‘How Canada lost its way’

Lament for a Literature: The Collapse of Canada’s Book Publishing
by Richard Stursberg  

Toronto: Sutherland House, 2026
$19.95  /  9781998365753

Reviewed by Richard Butler

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Introduction

Richard Stursberg’s Lament for a Literature suggests there is a causal link between the parlous financial state of Canadian publishing, a less robust Canadian literature, and a consequent decline in Canadian national culture. All of that, he says, can only be slowed by immediate government protective action.

From the preface:

The publishing and bookselling businesses determine what books get produced, where they are made available, and how they get marketed and sold. They determine which books will get released and promoted on the basis of both creative and financial considerations.

What publishers and retailers can and cannot do is deeply shaped by government policy. Rules on ownership, public subsidies, copyright and ‘worthiness’ have a determinative effect on the kinds of books they can finance, release and market. The book business [and] the other creative industries of TV, film, music and journalism flourish or fail on the basis of the policies and programs they work under.

That, Stursberg suggests, can have a devastating effect on culture.

In making that case, Stursberg’s book weaves together four main premises:

• how difficult it is to make money publishing and selling books in Canada;
• the consequent impact on Canadian writers writing Canadian books;
• the coincident impact of policies of diversity, equity and inclusion; and
• a consequent cultural loss.

He continues:

[This] book describes how Canada lost its way. At the same time it shows how at this very particular moment it can find its way again. It is both a lament for what was so negligently cast aside and an appeal to what can be restored.

Stursberg’s book is handsomely produced, well-written, and contains a number of good lines and interesting insights, some of which will be referred to below.

Yet, in my respectful view, much of the book reads like special pleading by a long-time senior mandarin¹ on the merits of past and future bureaucratic solutions to the problems it chronicles. But maybe that is simply my own latent anti-“Save the CBC” bias coming through.

Nevertheless, Stursberg’s book has got me thinking about important questions. What is actually involved in being culturally Canadian in these strange times? How is that reflected in our literature?

So may it you.

For that reason, it is well worth reading.

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Lament for the industry

Stursberg says the history of government intervention to protect Canadian culture as expressed through broadcasting started in the 1930s.

It gained impetus from the publication in 1965 of George Grant’s Lament for a Nation which Stursberg says “was taken as a call to arms, to resist America’s imperial pretensions and violence”—the first of a host of similar books “marking a new nationalist direction for Canadian publishing … [paralleled by an] explosion of new literary voices.”

That movement began to gain expression in literature with the 1971 publication of Pierre Berton’s The National Dream and The Last Spike—of which Stursberg says the following:

[Those] books documented and reinforced one of the central narratives of the country’s greatness: that it had denied the Americans Western Canada by completing a marvelous engineering feat and in the process created the second largest country in the world.

He then refers to Margaret Atwood’s Survival whose “central message [was that] Canadian fiction was not triumphing over the rigors of life but simply surviving them.” Stursberg says her purpose in writing the book to talk about Canada as “a geography of the mind,” with our literature being a “map … of who and where we have been.”

He then tracks through a range of subsequent events which he says marked the decline of Canadian literature, concluding as follows:

When the Trudeau liberals came to power at the end of 2015 … the publishing industry had [for its part] been forsaken. The ownership policies were in tatters, essentially abandoned. Many of the biggest and most important Canadian publishers had either collapsed or been taken over by the multinationals and the book retailing business had been largely monopolized with many small retailers being driven out of business.

All of this sets the historical-political context in support of the thesis of Stursberg’s book:

The concomitant effects on the kinds of books that Canadians were offered and bought were troubling. The best sellers list was increasingly dominated by foreign works. Long form Canadian narrative history and biography had largely disappeared and Canadian fiction was more and more about the lives of non-Canadians living in other countries.

The new [Justin Trudeau] government … mandate letter to the minister of Canadian heritage made no mention … of the radical shift in media consumption that had taken place. …. The most important parts of the Canadian cultural ecosystem faced imminent collapse.

In sum, it is certainly handy to have all this history so conveniently and succinctly presented. Stursberg really knows his stuff. However, much of it will be familiar ground to those who have followed and critiqued these developments over the years. In places the book reads a little like the re-fighting of old battles.

Also, I suggest that any attempt to organize culture through the machinery of government is, given political shifts, always eventually bound to fail.

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Lament for the way things used to be

The basic problem with culture is that it is always evolving. The problem with writing about culture is that it involves a moving target.

For instance, Stursberg says of Pierre Berton’s The National Dream and The Last Spike that they invoked Canadian pride in Canadian accomplishment. He says it was a foundational accomplishment (albeit mixed up in colonialism); and perhaps the books made that accomplishment more accessible. But the fact also remains that those books simplified history into a form more palatable to the sensibilities of contemporary readers than would be expected today. One is left to wonder how being swept away with the positives of a story really informs culture.

There is a certain naïve romanticism underlying Stursberg’s retelling of this history. Yet there is also something quite troubling to me—namely, his attacks on multiculturalism and the Justin Trudeau policy of diversity, equity, and inclusion.

Stursberg says that from the 1990s Canadians identified less and less as Canadians and more and more as hyphenated ones on the basis of race, ethnicity, colour, countries of origin, or sexual preferences [his word]. Stursberg argues that the resulting multiculturalism was, and is by its very nature, divisive, producing “a nation of cultural hybrids [instead of a country] where every individual is unique and every individual is Canadian, undiluted and undivided, with the ultimate goal being a coherent society able to define its place in the world.”

Proof, Stursberg says, was in Justin Trudeau saying that there was “no core identity, no mainstream in Canada;” that Canada had become “the first post-national state.”

In the result, Stursberg says,

the collective struggle to shore up the country’s sense of itself then gave way to a different set of preoccupations aimed at recognizing and eliminating the historical injustices that the non-white non-male groups of the country had suffered.

Over time, multiculturalism would “morph into a much harder edged form of identity politics, typically called diversity, equity and inclusion.” Despite laudable intentions, the movement evolved, as Stursberg correctly observes, and began to focus less on inclusion and more on exclusivity.

Stursberg sets out some immediate consequences for the broadcasting and publishing industries: for instance, a count of how many BIPOC people were involved in a project became a criterion for funding approval. Codes of conduct resulted in distinguished careers coming to a sudden end. The result is caution and natural aversion to the risk of being caught out.

He adds that the current trend also has made questions of appropriation of voice even more sensitive, giving as an example Joseph Boyden; and has also made it “increasingly difficult for white male authors unless already famous to find editors willing to read their books.”

All this is likely true. The programs and codes have indeed overreached. There is bound to have been an effect.

As Stursberg correctly says,

the revelations surrounding the appalling behaviour toward indigenous people coupled with the seemingly endless apologies for past behaviour toward women, Jews, black and brown Canadians, Italians and Japanese Canadians, along with the denunciation of Sir John A. Macdonald, left Canadians questioning the virtue of their country. People of conscience began to feel shame and Canadians’ traditionally intense pride in their country began to erode.

That, it seems to me, is culturally salutary. But Stursberg argues it was also culturally harmful:

The decline of books on Canadian history and its ongoing denigration accompanied by the celebration of individual life stories seemed congruent with George Grant’s contention that Canada was slipping away from its historical emphasis on community values and shared experiences to a much more individualistic, more American view of what was important. The things that count are not the large social and political acts of collective effort for good or ill, with all their warts and triumphs, but how people feel within the confines of their own experience. ….

Stursberg cleverly calls this the “penetration of identity politics” and distinguishes it from George Grant’s 1965 politics of identity.

Yet, for myself, I have difficulty with the premise that acknowledging and advancing Canada’s diversity somehow weakens its cultural identity and integrity. I believe strongly that Canadians’ sense of themselves requires a sweeping and honest reconsideration of the past. I maintain that cultural integrity involves a respectfulness which overrides any ‘inconvenience of not being Indian.’ A culture of diversity, equity, and inclusion is something I am proud to be part of—warts and all.

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Lament for the passing of readers

In the words of Albertan Bill Kinsella about a baseball diamond in a cornfield in Iowa, “If you build it, he will come.”

The obverse seems to be Stursberg’s pivot-point: that without Canadian publishing houses and writers, Canadian readers have increasingly gone elsewhere to find books and culture has suffered.

But I suggest this is not so much a lament for literature as a lament for literacy.

The lament for literacy is an old, old story. “Kids these days: all they want to do is watch television.” Or so my parents’ generation was heard to say. And so on down the generations.

Stursberg is writing about true readers—which has always constituted a small minority of Canadians. And even if, as he would correctly say, the minority is proportionally smaller today, that may not be for the loss of books so much as the gain of other instantly accessible gratifications. None of us are exclusively readers of books. Today even the most high-brow among us surfs the internet.

So even if times are financially tough for Canadian publishers, writers, musicians, and artists (as always), there is in my view no real benefit in the sort of renewed protectionism Stursberg advocates for in his closing chapter. Canadian literature continues to survive the rigours of life, “taking the world as it finds it.” Its Canadian-ness is still surfacing of its own accord.

Take my own reading experience.

These days I am not much drawn to fiction of any sort. So, I checked with the staff at Munro’s Books here in Victoria about any alleged paucity in recent Canadian fiction. The many books they recommended satisfied me there are still readers buying books and no reason to lament the fiction side of our literature. But maybe it is more a Toronto problem.

On the other hand, I am increasingly drawn to nonfiction—history, biography and auto-biography, memoirs, reflections. The nonfiction books I read are almost invariably recent, by Canadians, and from Canadian publishing houses. Some examples of books I liked are Patrice Dutil’s recent biography of Sir John A. Macdonald; Jean Teillet’s The Northwest is Our Mother; Wendy Wickwire’s At the Bridge; Robert Bringhurst’s A Story as Sharp as a Knife; John Sutton Lutz’s Makuk; art books such as Where the Power Is, the second edition of Transforming Image and David Neel’s The Way Home; memoirs such as Clarence Louie’s Rez Rules, Harold R. Johnson’s The Power of Story and Murray Sinclair’s moving personal reflection Who We Are: Four Questions For a Life and a Nation.

All of these books will have been on the reading lists of book gatherings across Canada. Many have been the subject of commentary here in The British Columbia Review and on other similar platforms. This is solid proof that Canadians still have an interest in, and ways to hear about, books that speak to our Canadian-ness.

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Canadian, eh?

In raising the question of Canadian-ness, I want to distinguish between literature which speaks to the human condition generally and literature which engages a uniquely Canadian version of that condition.

I would also distinguish between literature which prompts national pride in its authors as being “ours” from literature which captures the sense of being “us.”

From place to place in his book, Stursberg tries to ground the sense of literary culture in Canadian subject matter or author affiliation and domicile.

It is fair to say that books about Canada by Canadians are prima facie of somewhat greater interest to Canadians than they are to other people. But we must look deeper than that for such books’ Canadian-ness.

As for where novels are set, we may proudly claim Margaret Atwood as a Canadian cultural icon, remembering for present purposes that her novels are not always Canadian in content: for example, The Handmaid’s Tale was a dystopian vision of some place in America. Marian Engel’s Bear—while set in Canada—could as easily have been set in Alaska or Montana. It is more about personal than national identity. Mordecai Richler’s novels are more about Jewishness in Montreal than about Montreal, Canada—although, to be fair, the former is arguably a subset of the latter.

As for national affiliation, Roderick Haig-Brown, the Canadian contemplative angler, was (and essentially remained) an expatriate Englishman married to a Seattle woman making a life in the semi-wilds near Campbell River. Jane Rule, an American, wrote compelling novels set in Vancouver. We claim them both as our own. But their affiliation has nothing to do with the Canadian-ness in their works.

As for domicile, it is difficult to see the relevance. Michael Bublé’s rendition of “New York New York” is not made Canadian by the fact that Bublé makes his home in Burnaby, BC. By contrast, there’s Joni Mitchell at the 2026 Juno Awards, saying how glad she is to be back in Canada and praising Prime Minister Mark Carney as “a blessing: I live in the US now, you know.” The idea of Canada “being in my blood like holy wine.” I have always been a fan. So is Stursberg. We agree.

But what is of core relevance to Canadian cultural identity? The question I think is: What makes this place who I am and who we are?

Indigenous cultural resurgence, including in literature, is and always has been fundamentally about here. Stursberg agrees.

Other examples include the nonfiction books I listed above. I concede that many such books are supported directly or indirectly by public funding to the scholars who write them and the university presses which publish them. But that is not the kind of protection and support for which Stursberg’s book advocates.

Moreover, in a world which seemingly requires instant responses, it also seems possible that culture comes to its spontaneous expression more through means other than books or art or film.

For example, at this confusing time in our nation’s history, when opportunity beckons to become the beautiful 51^st American state, we seem to look to hockey (!?!) for what might fairly be termed cultural guidance in relation to contemporary events:

• elbows up, one or both, win or (tragically) lose;
• the “Hockey Song” parody in the Canadian Super Bowl commercial: “The good old football game, it’s the second best game you could name, ….” ;
• Gretzky at Mar-a-Lago;
• the fights at the very start of the US/Canada Four Nations game;
• the kerfuffle over the Gordie Howe Bridge.

Attitude as living culture. “We all play for Canada.” It is no accident that Canadian Tire acquired the intellectual property rights to the Hudson’s Bay blanket. But perhaps I am getting a little fanciful in my search for the locus of our culture.

The other core component of our culture lies in the persistence of memory. A select few songs are fundamentally about a non-Indigenous person’s experience of here, including the following:

Mon pays ce n’est pas un pays, c’est l’hiver
Mon jardin ce n’est pas un jardin, c’est la plaine
Mon chemin ce n’est pas un chemin, c’est la neige
Mon pays ce n’est pas un pays, c’est l’hiver.

Mon pays ce n’est pas un pays, c’est l’envers
D’un pays qui n’était ni pays ni patrie
Ma chanson ce n’est pas une chanson, c’est ma vie
C’est pour toi que je veux posséder mes hivers.

It is a love song difficult to explain to a non-Quebecer, in words that defy translation into English.

Also at this confounding time, when separatism is threatened by Alberta to garner local financial and electoral advantage, and other governments battle over oil tankers on the coast or roads to the Ring of Fire, the words of Stan Rogers ring out in the memory as quintessentially Canadian—vision and aspiration as living culture, a Canadian ability to compromise and somehow find a way to the future, together:

Ah, for just one time
I would take the Northwest Passage
To find the hand of Franklin
Reaching for the Beaufort Sea
Tracing one warm line
Through a land so wild and savage
And make a Northwest Passage to the sea.

Culture of that sort doesn’t have much to do with issues of protecting Canada’s commercial publishing houses or the writers, musicians or artists they publish. Rather, culture of that sort touches and informs us regardless, in our own ways and lives, exactly where we live.

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Richard Butler lives on the traditional territory of the lekwungen-speaking Peoples, a retired lawyer and sometime law professor, and more recently a writer on various Indigenous subjects. He is the author of Taking Reconciliation Personally, I Dare Say… Conversations with Indigeneity, and the recent title What Is This? Who Am I?: Culturally Informed Appreciation of Coastal Peoples’ Artworks, published through A & R Publishing. [Editor’s Note: Richard Butler wrote a reflection on The Salmon Celebration in the Okanagan, the essay An Exercise in Futility, and has recently reviewed the films Sugarcane & Racing to keep our language alive: H̓ágṃ́ṇtxv Qṇtxv Tx̌ (We’re all we got) and books by Jody Wilson-Raybould and Roshan Danesh, Marianne Ignace and Ronald E. Ignace, Philip Seagram, and Val Napoleon, Rebecca Johnson, Richard Overstall and Debra McKenzie (eds.) for The British Columbia Review.]

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The British Columbia Review

Interim Editors, 2023-26: Trevor Marc Hughes (non-fiction), Brett Josef Grubisic (fiction)
Publisher: Richard Mackie

Formerly The Ormsby Review, The British Columbia Review is an on-line book review and journal service for BC writers and readers. The Advisory Board now consists of Jean Barman, Wade Davis, Robin Fisher, Barry Gough, Hugh Johnston, Kathy Mezei, Patricia Roy, and Graeme Wynn. Provincial Government Patron (since September 2018): Creative BC. Honorary Patron: Yosef Wosk. Scholarly Patron: SFU Graduate Liberal Studies. The British Columbia Review was founded in 2016 by Richard Mackie and Alan Twigg.

“Only connect.” – E.M. Forster

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1. Stursberg has more than 25 years’ experience in the entertainment, broadcasting, cable, telecommunications, and cultural industries, including terms as head of the Canadian Cable Television Association from 1995 to 1999, Star Choice and Cancom from 1999 to 2001 and Telefilm Canada from 2001 to 2004. He is a member of the executive committee of the Commonwealth Broadcasting Association. He has been a director of PEN Canada since 2015, and became president of the board in 2017. He lives in Toronto. ↩︎