Cartt.ca Podcast

THERE’S NOT MUCH TIME left to save our cultural institutions and corporations in Canada, says Richard Stursberg. If our federal government doesn’t act soon, what it means to be Canadian will be subsumed by the sheer volume of American culture washing over us online while our “feckless” Canadian government stands idly by. “We’re going to be completely dominated by American content,” he says. The former assistant deputy minister of culture and broadcasting and former CBC, Shaw, and Telefilm executive, recently released a brand new book, called The Tangled Garden. A Canadian Cultural Manifesto for the Digital Age, which is a soup to nuts re-envisioning of Canadian content and the Canadian media industry which is cracking under the enormous pressure being applied by the FAANG (Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix and Google) companies. Those foreign interlopers need to start playing by the same rules (at least start with having them pay the same level of tax, he implores) as Canadian broadcasters (because those FA