressive age or, as Carl Berger said of George Grant's Lament for a Nation, simply a "depressing footnote" to imperialist thought. The Canadian cultural elites, Litt writes, "attempted to foster a humanistic code of values to guide Canadian society. They looked to the state to offset continental economic forces and encourage Canadian cultural development. Moreover, their fears of an ignorant populace invoked the traditional elitist concern that mass democracy threatened individual liberty." The Massey Commission offered "high culture as a panacea for the ills of modernity."

The legacy of the commission was clearly progressive. It represented the coming together of Canada's cultural groups, educational forces and public broadcasters. It pulled together an alliance of two Canadian nationalist forces that have never reconciled their different roots: the heirs of Matthew Arnold, who represented the very best of enlightened Tory cultural ideas, and the reformist social democratic nationalists of the liberal left, who were fired by a missionary zeal to spread knowledge and art to all the social orders. Both feared the power of uncontrolled market forces from the south, and that was the basis of their alliance. They differed on whether or not they feared the "masses."

Other nations' nationalism is ethnic, or military, or economic. Canada's is "cultural" in the broadest sense. "Liberal humanism and nationalism combined to form a high-minded and defensive strain of Canadian cultural nationalism," writes Litt. Canada's cultural nationalists forged the idea, still strong today, that "with the state's help they could defend Canada's superior national character." The justification for state intervention to support high culture was "that mass culture was a foreign threat." Massey himself had been deeply influenced by André Siegfried's book Canada, an International Power, which invoked the spectre of continental integration. Siegfried believed that the east-west axis on which Canada had been built was quickly being replaced by north-south ties with the United States. Cultural nationalism was seen as central to Canada's survival, and since commercialism was associated with continentalism, cultural nationalists framed the battle as Johnny Canuck versus the Almighty Buck.

The Muses, the Masses and the Massey Commission has much to recommend it. It reminds us that the debate has not changed in forty years; the alignments of the free trade debate are identical to the alignments in the debate surrounding the dawn of postwar Canada. In fact, the recurrence of the same arguments and phrases is haunting. The identical debates about commercialism on the airwaves, the CBC's request for five-year funding, the private broadcasters cloaking themselves in the language of liberty to import more American programming--all these have the eerie quality of yesterday's Globe and Mail. It's depressing how little has changed.

But most significantly, Litt brilliantly identifies the fundamental rift in Canadian cultural nationalism. It is an alliance of conservative cultural forces who fear mass culture with left-liberal forces who fear American free enterprise but not the masses. You can find the debate in the CBC cafeteria any day, in the film and publishing industry, in the National Film Board.

This is the only country in the world where you can split three ways on a TV program. Is Street Legal vulgar trash that displaces the "high" drama we should be airing? If you opt to support popular drama you still have two options. Is Street Legal good because it is popular and Canadian? Or is it bad because it's not really Canadian but instead an appropriation of U.S. forms and content, a Canadian shell for American television values? The point isn't who's right but that you can get into a fight on any municipal bus in rush hour about this. I doubt you can do this in any other country.

Public broadcasting is the perfect example of the division about the role of the state and the nature of culture in Canada. What's the role of public broadcasting? Is it to be a supplement to a commercial diet deficient in certain nutrients such as classical music and documentaries about Latin America, which therefore has no business putting on sitcoms and rock videos? Or is it meant to serve all the tastes and needs of the taxpayers who fund it, but to do so free of distortion by commercial market forces?

Is it meant to be a serene and elevating retreat from the vulgar marketplace? Or is it meant to be an aggressive producer of children's programs, teenage programs, popular sitcoms as well as news and public affairs and Ibsen?

So far, from Massey until today, we have straddled the fence. We develop cultural policies that encourage writers, but we lose control of our publishing industry. We fund filmmakers, but they can barely get on the screens because the U.S. controls our distribution. We support public broadcasting, but we require that it be heavily driven by commercial revenue.

We have not resolved Massey's conundrum about the role of the arts. We still stop short of embracing "mass culture," leaving it to the commercial sector. We run magnificent classical music on CBC radio but have not one microsecond of children's programming. We don't know whether to applaud a sitcom or condemn it as a vulgar form. We don't know whether the music is supposed to stay in the parlor, or whether we're supposed to take the ensemble into the marketplace and learn the music of the people.

The Massey conundrum, and the conundrum of Canadian national culture, will be resolved with the brutality of a highway collision in this decade. The 1,000-channel universe and the infinity of choices that is coming upon us with the amalgam of the computer, digitalization and satellite compression will leave us naked. Either we will learn to compete on the playing field of CD-ROMs that contain entire encyclopedias, produce the films that assert our existence in the electronic video libraries that will dominate our lives, and develop Canadian international satellite channels, or we will be the victims of the age of the satellite and digitalization.

For my part, I think the Massey Commission's brilliance was its embrace of culture as the definition of a people, the foundation of a national spirit. Its failure was its suspicion of the people, its retreat from the challenge of mass culture and, in effect, its patrician and somewhat elitist disdain for the common experience. It may be time for the Massey Commission of the satellite age, for the Massey Commission of the Canada that has 250,000 blacks in Toronto and 27,000 Somalis in Mississauga, the Canada of Asian immigration in Vancouver, and the Canada of the age when every channel and every city on the continent will appear on our screens.

Paul Litt suggests it was not desirable, morally, to have a cultural philosophy that ignored the vastness of the "masses." Now it is not only philosophically doubtful but technologically impossible. And thereby, in the cultural definition of ourselves (Massey was right in this), hangs a national identity and the future of a specific Canadian people and a Canadian sensibility in this world. Reconvene the Massey Commission.