In reply to Jay Johnson.
Certainly our fashions have been influenced by our near total diet of American culture. But years ago I was told American co-workers that Canadian Football (CFL not soccer) was superior to American football. I’m not one to judge, as it seems to me that today’s televised sports seem more like reality tv than actual sporting competitions. Live sports in which we participate are something else again. Baseball was the big one when i was a kid, but in my little corner of Canada it has been thoroughly supplanted by soccer for my child’s generation.
Mostly Canadians watch American media because we believe (wrongly) that our own is inferior. Canada has long had a rich cultural heritage, once celebrated by the brilliant work of the NFB. Even the CBC has produced good work on the rare occasion it has risen above the politics that normally weighs it down. A case can be made that the North American English Accent prevalent in American media is more Canadian than American.
Like our American friends, the food Canadians eat is based on a mixture of indigenous food and the cuisines brought here by various waves of European settlers, so certainly there is similarity in our diets.
I agree that the idea of CanCon is to keep us “Un-American” (and give Canadians jobs) but I very strongly disagree with your contention that there is no Canadian Culture. Not because so many talented Canadian creators flock to the American culture capitals (although an argument could be made that so many Canadians must certainly be Canadianising American culture) but because Canadian Culture is in fact thriving for the first time in decades thanks to technological advances that make it possible for us to both digitally self publish our own creative works and then distribute them both at home and abroad. This is effectively breaking the stranglehold the handful of multimedia conglomerates (aka “the copyright industry”) have imposed on us for most of the past century. Pretty nearly any Canadian can go out and make a movie, record a song or publish a book. And that’s a good thing.
