The Cultural Industries in Canada: Problems, Policies and Prospects

Patricia Morley is professor emerita of English and Canadian studies at
Concordia University, and the author of Kurlek, Margaret Laurence: The
Long Journey Home, and As Though Life Mattered: Leo Kennedy’s Story.

Broadly speaking, the “industries” of Canada’s culture are
publishing and broadcasting, along with film, video, and television
production. Editor Michael Dorland groups them as print, sound, and
image/data industries.

Dorland teaches in the School of Journalism and Communication at
Carleton University and has edited two earlier books in the same areas.
In an introduction to the problems of Canada’s cultural industries, he
notes that two realities are involved—culture and economics. Both
words are difficult to define, and the problems are magnified by
Canada’s location alongside the United States.

In Dorland’s words, the collection’s central argument is “that
the way one approaches the cultural industries and the policies
affecting them, as well as the language that one uses, is as important
as the reality one imagines one is talking about, or making policy
for.” Mercifully, not all of the language here is so convoluted.

The contributors are Rowland Lorimer, Lou Dubinsky, Will Straw, Michel
Filion, Ted Magder, Marc Raboy, Liss Jeffrey, Paul Attallah, Robert
Babe, Kevin Dowler, Keith Acheson, Christopher Maule, and the editor.

The problems covered are complex, the prospects uncertain but hopeful,
the treatment current and well supported with data.