Canadian Heritage Committee on Oct. 27th, 2009

[The Chair, Conservative, Gary Schellenberger]

Thank you.

Mr. Pomerleau, please.

[Roger Pomerleau, Bloc, Drummond, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you, Dr. Gaffield, for your thoughtful presentation. Our research officers inform us that you are an expert on the ways demographic, economic and cultural changes influence institutional and political history. That's wonderful.

My question is of a political nature. It comes from someone who is a sovereigntist. At the close of your presentation, you express the hope that we use all of the positives you describe to increase, or nourish, our common Canadian cultural identity. Earlier in your presentation, you gave the example of the Canadian railroad that contributed to the birth of Canada as a nation. My question will flow from what I am about to say. The major political decisions in Canada, such as building the Canadian railroad, needed to be taken. I completely agree with those decisions. Canadians could not have done otherwise, or they would have remained a small people living in a small part of a very vast land that needed to be settled. Although it may not have been the objective, the decision to build the railroad ultimately had the effect of diminishing Quebec culture and identity. Quebec's minority position grew as Canada was built. This can be seen, for example, in the fact that western Canada is set to be given more elected representatives in Canada's Parliament, given the larger population in western Canada. A pro-Canada decision reduced Quebec's position.

This same can be said about the St. Lawrence Seaway. The construction of the seaway killed Montreal as the economic capital of Canada. Mordecai Richler even wrote a book about this. He wrote the following, and I quote: “Once the St. Lawrence Seaway was in place, diminishing the importance of Montreal, Montreal's slippage was inevitable.” This is entirely true. I'm not anti-Canadian, but rather pro-Canadian. All of the decisions that were made were intelligent decisions that Canada needed to make. However, as a result, Quebec's political, economic and cultural powers were diminished.

My question is therefore political in nature. You claim that there is a desperate need for the Canadian identity to be strengthened. Mr. Del Mastro is quite right to say that there is more to being Canadian that hockey games and maple syrup.

[Carole Lavallée, Bloc, Saint-Bruno—Saint-Hubert, QC]

No, he mentioned Tim Hortons.

[Roger Pomerleau, Bloc, Drummond, QC]

That's even worse.

[Carole Lavallée, Bloc, Saint-Bruno—Saint-Hubert, QC]

They're not familiar with maple syrup.

[Roger Pomerleau, Bloc, Drummond, QC]

Canada is perfectly right to do what it is doing. It has no choice. If I were to ask you, as a Canadian, what steps should Canada take to guarantee that any efforts made to raise the nation's profile will not diminish Quebec's culture, what would your answer be?

[Dr. Chad Gaffield]

That's a broad question.

Canadian identity has evolved tremendously since the 19th century. In each different era, that identity was linked to either an agricultural or urban society. Of course, it is reflected in demographic, economic and cultural changes. Canadian history shows that a country remains viable provided it changes with the times.

The key question, for all jurisdictions at all levels, is knowing how to adjust to local, regional and global realities. Identity comes into play at every level. I am a resident of the city of Ottawa. Identity is a complex issue.

In the 19th century, the use of one language in schools was promoted, for example, by France and the United States, as a means of strengthening society. Today, people claim that a society's strength lies in its diversity and that this diversity must be encouraged. We are in the process of redefining approaches and rejecting a cookie-cutter approach for communities, an approach that was associated with the 19th and 20th centuries. We are seeking to establish cohesive communities based on diversity, not uniformity. How do we build cohesive communities that benefit from diversity at every level? That is a question for Canada, the United States, France and other world countries. This is the dynamic that is currently at play. The goal for the 21st century is to build diverse, rather than homogeneous, societies. How do we meet this interesting challenge?

[The Chair, Conservative, Gary Schellenberger]

Thank you very much.

Mr. Uppal, please.

[Tim Uppal, Conservative, Edmonton—Sherwood Park, AB]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you for your presentations. It's obviously a very fascinating topic, and there are so many different angles to it.

You mentioned Canadian diversity and Canadian identity, and that because of the low cost of new media, different cultural communities across Canada have been able to connect with each other as well as bring content from their home countries into Canada and experience that as well, going beyond just traditional TV or radio and newsprint. That has been able to bring Canadians together.

It's interesting that Canadian-born children with ethnic backgrounds have been able to learn more about their cultures because of new media. You can actually get various translated religious scripts now on your BlackBerry or your iPhone; previously you'd probably have had to go somewhere and find these scripts and try to get someone to translate them for you. New media have been able to affect new Canadians in different ways.

I know Mr. Del Mastro was saying that we're more than just hockey, but hockey's still a very strong part of Canadian culture, to the point that now, I think on Bell, you can actually get NHL with Punjabi and Mandarin commentary, so that's a strong part of Canadian culture with different languages.

How do you see new media shaping Canadian identity itself? Also, Canadian governments have always paid into multiculturalism. Do you see that changing now, with the way new media are working together with the different cultural communities we have?

[Dr. Chad Gaffield]

That's a fascinating question.

It's really pretty recent, I think, dating from the 1960s. Until the 1960s, what they call modernization theory was the driving force of understandings of change. The idea was that slowly but surely, everyone around the world was going to increasingly look similar and act similarly.

In other words, English was going to take over, everyone would have the golden arches, and we'd all have roughly the same number of children. It was the best way to organize society, and slowly but surely it would spread all over the world. That was how you were really going to progress: by adopting these best practices and having everyone do them. It was the ideal.

Very quickly we've moved into this new paradigm, which says that if you go down that path, it would be the path to destruction, because it would make you extremely vulnerable if it turned out that although you thought this was the best thing, it didn't work out that way.

For example, there's a lot of concern now about endangered languages. The issue is that those languages enrich our understandings of the world. They have ways of imagining and articulating perceptions of the world that really enrich us. We don't want to envision a world in which there's a single language, a single this, a single that, because it's going to make us too fragile and therefore unable to deal with changes when they come. We need to have that kind of diversity. As in my example, the reason we want genetic diversity is the same reason we want economic diversity: we don't want to put all our eggs in one basket.

What's happening now in terms of identity is we've moved from the notion, for example, that we should have the single to the notion of the multiple. In terms of your hockey example, why not enjoy hockey in multiple languages? Isn't that an enrichment of our understanding of this classically Canadian pastime? It's a big enrichment of it. It makes it better. It makes it stronger, and so on.

It's a very different way of looking at it. To look at diversity as a strength and to see it as a protection that will equip us to deal with change in the future is a very different way to look at it.

Obviously there are limits to that idea. We don't want to get everything so fragmented that we can't work together as a society, so we're back to that balance between what I like to call vertical and horizontal connecting. We need that balance. We need the balance in terms of the commonness that was being alluded to there, in terms of what makes this society tick, but at the same time the diversity that enriches it and is dynamic can continue.

It seems to me that the potential, the opportunity, with new media is finding out how to use it to make Canada stronger and stronger as we move onto that global stage of the 21st century.

[The Chair, Conservative, Gary Schellenberger]

Thank you for that.

We started about ten minutes late, so I'm going to do one more round. It'll be Liberal question, Conservative question, New Democratic question.

Mr. Dhaliwal, would you take the first question?

[Sukh Dhaliwal, Liberal, Newton—North Delta, BC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I'll carry on with the discussion that Mr. Uppal initiated.

You said that the future is ours, and there's no doubt about it. Canada has been a leader, and particularly so now, as the multicultural and diverse nation that we are here. In Canada, this century belongs to us.

How can the government play a role with the private sector to make sure that we are the leaders and that when it comes to digital media, new technologies, and knowledge, we have the capabilities to compete with giant nations like China and India?

[Dr. Chad Gaffield]

In your question I think you put your finger on the answer. You alluded to the multiple players in this: the communities, the businesses, the various jurisdictions, and so on. In this new recognition of complexity, what we see is unlike the situation in the 19th century and 20th century--namely, that no one level of government in any position can alone fix problems or make a big difference. It's got to be done in collaboration and in some kind of connection with all other key aspects. The challenge now for any of us, in any of our organizations, is to act in ways that enhance and enable and fit with the actions of others.

For example, on our research council we now see ourselves as intimately linked to the universities across Canada, the private sector partners of those universities, and so on. We are truly in a multi-stakeholder world, and we're very conscious that whatever we do has to be done in a way that makes sense in terms of those other pieces of the puzzle. That's a new role. At some level it seemed to me that historically, in the case of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, we had the little idea in the beginning that we could develop programs and support them more or less within ourselves. Now we find increasingly that our programs and how we think about them must be done in the context of other institutions, communities, and so on. That's the challenge.

It seems to me that the federal role is now in a much more diverse and complex context, and it's in that context that the opportunity for me to be here and for these kinds of exchanges to take place are really important.

[Sukh Dhaliwal, Liberal, Newton—North Delta, BC]

The other very interesting point you mentioned was about the languages that are endangered now. Besides our two official languages in Canada, French and English, there are more than 6,500 languages, including sign language, across our great nation. Many of them, including the aboriginal languages, are endangered at this time.

Can you tell me how society can play a role in facing the challenges to protect those languages?

[Dr. Chad Gaffield]

One of the key differences, which links back to an earlier question, was that when we thought about endangered languages some years ago, to some extent the idea was that saving them would be a nice thing to do. It would be a generous thing to do. Now we're thinking about this much more from the perspective that we need to save them; we need to think that idea through, in the sense of enriching ourselves and enriching the pool of talent.

We've been supporting research projects of scholars such as Karen Rice and others, who are trying to document and capture, at some level, some of the richness of these endangered languages so that the richness can continue to inform us all and enrich our lives.

It's a very interesting change from the idea that we should worry about them for moral reasons. Now that's been layered onto the idea that we should take advantage of them, because that's how, in fact, we're going to continue to thrive in the 21st century; it's going to reinforce our chances in going forward. It's a very interesting shift, and our researchers are attempting to capture that richness as a way of arming us and enlarging the pool of perspectives that we have going forward.

[The Chair, Conservative, Gary Schellenberger]

Thank you.

Ms. Grewal, please.

[Nina Grewal, Conservative, Fleetwood—Port Kells, BC]

Thank you, Chair.

I have two short questions for you.

The first one is about the rise of digital media, the use of the Internet to share your music, photos, and videos. What is the impact of all of that on our policy-makers?

Second, how are policy-makers in other countries dealing with the rise of digital media? Could you please tell us?

[Dr. Chad Gaffield]

I'll start with the second one first. It's obviously, as you know, a hot international debate around the world.

One of the interesting dynamics, though, and I do want to emphasize this a bit, is what's called the open access movement. This has become very important, and it changes a whole lot of the dynamics. Just thinking about it in the economic sense, for example, we have found that making research open access as much as possible can really help the creators of that research. Why? Because it gets them known.

It's interesting that in our fields, it used to be the case that in order for a researcher to really advance their career, they would publish in scholarly journals and monographs and so on; but now, if they are not also very active in tweeting and using podcasts, their reputations and the value of their work will not get known, and in fact their careers will be hurt. So that's a fascinating change in terms of how the new media is really switching things around.

We see this on the music side. For example, artists now know that if their music does not get out and get heard, no one is going to go to their concerts to see them. The role of the concert, the physical concert, for example, has become much more important now in terms of revenue generation, and so on, and the digital side is used to promote that.

So it's a very interesting dynamic in which the policy assumptions, it seems to me, of the past don't play in the same ways. At SSHRC, we're trying to deal with that, because in the past we had, for example, funded scholars to put their research findings in printed ways, and now we have to find new policies to really enable open access and the new media in terms of the dissemination and exchange of information.

My sense is that on the music side and so on, there's no doubt that those industries—what we call the creative industries—are growing rapidly, and it's partly because there are just so many more people easily able to contribute. You know, Marshall McLuhan said in the 1960s, when photocopiers came out, that now everyone would be an author. Well, if photocopiers could make everyone an author, obviously the new technologies are enabling that, but the key point, it seems to me, is that people want to be authors.

That's such an interesting phenomenon. People don't just want to consume, they want to be authors. They don't just want to watch something, they want to engage in it.

That's what the new technologies are really enabling. They're enabling a kind of active side. We're trying to embrace this in terms of schools. We're trying to embrace this in terms of building communities, advancing the economy, and so on.

It's a very different notion of consumers, of products, of services. It is a very different notion. It turns out that people want to create. It's not just a very tiny, select group.

So I think it is changing dramatically now and redefining what we mean by artists, what we mean by consumers, what we mean by spectators, and so on.

[Nina Grewal, Conservative, Fleetwood—Port Kells, BC]

Mr. Chair, do I have some more time left?

[The Chair, Conservative, Gary Schellenberger]

For a very short question and a very short answer.

[Nina Grewal, Conservative, Fleetwood—Port Kells, BC]

I'll give the rest of my time to Mr. Del Mastro.

[The Chair, Conservative, Gary Schellenberger]

Okay, but very short, as in one minute.

[Dean Del Mastro, Conservative, Peterborough, ON]

No problem.

You made an interesting point. You just said a minute ago that new technology is actually enabling everyone to contribute. It's kind of opening up opportunities for people to contribute. To go back to something that I said earlier as well, I think anybody can be a broadcaster. Anybody can be a recording artist.

From that perspective, to me, the investments we're making in digital technology would therefore, certainly on the musical side, seem to be more important than investments we could make into, say, the recording side. If people can actually access digital opportunities, that would seem to me to present a bigger opportunity than to access a former conventional form.

Would you agree with that?

[Dr. Chad Gaffield]

I think it's always a question of balance, but there's no doubt that the creator side is a little unanticipated. When the digital age got going, I don't think it was expected that people would really change from sitting on the couch to wanting to get in there and be part of the stage. I think we're trying to deal with that.

There's no doubt about it: a driving force of the digital era is the extent to which individuals want to be active creators of their own lives. Now, obviously, it seems to me, a positive side of that, I think, is that we're now, in the 21st century, going to tap the true potential of human beings.

[Dean Del Mastro, Conservative, Peterborough, ON]

Thank you.