The Trudeau government has given up on trying to cajole the Canadian culture industry into producing quality Canadian content, and contracted out that task to US-based Netflix. At least that seems to be the gist of the announcement by Hertiage Minister Minister Melanie Joly last Thursday.

There’s some reason to celebrate, since Netflix has made some very entertaining and engaging programming. But the federal government has had a week now, and they haven’t produced any details on what kinds of content Netflix is going to be required to create for Canadian audiences. This poses a serious threat to the idea that there is something about Canadian identity worth promoting.

Of course, it sounds good: half a billion spent by a US company in Canada. But that is over five years, meaning that it might be less than they have been spending annually lately. A new production house is a good thing, and I am sure workers in the sector are excited about this. But let’s look this gift horse in the mouth anyway.

Over the past century, a complex web of different policies have been put in place in order to ensure that the cultural content to which Canadians were exposed through the radio and television airwaves included expressions of our shared understanding of who we are as a people. This project was never complete, and many would say it never really worked as well as it should have – certainly the programming made here was never as popular as the biggest imports from the US. But on the other hand, there are notable successes to acknowledge, and Canadians on the whole seem to be pretty secure in their national pride. We hang on to those things that differentiate us from our southern neighbours, and (like most communities) we want to be able to entertain ourselves with content that acknowledges the particularities of who we are.

There are plenty of ways that the policy framework for boosting ‘national consciousness’ has always been weak and has always needed strengthening. But given that one of the mechanisms for channeling funds into that project was special levies paid by cable companies and distributed to those that produce Canadian content, there are reasons to worry that what we’ve been doing so far might be even less adequate, as more and more of us switch from cable TV to internet-based streaming.

Proponents of a change of direction for cultural policy will point to the end of ‘spectrum scarcity’, the technological transcendence of the limitations of aerial broadcast that were used to justify the original imposition of ‘Canadian content’ quotas on broadcasters. And it is true: we now have access to far more content, including Canadian content, than we ever did in the broadcast age. So some new ideas are welcome. But last week’s ideas probably won’t help.

Rethinking Canadian content policy starts with understanding what it has always been about. CanCon requirements meant that broadcasters had to fill some of their schedules with television programming made in and (primarily) by Canadians, so they had to dedicate some of their production and acquisition budget for such productions. And the government chipped in to help cover the costs, whether through subsidies, redistributing special fees on broadcasters, or through the CBC. The broadcasters could fill the rest of their schedule with whatever was profitable, which meant relatively low-cost imports of US programming.

That way, the government could argue that Canadians could see themselves on the screen, but no one was left unable to watch what they wanted, and the broadcasters could still be profitable. But the money redistributed was never substantial enough to produce the kind of quality viewing experiences that the massive corporations in the US could supply, and so naturally Canadians preferred to watch imported content, all the while thinking that our national culture was safe in the CRTC’s hands.

The real problem has, in fact, always been funding, not distribution. Making sure that content got exhibited was never enough: if no one wanted to watch what content was produced domestically, quotas would fail. Canadian content has always been known as low-budget, and always seemed to do everything to avoid offending anyone, which meant it pleased almost no one.  What has been needed is not the production and broadcasting of greater quantities of Canadian content, but production of higher quality content. Which means each production needs more money. That’s hard to do when you have a certain number of hours per day of scheduled TV that you have to fill.

Recent policy changes have, in fact, recognized that this is the real problem. The CRTC had announced in 2015 that they would be “shifting the focus from a regulatory approach based on exhibition quotas (the number of hours of Canadian programming broadcast) to one based on expenditures (the amount of money spent on Canadian programming). Those ‘exhibition quotas’ involving proportions of the broadcast day, make less sense the more people use DVRs and streaming as opposed to watching scheduled broadcasts. The new plan allows broadcasters to concentrate their spending budget on a smaller number of better-funded programs. As policies go, it is likely to end up allowing us to create something we can be proud of. Maybe fewer original Canadian productions will be made, but I don’t think that would be a problem.

Last week’s announcement, though, seems to abandon this approach and potentially opens the floodgates for a tsunami of imported content that might make our television experiences that much less Canadian. The big problem with the new plan, the centerpiece of which is the half a billion dollars that Netflix promised to invest in the country over the next five years, is that the requirements that have traditionally been attached to the projects receiving federally-mandated funds don’t seem to apply.

For sure, the same announcement included new money being paid into several of the important funds that Canadian content producers rely on, in order to account for the decline due to cord-cutting. But in the week since the announcement, they have not released any details on what kind of content Netflix will be producing here, and with which any producers of Canadian content will have to compete.  After all there is plenty of non-Canadian content produced in Toronto and Vancouver. Suits, Riverdale, and Star Trek: Discovery are made here, mostly because it is less expensive to produce here than in the US. They do nothing to help Canadian national consciousness. Without some restrictions, there is nothing to stop Netflix from investing solely in such products designed to appeal primarily to US audiences.

Now of course, even if that happens, it will help build a Canadian cultural sector – a new production house, lots of experience for Canadian culture sector workers, and a chance for talented Canadians to earn money and garner fame without leaving the country. So there is an economic benefit. But not as much as there would be if the Liberal government would promise that the content would have to meet the same criteria as the broadcasters have had to pay for over the last decades. The cultural benefit will surely be greater if the government were to ensure that funds were directly spent on the production of high-quality, genuinely Canadian content.

Yes, such funding has to come from somewhere and if Netflix is offering we shouldn’t turn it down. But there is money to be had from inside the country. We’ve been funding television content for a long time now partly out of cable company fees, and now we’re watching more TV through the internet. It is only logical so suggest a levy on ISP bills to channel money where it is needed. The Liberal government, however, doesn’t seem to think that they can persuade Canadians to chip in with a small fee, or perhaps fears losing the support of the massively profitable media monopolies that dominate the industry. Instead of a policy that would ensure the meeting of cultural goals, they’ve chosen to see things purely in economic terms.

That they really aren’t concerned about the Canadian character of what is filmed here is made clear in another part of the policy announcement. A new fund will be set up to help creative industries find audiences for their productions outside the country. If I worked in the TV or film industry here in Canada, I’d be happy about that – after all, the US is where the big money is, and foreign sales are highly lucrative. But can we really promote national consciousness and strengthen the cultural fabric of the country by producing things so that people in the US will watch them? Most observers would say no. There may be a market outside Canada for some of our productions – like the new “Anne” that the CBC and Netflix are working on – which is likely to be popular in Japan – but the more that foreign audiences are held in the back of the minds of the people as they make the creative decisions about the final product, the less likely they are really help keep us believing in the national project.

This part of the announcement makes me very skeptical that the Netflix deal is going to come with enough strings attached to ensure that what is produced serves the Canadian audience any more than it serves anyone else. Rather, we are likely to see a large investment in productions that have nothing to do with Canada, in which the Canadian urban backdrop is disguised to look like the US, and arrestees are read their Miranda rights. Those productions might be great to watch, since Netflix seems to know what it is doing. And they will keep media industry workers employed.

But we shouldn’t entrust our cultural identity in their hands any more than we would the US media companies whose products we’ve been trying to limit on our screens for decades. The policies announced by the minister have little to do with promoting Canadian national consciousness, and should be seen instead as a cynical ploy of the Liberal government to attach themselves to the popularity of Netflix rather than to the heritage of the country they are supposed to govern.