Kay Kritzwiser, a feature writer assigned to the Globe and Mail’s weekend supplement, The Globe Magazine, had never heard of Marshall McLuhan when, on a mid-November morning in 1963, her edior, Colin McCullough, asked her to write a profile of him. She visited the Globe’s library and took away a Who’s Who entry and a few articles about the University of Toronto English professor. One, a profile by Kildare Dobbs published the previous year, compared a conversation with McLuhan to a trip to outer space. “In orbit with him one looks down to see the comfortable world of familiar facts diminished to the scale of molecules; long vistas of history yawn frighteningly…”

Kritzwiser, who regarded herself as a woman with her feet on the ground, thought it sounded like a carnival ride. She read on: McLuhan’s first book, an eccentric intellectual critique of advertising and society called The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Industrial Man, had been published in 1951 to good reviews and weak sales. His second major book, The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man, had been published in the fall of 1962 and widely reviewed both in Canada and in prestigious international publications, and had won that year’s Governor General’s Award for non-fiction. Nevertheless, McLuhan was, for the most part, a high-brow academic whose challenging ideas on communications and media were confined mainly to university campuses and a few industry and government organizations. In the fall of 1964, he was two years away from the mega-celebrityhood that his theories in part addressed.

At that time, almost all female reporters were forced into one of two stereotypes: those who specialized in women’s page fare (weddings, fashion, cooking tips) and the so-called “sob sisters”—reporters whose great journalistic achievement was the use of sympathy to coax family photos from grieving widows. Kritzweiser fit into a third category that might be classified as post-emancipation and pre-feminism: independent, determined career women actively competing with their male counterparts (at half their salaries) who nonetheless saw no irony in backing up serious reporting and research skills with a feminine flair. They were the precursors of the liberated, college-educated go-getters who began pouring into newsrooms in the mid-1960s.

A Regina native, Kritzwiser was recruited by the Globe in 1956. A year later, she had established herself as one of the paper’s senior feature writers. In his 1999 memoir, Hurly Burly: A Time at the Globe, Richard J. Doyle fondly described Kritzwiser in a passage that also revealed an attitude toward women shared by many of his generation:

The lady knows how to bat an eyelash, swivel a hip, show off an ankle or arch an eyebrow. A rustle of silk announces her arrival, a breathless voice begins the interview, a laugh like [Lauren] Bacall’s punctuates the questions. Tiny gasps greet the most mundane of responses to her guileless prodding into the dark recesses of the hapless fellow on the other side of her notepad.

Until the interview appears in print. “Did I say that? I didn’t admit… but if I did… why did I tell her about… Who does she think she is?”

Kritzwiser’s writing reflected Doyle’s modernizing of the Globe in the 1960s. Although most of us take it for granted today, at this time people were just beginning to realize that objectivity, a goal of news reporting for decades, was seen as too confining to cope with the complexities of modern life. Features were longer than a conventional news story and had a beginning, middle, and an end; readers who devoted time and attention to them expected some interpretation, not just a recitation of facts. Pierre Berton and a handful of others had turned out these kinds of features from time to time since the 1940s, but now they were becoming accepted practice. And it was the only approach that had a hope of making sense out of a figure like Marshall McLuhan.

“How do you do, Professor McLuhan?” Kritzwiser said, stepping into McLuhan’s cramped, shabby office on the U of T campus. Considering McLuhan’s published statements about how the electronic media were killing print, it was hard not to notice the books: shelves groaned with them, they were piled high on tables and the floor, and they spilled out into his secretary’s tiny alcove.

“How do you do,” said McLuhan, standing up behind his desk and indicating a chair. Kritzwiser sat down, crossed her legs, and placed a notebook on her knee.

Like most things she did when working, Kritzwiser dressed for effect; this morning she was wearing her beautifully tailored grey wool suit with the pearl-white buttons and a stylish grey felt hat. She was a short, trim woman with a sunny personality and plain, boyish features. On most occasions she seemed entirely at ease, a function, in part, of several years spent in amateur theatre in Regina, which she regarded as excellent preparation for interviewing. She drew a cigarette from its package and politely asked McLuhan whether he had a light.

He was a tall, lanky man, his thinning grey hair swept straight back, handsome in a distinguished way, she observed. He wore a russet-coloured Harris tweed suit and, as he leaned forward in a courtly gesture to light her cigarette, she noticed his relaxed stance, the angular lines of his free hand on his hip, index finger pointing downward. Then he sat down and lit a thin cigarillo.

Kritzwiser was a social smoker. Cigarettes, to her, were mainly aesthetic, a prop, part of a formality that relaxed both interviewer and interviewee in the days before antismoking sentiments came to dominate Canadian society. Her brand was Sweet Caporals, not for the taste but for the red filter that approximately matched her lipstick.

McLuhan, she knew, had been born in Edmonton and brought up in Winnipeg, so they chatted about the West. McLuhan had no idea how to make small talk—he described it as “a world without a foreground, but with the whole world as a background.” Then he began a discourse about how the industrial revolution was symbolized by the extension of feet into the wheel, the knight-in-armour into a tank. Next the earth’s curvature was discovered, which led to the invention of modern media.

“Today, the central nervous system has been extended outside the body through the age of electricity,” he explained, smoke forming a nimbus around his head. “Literally, our brain is now outside our skull. We’re lashed around by the fury of these extensions. It’s like a spinning buzz-saw. It’s not known where the teeth are but we know they’re there.”

It didn’t take much to get McLuhan started, and he was warmed up now, his voice purring on eight well-tuned cylinders while his thoughts wound circuitously through a maze of theories, many related to a work-in-progress that would be published, a few months later, as Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. Kritzwiser’s pen darted back and forth across the page in an effort to keep up. McLuhan was incredible; he spoke in what sounded like feature-story paragraphs, although following his train of thought was like trying to scoop up a puddle of mercury. It was, she thought, as though he simply hadn’t stitched together all the loose ends yet, as though he was feeling his way toward a new philosophy, like a blind man acquainting himself with a new neighbourhood.

An exhilarated Kritzwiser arrived back at the office. In today’s world, where computers are not just in most homes but now ubiquitous in the palms of millions, it’s hard to remember that 50 years ago McLuhan’s ideas—about a “global village” and a computer-driven medium of communication that sounded a lot like the internet—might as well have been science fiction. “I don’t know what I’ve got,” she told her editor, “but I do know a man has pulled aside a curtain for me. I don’t know what I saw but I know I glimpsed the future.”

Later she read over her notes. The story hadn’t gelled yet, she thought. She was still looking for what she called the “moment of truth,” that dramatic scene or anecdote or object that symbolically captures the essential theme of a story. But what was the theme? So far, Kritzwiser had a professor in a book-filled office and seven pages of notes that included references to Ezra Pound, James Joyce, Baudelaire, and Flaubert, as well as cryptic phrases (even though they were in her own handwriting) such as “in a non-specialist society, relevance will be our business.”

The following Saturday, she arrived at McLuhan’s rambling two-storey home in the Annex district of Toronto, a few blocks north of the U of T campus. There were bicycles on the front porch and inside the homey smell of a baking pie filled the air. McLuhan, in a rumpled flannel shirt and casual slacks, looked like a homebody sitting in his chair beside a crackling fire with his legs stretched out. He was talking to a friend who worked at the Royal Ontario Museum about a lecture he was scheduled to give the following week.

“TV is tactile,” McLuhan was saying, rubbing his fingers together as though he were feeling silk. “The eye has immunity to radio…”

But Kritzwiser’s attention was captured by a carved wooden slab of a mask hanging on the wall. Was it Greek? She was interested in Greek and Roman mythology and her instincts told her she had found the symbol for her story. On January 4, 1964, her article, bearing the title “The McLuhan Galaxy,” was published.

On the fireplace wall of the Herbert Marshall McLuhan home, a giant wooden mask broods over the living room. Visiting children swarm up the chair beneath it to stroke its satiny furrows. It is a mask of Tiresias, the Theban of Greek legend who saw Athena bathing and was struck with blindness when she splashed water in his face. Through she repented, Athena was unable to restore his sight. Instead, she gave Tiresias the power of soothsaying. She opened his ears so that he could understand the language of the birds. She gave him a staff with which he walked as safely as a sighted person.

Six foot tall and lean, Marshall McLuhan, an internationally known expert in the new science of communications, casts a shadow like a television tower on the University of Toronto campus… But in his home, sprawled beside the fire, the mask of Tiresias above him makes a provocative comparison. For McLuhan’s new global reputation as a communications authority credits him with the power to see as few do, to hear a new language and to walk confidently in the strange and frightening world of the electronic age.

It was not Kritzwiser’s best story. McLuhan was both charming and hard to pin down, and her profile was overly flattering. Some of McLuhan’s ideas were summarized but they weren’t critically analyzed, nor was Kritzwiser particularly well qualified to do so. Few reporters were at the time, but she might have included one or two of the critics of McLuhan who thought he was a self-absorbed crackpot whose theories lacked intellectual rigor, or more often simply lacked a point. The closest Kritzwiser came to representing that view was through an unnamed faculty member who said he admired McLuhan’s ability to challenge tradition but admitted he left his seminars “with a thundering headache.”

Her story was otherwise typical of how daily journalism usually dealt with McLuhan in the mid-1960s. The opening was revealing. The key phrase was the reference to McLuhan’s ability “to hear a new language and to walk confidently in the strange and frightening world of the electronic age.” Aside from tying neatly into the Tiresias myth, it reflected the accepted wisdom among mainstream journalists that the electronic age was to be feared and mistrusted. Since the public had as much trouble understanding abstract subjects involving science, physics, and technology as the press had writing about them, most stories focused on a person. The mid-1960s was a time of accelerated change, and McLuhan seemed to offer an accessible link with the future. A Canadian, he was emerging as an internationally acknowledged “expert”— which lent him credibility—but he was also easily portrayed as a literary invention: an ivory-tower egghead who might be a genius, an adventurous non-conformist who, against all odds, wasn’t a young, bearded, wild-eyed revolutionary. Instead, he was a respectable family man with six children, and it was as easy as it was natural for Kritzwiser to “humanize” him near the top of her story by presenting him in a Norman Rockwell–like setting where Corrine McLuhan, “wife and mother, calm, handsome and dark-haired,” appeared as “the pivotal force in the McLuhan galaxy.”

Sometimes the mainstream media seemed like a three-ring circus, with a few big attractions on the front page (or leading the TV newscast) and plenty of sideshows to ensure there was something of interest for everyone. Even papers like the Globe or the New York Times, with their well-educated readers and lofty reputations, still had to entertain as well as inform. A few months later, when McLuhan’s Understanding Media was published, The Globe Magazine ran a critical review by Lister Sinclair in which he declared, “He has become a writer and he can’t write. He has become an authority on communications and he can’t communicate.” Many academics agreed, and if the debate had been confined to the insular world of university scholarship, today McLuhan might be an obscure curio of the ’60s. But instead, he became even more popular and controversial; a “McLuhan story” had increased in value because it was viewed as entertaining, which resulted in more coverage.

By publishing Kritzwiser’s respectful profile, the Globe introduced McLuhan to an elite audience and acted as a stamp of approval, signalling to timid editors of other papers that McLuhan was important. Over the next few years, the momentum grew. Articles were written about him in virtually every major North American publication, including the New York Times, Playboy, Time, Life, Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s, Saturday Night, The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, and the New York Herald Tribune. (Which, in November 1965 in its weekend magazine, New York, published Tom Wolfe’s legendary profile of McLuhan that posed the Wolfian question: “Suppose he is what he sounds like, the most important thinker since Newton, Darwin, Freud, Einstein, and Pavlov, studs of the intelligentsia game—suppose he is the oracle of the modern times—what if he is right…?”)

As McLuhan had written, the medium is the message. That meant new technologies, from television to computers, were revolutionizing human consciousness and altering the context of communications, but it could also be summarized as content follows form. The properties of the medium were more important than the information it conveyed. Still, even many scholars had trouble following his train of thought, so, in 1964, the job of communicating McLuhan and his ideas fell to journalists like Kay Kritzwiser who focused on the most accessible information—and left the theories to the future in which we live.

David Skok. Illustration by Dave Donald

David Skok, the managing editor of GlobalNews.ca, checked into Harvard University in September to begin a one-year Nieman Fellowship. The 33-year-old is the first Canadian digital journalist to receive the prestigious award. He’ll be studying “how to sustain Canadian journalism’s distinct presence in a world of stateless news organizations.” He spoke with This two weeks before heading to Boston.

THIS: I’ve seen you referred to as an online journalist and a digital journalist. Which do you prefer?

SKOK: Digital journalist. Online is a little too specific to the web. What we do is beyond that. It’s mobile. It’s iPads and everything else.

THIS: Do you like being called a digital journalist?

SKOK: It’s fine for now but I look forward to the day when there’s no label that separates digital versus broadcast versus a print journalist.

THIS: Do you think the established media consider digital to be less important than traditional media?

SKOK: It depends on what we’re talking about. There are two ways to look at digital media. For me there’s the newsgathering … and then there’s digital media for publishing and distribution. I think digital media [for the latter] is becoming more accepted, if not by choice but by necessity. From a newsgathering point of view, I think there’s a long way to go.

THIS: For example?

SKOK: Look at the Arab Spring and how Andy Carvin of NPR used Twitter to verify information and facts. And he did the same thing with Syria. He was in Washington, DC. He’s being more effective at getting the accurate, fair, correct news out than the mainstream or legacy news organizations. That’s something I don’t think many news organizations have actually caught on to yet. And if they have it’s in a very tokenistic way, not as a real way of telling stories.

THIS: There’s a concern that if someone Tweets something, how do you know it’s true?

SKOK: Exactly. When I speak within my own newsrooms, I often make the point: how is a Tweet any different than a press release, or a report you’re hearing on a police scanner or anything else? Every piece of information we get needs to be verified and Twitter is no different.

THIS: Can you sum up your overriding goal for your fellowship?

SKOK: It’s probably too far-reaching but there are three parts I really want to look at. The first is the new tools of journalism, such as Twitter, open data, data journalism and even things like WikiLeaks. Second is how should Canadian newsrooms evolve in light of all these changes. This one hits me very close to home because I run a digital media organization within a legacy news organization. We created that from scratch and eventually, ultimately we have to integrate our product and our journalists into the main news organization as a whole. The third part is how can we, as Canadian news organizations, think of our role in the global sphere.

THIS: What do you mean by stateless news organizations?

SKOK: Ones that are based in a country but whose target audience is not that country. Al Jazeera, for example. Its target audience is not Qatar, where it’s based or Dubai or even the Arab world. I watched Al Jazeera and BBC World and CNN International on my iPad during the Arab Spring demonstrations. I didn’t need to be watching a Canadian news organization. Do we even need a national news organization anymore?

THIS: What else will you be studying?

SKOK: I’m noticing, as someone running the digital side of things, that we’re increasingly reliant on private enterprise to host the content. For example Facebook, Twitter, even the servers we use, Amazon, let’s say, they’re all private companies that host content in California. What interest do they have in sustaining Canadian journalism? What obligations does the CRTC place on them? There’s something about that we should be questioning. I’ll also be taking some courses at business school to understand more of the business side of things. As journalists we’ve always had this church and state mentality and I don’t know if we can still afford to do that anymore because we’re not making money anymore.

THIS: Are you excited about spending a year at Harvard?

SKOK: Absolutely. The resources at Harvard are immense. There are so many bright people. But not just that, there are programs that are thinking about all these issues we’re talking about, whether the law school, the Kennedy School, MIT. And they’re tackling these issues every day. To be immersed in that environment and be able to tackle them without the day-to-day operational running of a newsroom is incredibly exciting.

Hugh McGuire, founder of Librivox, Iambik, Bite-size Edits, and PressBook.

Imagine Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness read by a woman with a girlish, high-pitched voice. How would it affect your interpretation of the text? What elements of the story would be heightened, and which ones muted? What effect can a reader have on a text? These are a few of the questions that arise when you sample one of the more than 3,700 audiobooks posted to LibriVox.

Inspired by open-source models like Project Gutenberg and Wikipedia, LibriVox was launched in 2005 by Hugh McGuire, an affable Montrealer with a background in mechanical engineering. Finding the selection of audiobooks on the slim side, McGuire bet that people would be willing to record audio versions of public-domain books, for free, simply to make them available to others.

He was right. LibriVox today boasts posts by 4,178 readers, of which the most prolific has posted 2,923 chapter recordings; the collection includes everything from Alfred Marshall’s Principles of Economics to Aristophanes’ Lysistrata. At the heart of the project is the belief that people are fascinated by transparency in cultural production, and that the public should have a hand in enriching the canon of available works.

With LibriVox now chugging along under its own steam, the 36-year-old McGuire is focusing on several new projects. Last October, he launched Iambik, which mines the talent in the LibriVox pool, matching some of those readers with titles submitted by more than 30 independent presses; the revenue-sharing model makes audiobook production more affordable, allowing for the creation of high-quality recordings of contemporary works. And this summer, McGuire will launch PressBooks, a WordPress-driven tool that will simplify the ebook production process for writers and publishers alike.

PressBooks users may benefit from the expertise of fans of another McGuire project, Bite-size Edits, a forum that “gameifies” the editorial process, allowing enthusiasts of the red pencil to earn points and prizes by editing the texts of books posted by publishers.

McGuire is the Canadian doyen of literary commons-based peer production. His projects enable public engagement in the preservation and dissemination of literary works, and show that, given the chance, there’s no shortage of material to share—and bookish volunteers who want to share it.

It was his first act of reinventing himself. He’s been doing it ever since, to the benefit of us all.

A college student in 1967, he participated in a mass resistance to the draft in the Vietnam War, and fled to Canada like so many other good Americans did. It wasn’t easy to be a teenager alone in a new country, but he never regretted what he’d done. A few years later, when he could have returned to the U.S., he didn’t. He moved to the Ottawa Valley and reinvented himself as a Canadian.

Faithful to his anti-war roots, he was president of Operation Dismantle, with the awesome task of dismantling the nuclear arms machine. Good Canadian that he became, he won the prize for sheer progressive persistence by running four times as an NDP candidate in the barren ground of rural eastern Ontario.

He plays the fiddle like he was Valley-born and, a non-stop learner, he is currently studying jazz piano. He started writing musical plays and that is how he was to find his two present-day vocations, as a summer theatre director and as a writer and publisher. He is a left entrepreneur par excellence.

Theilheimer is a self-taught journalist with an easy style. He became a stringer for the Ottawa Citizen. He was the editor of the Ontario New Democratic newspaper.

A decade ago, at the turn of the millennium, he founded Straight Goods, the alternative online news source. (Full disclosure: I’ve been involved myself from the outset, on the board of directors and as a columnist.) A good name: the key to good writing, the great Gabriel García Márquez says somewhere, is to tell it straight—the way country folk do.

Straight Goods is a meat-and-potatoes, trade-union–sponsored venture. A for-profit business that has yet to make a real profit but has had and is having a real impact on left activism.

In a parallel universe, there’s Stone Fence Theatre, dedicated to the heritage of the Valley, where he writes lyrics, composes, and runs the business. The long and the short of it is that Ish Theilheimer is a person of the people. In everything he writes and creates, he tells us about the lives of those extraordinary ordinary Canadians who did, and do, the heavy lifting in this country he chose.

Since 2007, Maly has, like so many others, written a blog on subjects he cares about. His is called Quiet Babylon, where he writes about technology, architecture and urban spaces. But in 2010, Maly made the brave and unusual decision to quit his regular job, dip into his savings, and set himself a deadline to turn Quiet Babylon into his livelihood. Now Maly spends his time collaborating, thinking, and “creating cool stuff.”

Some examples? He curated the “50 Cyborgs” project, which celebrated the 50th anniversary of the term “cyborg” by gathering 50 blog posts on the topic from an array of writers—from fellow bloggers to the founder of Wired magazine. In April, he set up a design studio that will generate art and ideas about the concept of border towns.

Part of what enables Maly to do this is the web, which has allowed him to find and foster a community of like-minded people, while drastically cutting the risk involved in creating and publishing work. It’s an approach that in its collaborative, creative nature is eminently contemporary—futuristic, even.

In a sense then, Maly is sort of from the future. His practice speaks to the possibility that we will increasingly carve out careers in the spaces made by new technology—inventing ways to merge what we love with how we live.

Looking for answers: Alex Colville, "To Prince Edward Island" (1965). Copyright National Gallery of Canada.

Their jobs sound like an oxymoron in Canada’s present political climate; arts professionals earn about half the average national income per year, a large chunk of which comes from grants. That public funding is in danger since Stephen Harper made it perfectly clear he doesn’t consider the arts a priority. Given that the main agenda of his Conservative majority is to balance the budget, the Canada Council Canadian Conference of the Arts recently predicted cuts of “at least $175 million” to arts, culture and heritage. And two weeks ago, adding insult to the threat of injury, Sun TV attacked interpretive dancer Margie Gillis by distorting grant tallies in a ham-fisted effort to devalue the arts. In this state of worry and frustration, what can bring some sanity back to Canadian arts policy?

Jeff Melanson, currently co-CEO the National Ballet School, and soon to be president of The Banff Centre, made a provocative suggestion at a talk in late May hosted by the Literary Review of Canada: a new Massey Commission.

Canada’s “Magna Carta of arts and culture,” as the commission’s report was nicknamed, was released in 1951. The detailed document gave advice on the state of Canada’s arts, sciences, humanities, and media based on three premises:

1. Canadians should know as much as possible about their country’s culture, history and traditions
2. We have a national interest to encourage institutions that add to the richness of Canadian life
3. Federal agencies that promote these ends should be supported

With then University of Toronto Chancellor Vincent Massey at the reins, the commissioners were poised to spur government spending in the arts. But before I let you in on their recommendations, let’s set the stage with some juicy historical context.

History of the Massey Commission

Rewind 67 years. Canada was nearing the end of the Second World War, a key part of which was fought using propaganda. Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia needed to keep their populations confused and complacent; the U.S. and Canada wanted their citizens to buy liberty bonds and join the army. Information and creative expression were deployed against the masses.

Before the war, Canada’s government had no real investment in the arts. The turning point came when arts groups began calling on their government to support culture as a way of protecting democracy.

As a negative argument, stifling creativity is censorship’s equal. As a positive argument, the arts play a role in driving democracy through freedom of thought, belief, opinion and expression. (Thank you section 2(b) of the Charter.) Citizens who think critically and express their ideas creatively are a basic part of any healthy democracy — they hold government accountable.

After the war was over, Canada’s government created the Royal Commission on National Development in the Arts. Two years later, the commission produced a body of research and advice that blossomed into an independent institution by 1957. To this day, many artists still fiercely protect the Canada Council for the Arts as if their lives depended on it—which for some is pretty close to the truth.

The report’s key recommendation

Please direct your gaze to section 15 (XV) of the Massey report: “The Artist and The Writer.” Here you will find a time capsule detailing the state of such creative endeavors as music, theatre, ballet, painting, architecture, literature, and Aboriginal arts. It is, I think, a must-read for all artists — and any naysayers. It will remind them that Canada indeed has written policy that places high value in artistic work.

This section begins with the suggestion that the extent to which a nation supports its artists is a measure of how civilized it is. Just how civilized was Canada back then? The report quotes the Arts Council:

“No novelist, poet, short story writer, historian, biographer, or other writer of non-technical books can make even a modestly comfortable living by selling his [or her] work in Canada. No composer of music can live at all on what Canada pays him[/her] for his[/her] compositions. Apart from radio drama, no playwright, and only a few actors and producers, can live by working in the theatre in Canada. Few painters and sculptors, outside the fields of commercial art and teaching, can live by sale of their work in Canada.”

This raised a vital question for the commissioners: if artists were so undervalued that they could barely sustain themselves, how could they gain funding? It only made sense for taxpayers to chip in — to protect Canada’s democracy and “civilize” our apparent philistinism.

The commission urged the resurrection of the Canada Council as an arms-length body. It would boost not-for-profits, promote artists abroad, and dish out scholarships. The independence of this body was key. As Margie Gillis calmly pointed out in the midst of Sun TV’s sensationalism, the government does not fund Canadian artists directly; instead it endows funds to the Canada Council. The Council consists of no more than 11 respected artists and educators who hold their positions for no more than four years each. Grant recipients are selected through a fair and open process.

A new commission on the arts

Today many of the report’s recommendations are dated. For example, Massey’s posse tagged radio as a “new technology.” While it remains an important medium, radio has been swallowed alive by the web and social media. Artists have harnessed these newer mediums for creative projects, including this fabulous example.

But technology is far from the report’s only concern. As Tom Perlmutter, chair of the National Film Board of Canada, told the Toronto Star:

“What we need now is not one particular policy patchwork fix but the new Massey-Levesque for the 21st century. We need to rethink the fundamental conceptual framework that can give rise to the cultural policies that will serve us for the next 60 years.”

Whether it is updated or started again from scratch, this not-yet-conceived report should be the brainchild of Canadian artists. They should review those ever-important premises about promoting the historical and cultural richness of our country. They should reassess how creative minds are using technology. They should research how Canada’s cultural policies compare to those abroad. And, most importantly, they must underline the fundamental reason that Canadians support the arts financially: the health and vibrancy of our democracy.

“People spend an average of 14 minutes a day on Facebook,” says Vancouver-based Haas Lyons, a 33-year-old public engagement consultant who sees an opportunity to steer Canadians toward more political conversations in that space. “We can start to really advance civic capacity to be taking leadership on pressing issues.” During a six-year stint with America Speaks in Washington, D.C., Haas Lyons helped integrate social media into the massive nonprofit’s citizen engagement initiatives, such as following up on Hurricane Katrina relief programs and grappling with how to bring jobs back to Ohio’s Rust Belt. But, she is quick to add, the goal is “never to replace face-to-face conversation, but to augment face-to-face conversation.”

Her current focus is the Alberta Climate Dialogue, a citizen-participation initiative that brings together individuals, businesses, and NGOs to help Alberta municipalities mitigate and adapt to climate change. After five years, the group wants to be able to share its views and experiences with the provincial government in an effort to change the political conversation on the always-heated topic. The tools and technologies may be new, but it comes down to a core belief that will be very familiar to activists of earlier generations: the personal is political.

“My hope is that in each of these individual democratic engagement pieces, we’re building civic capacity to have hard conversations,” Haas Lyons says. But she also knows there are challenges ahead for activists in social media. “People go on Facebook to look at photos and watch funny videos. We have to make it relevant, not just available.”

Illustration by Matt Daley

The United States’ decision to invade Afghanistan soon after 9/11 was misguided for many reasons, but one was purely practical: Al Qaeda is a stateless, decentralized network scattered across the globe. The spectral, international scope of the problem was no secret—so why wage a conventional war on one country? It was as if an outmoded way of thinking simply couldn’t react fast enough to a startling new reality.

With the rise of WikiLeaks and its release of thousands of classified military and diplomatic documents, something disturbingly similar is happening again. While the internet and geopolitical struggle were once rarely connected, in the WikiLeaks affair, they are now intertwined in a very real way. Among other things, the cables detailed secret U.S. bombings of Yemen and Chinese cyber-attacks on Google. Their publication drew loud, if somewhat hollow, condemnations from the likes of Hillary Clinton.

Unfortunately, the U.S. response to WikiLeaks seems eerily analogous to its response to 9/11. Another stateless, decentralized network has again attacked the establishments of American power. And America’s response, again, has been an ineffectual, ham-fisted blunder that mostly harms bystanders while the perpetrators vanish into the hills. Worse, corporations are also lining up behind governments to help protect the political status quo.

When WikiLeaks released the first batch of diplomatic cables, the reaction was, unsurprisingly, split. But whether people thought it good or bad, what everyone saw was that the spread of information on networks that do not adhere to traditional ideas of centralization, statehood, or journalism made that information extremely difficult to hide.

That didn’t stop the American government and companies from twisting almost every arm they could grab to try and stem the flow. Amazon, whose servers WikiLeaks were using to hold a copy of the cables, shut down WikiLeaks’ account, in part because its terms of service said its customers must own the rights to documents they publish. (Nobody at Amazon, it seems, caught the irony that the entire point of leaked documents is that you don’t ask for permission to publish them.) When the U.S Department of Justice served Twitter with a subpoena for the accounts of people associated with WikiLeaks—including WikiLeaks head Julian Assange and Icelandic MP Birgitta Jónsdóttir—Twitter had little choice but to comply.

Corporations obviously have to abide by the law. Beyond the business ramifications of legal censure, if they don’t play nice, neither other companies nor their shareholders will trust them.

Even though under most circumstances, law works to keep societies and economies running smoothly, legal protections for expressing dissent are built into truly democratic systems. If you want to demonstrate against powers that affect your life, you can always protest in a public square or on the street in front of a multinational. You are safe doing so because that space belongs to you as a citizen. But unlike a leak in the traditional press or the careful dance between protesters and police at a rally, WikiLeaks highlighted the fact that, on the internet, there is no tradition of public space. Indeed, the stark reality is that virtual world is essentially a private, corporate one.

If technology is increasingly both a tool and a site of resistance—and it unquestionably is—then the ownership of that space is of crucial importance. Centuries of common law underpin our rights to expression in public places; the internet has no equivalent.

We often treat the web like a public space, but the reality is that it is more like a private amusement park. We, the children who have been granted access, must play by the rules posted at its entrance. From the great server farms where data is stored to the pipes running under the sea to the copper wires linking your home to the web, all of it is owned by profit-seeking companies. And when the law knocks on their door—as it does every day with Twitter, Amazon, Google, Facebook, and others—they have to comply. What WikiLeaks so clearly demonstrated is that when companies beholden to the status quo own the virtual ground on which you can resist, it might be pulled from under you without recourse.

None of this succeeded in top-killing the WikiLeaks gusher, of course. The centreless nature of the web ensured that (so did legal protections in Europe).

But it did demonstrate that the authoritarian impulse is alive and well online, and that the rules of dissent, misbehaviour, and resistance are even less settled on the web than they are in the streets. The networks through which we spread information do not belong to us as citizens—only as consumers. Like any business transaction, the use of Twitter or storage on Amazon servers operates under a contract limited by the law. Anything that actually defies legality—as did the suffragettes, the civil rights movement, or anticapitalist anarchism today—is off limits.

Significant historical change often means not following the rules: taking to the streets, gathering with others, and yes, even breaking the odd window. But when the new virtual space of public assembly is owned by those with a vested interest in not rocking the boat, expressing dissent becomes more and more difficult.

So we are left with two competing, incompatible visions: of a technology that promised to upend the status quo; and a set of rules designed to ensure we never dare to try.

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The cover story this issue is Elizabeth Wright‘s look at Canada’s broken drug approval process. The way that pharmaceuticals in this country get approved for medical use is needlessly secretive, rushed, and inefficient, many experts say, and its dysfunction puts everyone’s health at risk. And with Big Pharma in the driver’s seat—from the doctor’s office to the federal research labs, it’s increasingly clear that a more accountable, transparent, and independent drug approval process is necessary.

Also in this issue: Brad Badelt reports on the mystery of B.C.’s 2010 salmon run, which saw record-breaking numbers of fish returning to west-coast rivers. The fish-farming industry said it proved that Pacific salmon stocks are perfectly healthy and there’s no need to worry. But was last year’s boom a sign of resurgence—or a last gasp? Plus we bring you a special eight-page photo essay by Ian Willms from the dark heart of the tar sands. In Fort Chipewyan, 300 kilometres downstream from the world’s most environmentally destructive project, residents are living—and dying—amidst a skyrocketing cancer rate and deteriorating ecosystem.

And there’s plenty more: Paul McLaughlin interviews Silicone Diaries playwright-performer Nina Arsenault; Jason Brown explains how Canada is losing the global race for geothermal energy; Ellen Russell asks why we can’t have more muscular banking reforms; Lisa Xing sends a postcard from Jeju Island, South Korea, where the last of the pacific “mermaids” live; Dylan C. Robertson explains how the Canada-European Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement will change our world; Kapil Khatter shows why that “organic farmed fish” you buy may be anything but; Daniel Wilson untangles the right wing’s curious fixation on aboriginal tax exemptions; and Emily Landau sneaks a peek at the next genre-bending project from KENK publisher Pop Sandbox.

PLUS: Christina Palassio on poetry in schools; Navneet Alang on Wikileaks; Jackie Wong on painter Michael Lewis; Flavie Halais on the West Coast’s greenest city; Victoria Salvas on criminalizing HIV-AIDS; Denise Deby on the fight to save Ottawa’s South March Highlands; and reviews of new books by Renee Rodin, Lorna Goodison, David Collier, and David Lester.

This issue also includes debut fiction by Christine Miscione and new poetry by Jim Smith.

In 1999, the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission took a hard look at the then-burgeoning internet. They then did what many Canadians would consider a very un-CRTC-like thing: they decided not to regulate it.

That may come as something of a surprise, as we tend to think that if the CRTC has a thing, it’s regulating stuff. They are, after all, the people known primarily for “CanCon” rules, the quotas that dictate that a certain percentage of programming on Canadian radio and television is made in Canada.

Yet at the time, the Commission’s logic for not touching the web was twofold. First, it felt that the bulk of material online consisted “predominantly of alphanumeric text,” and thus simply wasn’t theirs to regulate; second, it seemed Canadians were both consuming and making lots of Canadian content just fine on their own.

Eleven years later, the internet is a different place. The big change is that, whether on YouTube or the sites of Canadian TV networks, we are watching millions of videos a day. What’s more, we also have unfettered access to TV and film through online services like iTunes, and, since September, streaming video through the U.S.based Netflix. With this sudden online expansion of our entertainment and cultural choices, it may be time for Canada to not only change its approach to regulation, but the entire CanCon concept itself.

Though always contentious, the need for CanCon in our culture’s most dominant medium, TV, has compelling evidence behind it. Except for Hockey Night in Canada, the top 20 most-watched shows in Canada are all made in America. Though there are many reasons why, money is the big one. The pilot episode for ABC’s Lost was widely rumoured to have a budget of around $12 million. That’s as much as or more than many Canadian dramas get for an entire season. The disparity in financial backing—and, consequently, in cultural influence—is often stark. Legitimate debate rages over whether regulation is the best way to solve this gap, but the dominance of American media is likely to increase following the arrival this September of streaming-video service Netflix, allowing users to watch movies and TV shows on their PCs or, with the right equipment, TVs. The growing service already has 15 million subscribers in the U.S., and the company has become so well-known that even Ottawa-based Zip.ca has for years advertised itself as Canada’s Netflix.

But because Netflix delivers content over the web, it’s not subject to any CanCon regulation by the CRTC, and is under no obligation to deliver Canadian content. Similar services from Apple, Microsoft, and Sony are also free to sell and rent whatever they please. Because it’s relatively easy to license Canadian content, and because Canadians will watch it, most services do launch with some Canadian shows and music. But as more and more of these services spring up, Canadians will have increasing access to online broadcast channels untouched by CanCon requirements.

The answer, it would seem, would be to regulate them. When the CRTC initially chose to leave the web alone, it did so because it felt the market was doing an adequate job of protecting Canadian interests. But a decade later, market economics have done what they always do: they created a link between capital and cultural clout, and wealthy American giants like Netflix and Apple will soon have even more influence over what we watch.

What’s more, if media is the fodder for the conversations we have on Facebook and Twitter about the contemporary moment, it’s hard not to talk about those ubiquitous American shows. If you want to chat about body issues, it’s Mad Men’s Christina Hendricks you talk about. The web is a global conversation, and in a world in which U.S. cultural production is everywhere, American culture often becomes our shared reference point.

But even amidst this changing landscape, regulating the web is not the answer. In fact, the cyclical relationship between web hype and pop culture means that regulation is far less effective than relevance. CanCon was effective in a world with a few limited TV channels to choose from; the nearly limitless bandwidth of the web has changed the game.

To become more present in Canadian culture, Canadian media must provide its own fodder for online chatter, links, and debate. What this means is that rather than regulating the delivery system, we need to fund homegrown arts and culture to ensure the internet pipe into every home is filled with high-quality Canadian content.

Forget the free-marketeers’ response that “Canadian media should stand on its own two feet.” We need to acknowledge that the web has expanded our cultural choices well beyond Canadian borders. For Canadians to have and keep our own points of reference that speak to our own issues, we must fund them so that, placed side by side with American or British counterparts, there is no reason to click away.

Fortunately, this path has a precedent. Recent examples from television like Corner Gas and Being Erica prove that when Canadians are given high-quality programming from their own backyards, they will flock to it. In the face of the web and massively expanded competition from across the world, Canada must continue to invest in its own cultural industries if it too wishes to be part of that global conversation.