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If, likewise, the regulations had failed to keep pace with such changes in technology as, say, the Internet, it was only because “the legal and regulatory framework hasn’t been developed in a holistic manner.” She clearly intends to fix that, starting with an online public consultation on “the best way to support content.” Sample question: “What are the key roles for CBC/Radio Canada to play in Canadian content creation? Please select up to five items.”

But perhaps I am being too harsh. Perhaps, in the coming policy review, the minister will be persuaded the world has indeed changed. Perhaps she will even read this week’s report from the C. D. Howe Institute, arguing that content quotas in particular should be dismantled, along with foreign ownership restrictions and regulations requiring cable and satellite providers to spend fixed amounts on content, to be replaced with direct subsidies out of general revenues.

If so, the result will undoubtedly be a more efficient system of promoting Canadian content. But it will do nothing to address the fundamental contradictions at the heart of cultural nationalism. Which is rather more the point: it isn’t just that we have chosen the wrong policies to promote it, or that these have become obsolete, in this age of limitless spectrum and radically reduced distribution costs. It’s that the whole pursuit was wrong-headed.

The theory behind it remains more or less as stated almost 90 years ago, in the report of the Royal Commission on Radio Broadcasting (quoted in the Howe report): that the easy availability of programming from outside the country “has a tendency to mould the minds of young people in the home to ideals and opinions that are not Canadian.”