By Howard Schneider
Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, February 15, 1997; Page A29

Douglas Fetherling has a firm niche in Canada's literary world as a critic, poet, historian and enthusiastic adversary of America, a culture he defines as one seeking "transcendence through violence." Birthplace: West Virginia.

One of the country's national symbols, the stalwart beaver, is used throughout Canada to promote the Roots clothing store chain, a company that has turned Canada's sense of rugged communitarianism into a mint of money – for a couple of guys from Detroit.

A former U.S. Army Green Beret runs the country's most politically influential newspaper, the Toronto Globe and Mail, and another American native, Diane Francis, is editor of the main business publication, the Financial Post.

Provoked by a recent international trade ruling, Canadian leaders are once again debating how best to protect their cultural identity from the influence of the United States, with some in the arts community making suggestions from increased subsidies for artists to quotas on movie screenings to ensure time for Canadian films.

But, nearly a decade after the first U.S.-Canadian free-trade pact, and 20 years since the creation of programs to foster Canadian television, records and movies, there is a growing sense that the cultural nationalism that stoked arguments and produced a quilt of subsidies and protections here in the 1960s and '70s has lost some of its punch.

The stated aim of those policies is to ensure that in the flux of stories, sounds and images imported into Canada – largely from the United States – Canadian voices will always have a place and Canadian stories always be told. While there is little question that they have led to the production of more music, movies, books and television by Canadians, some economists question how effective they have been in increasing the domestic market for those products beyond the level where it would naturally settle, or in producing works reflective of Canada.

"The current polices have become symbols of concern with culture, but the reality is that the policies distort the business of culture while doing little to encourage content that is identifiably Canadian," Carleton University economists Christopher Maule and Keith Acheson contended in a recent essay. "Canadian cultural policy will be better informed by examining the reasons for the success of the American film and television industry rather than accepting a view that relies on audiences being either stupid or continuously deceived."

To social scientists such as pollster Michael Adams, who published a recent book on Canadian social values, Canadians, particularly younger ones, are less likely to view American products as a threat to their identity than as simply another piece of the world smorgasbord.

"Today average Canadians think the soul of Canada is in the Canadian people, and people will make informed choices about what they want to consume," Adams said. "They want to have Canadian choices there as well . . . but it is hard for the culture – we speak the same language and so many values are in common – to demonize the United States."

Fetherling was doing just that when he came here in the 1960s, but even as an anti-American coming at the height of Canadian opposition to a United States embroiled in the Vietnam war, he found his place of birth alone a cause for suspicion. Today, he wins honors for a life of work in Canadian letters. Globe and Mail publisher Roger Parkinson and the Financial Post's Francis go about their business – in Francis's case, even wading into the sensitive topic of Quebec nationalism in a recent book – with little public concern about their pedigree.

Legislatively mandated minimums of Canadian television are broadcast every day, and Canadians have responded by frequently favoring U.S. shows anyway. By law, radio stations give 30 percent of their air time to Canadian music; consumers in record stores, by contrast, choose Canadian about 13 percent of the time, according to Statistics Canada. Budget cutting at the Canadian Broadcasting Corp. is discussed in some circles as a wound to the national psyche, yet viewers have been tuning out: The CBC lost about one-fourth of its television audience between 1989 and 1996, according to Nielsen Media Research, although the network maintains a strong audience for its political satire and the overall numbers rose slightly in recent months.

When Canada's heritage minister said recently that the United States was trying to "take over the world" through "cultural imperialism," she was countered by a cabinet colleague who suggested Canadians themselves were setting the parameters of cultural trade more than any government policy, through their decisions about what to buy and what to watch.

Pointing to Canada's increasing success in exporting books, video and movies to the rest of the world, International Trade Minister Art Eggleton questioned whether Canada's cultural policies have become outmoded because of technology and consumer sophistication.

"When I see the growing world demand for Canadian cultural works, compared with our own reading and viewing habits, I can only wonder if Canadian culture is a secret kept only from ourselves," Eggleton said, citing the fact that Canada now exports more than $2 billion in cultural goods and sells more television programming abroad than any country except the United States. "The coming of age of Canadian culture may not depend on our ability to protect it at home, but to project it on the world's stage."

His comments are part of a debate that has been a staple of Canadian public discussion, in one form or another, for as long as there has been a Canada. This time around, the provocation is an American trade challenge of Canadian rules meant to guard local advertising dollars for Canadian periodicals. News that the World Trade Organization is likely to rule against Canada led Heritage Minister Sheila Copps, who is also the country's deputy prime minister, to threaten economic "hardball" if the United States challenges other Canadian cultural supports.

In addition to the radio and TV air-time quotas, they include strict rules on foreign ownership of broadcasting companies, subsidies and tax credits for artists.

In some cases the rules hardly matter anymore. They may have done their job. At Toronto's alternative rock station, The Edge, music director Kneale Mann said Canadian artists produce enough competitive music that his decisions would change little if the rules disappeared.

In other cases, they help steer the market but with sometimes odd results. At Canada's two main private broadcasters, Global TV and CTV, the Canadian-content rules generate the occasional Canadian hit, such as "Due South," about a Mountie in Chicago. But as often the Canadian time is filled with offerings like a Vancouver-based version of "The Outer Limits," or CTV's "Nikita," about a female spy.

Overall, executives at the two networks say the Canadian shows frequently have trouble paying their own way – a fact that advocates of Canada's existing policy blame on the higher relative cost of producing a domestic show as opposed to buying one from the United States. The end results, Global and CTV executives say, is that proceeds from American shows essentially underwrite Canadian programming.

"Buying good American product absolutely subsidizes the Canadian production industry," said Loren Mawhinney, vice president of Canadian productions for Global. "It is a symbiotic relationship."

American marketing power continues to be cited as a villain, however, by those in the Canadian film industry. "Canadian films have not consistently performed magically at the box office, and as a result we have frankly had difficulty in building a sustained audience, beyond buffs," said Dan Johnson, head of the Canadian Association of Film Distributors and Exporters.

Another factor, however, is that Canadians like what they are getting. In Quebec, where language and cultural values have led to very different consumer choices, broadcasters here marvel at the high ratings the French-speaking province's local shows receive, thriving in a much smaller marketplace because of their popularity.

The cultural debate, while still an issue in Quebec, is less a concern because "the American stuff does not reflect their lives in the same way that American stuff reflects our life," Mawhinney said. "In [English-speaking] Canada, we do not perceive American products as foreign . . . because our cultures are so intertwined."