Keywords Communications

Communications influence all societies, but Canada in particular takes its shape and meaning from communications systems. Since Confederation, Canada has been a landmass much larger than most empires in history; governing its distant settlements and bringing them together in some form of political, social and cultural unity has been primarily a problem of communications management. A communications system is an attempt to offset distance between human beings, whether by railway, aircraft, telephone or post.

The building of the CANADIAN PACIFIC RAILWAY in the 1880s, as part of the political arrangement that created Confederation, was an attempt to counteract the disintegrative effects of Canada's enormous space and to prevent the absorption of western Canada by the US. A similar impulse was behind the building of radio, television, TELEPHONE and TELECOMMUNICATIONS systems.

Since Canada's inception governments have recognized the importance of communications in Canadian life, and communications systems usually have been developed under government sponsorship and always under government control. Since 1932 the federal government has been directly involved in BROADCASTING (see CANADIAN BROADCASTING CORPORATION), first radio and then TV.

Since the late 1930s it has had its own filmmaking agency, the NATIONAL FILM BOARD, which produces and distributes films. Since the 1920s the government has regulated broadcasting and telephone systems; today it is a partner in SATELLITE COMMUNICATIONS.

Private business has played an increasingly large role in broadcasting, particularly since the early 1960s. But many communities, especially in the North, would not be reached by mass communications without the active participation of the government (see COMMUNICATIONS IN THE NORTH).

ADVERTISING is a major component in almost all media and, within the business structure of Canada, consumer advertising is the main role of the media. The media have made the consumer society possible by providing fast, widespread dissemination of information or impressions about products and services.

Experience has taught advertisers that TV is one of the most effective ways of selling products. Typically, a TV commercial sets out not to sell a product directly but to surround it with exciting or pleasing images and thereby to insert the product comfortably into the world view of the consumer.

Thus, beer on TV is associated with good fellowship, long-distance telephone calls are associated with family feeling, clothing is associated with youth and beauty. A careful study of TV commercials provides a series of clues to the values held by most people at the time when the commercials were made.

McLuhan, Marshall
Marshall McLuhan speaks about the communications revolution on the CBC-TV afternoon talk show Take 30, broadcast on 1 April 1965 (courtesy CBC-TV).

McLuhan, Marshall, II
Marshall McLuhan discusses communications theory in an episode of the CBC-TV series The New Majority, broadcast on 24 August 1970 (courtesy CBC).

Hermes Communications Satellite
"Hermes" was launched on 17 January 1976, and was the most powerful communications satellite at that time (courtesy Govt of Canada).

The Mass Media
The mass media constitute an elaborate and highly sensitive web, stretched over the country, the strands of which are individual NEWSPAPERS, MAGAZINES and radio and TV stations. The people who run these institutions are closely connected and their roles are often interchangeable. A magazine editor may write a book that is serialized in a newspaper, which he discusses at length on radio, and which he then helps to turn into a TV series.

The media are also connected by the facts, themes and ideas they convey. Radio listeners will sometimes sense this interdependence when they realize that the news they hear at breakfast is a rewritten version of the news in the morning paper that was prepared the night before. News is a commodity that can be sold. The CANADIAN PRESS, the national news-gathering agency owned co-operatively by the newspapers, sells its service to broadcasters.

Through that system, and also informally, news passes freely from one medium to another. A newspaper reporter's story or quotation will be selected by a TV reporter and combined with a fresh comment from a public official to become the basis for another story in another newspaper; a few hours later it may be the subject for a column of comment or a broadcast commentary by another journalist.

McLuhan - who based much of his work on the pioneering media studies of the economist Harold INNIS - believed that media reshape not only our perceptions but our actions. People seeking publicity often create "media events" that lend themselves to coverage by TV and to a lesser extent by newspapers and radio. Campaign tours by political leaders are arranged to provide interesting TV pictures; a visit to a steel plant, for instance, is not only an attempt to solicit the steelworkers' votes but also a way of obtaining precious TV time by putting the candidate against an arresting background.

A prime minister's press conference was a small, almost private affair in the years before TV; now it is normally a public performance. The most dramatic event of recent decades in Canada, the OCTOBER CRISIS of 1970 in Montréal, was a media event. The kidnappers set the tone by demanding that their separatist manifesto be read on TV and by regularly communicating with the police through dispatches sent to radio stations.

In response, the WAR MEASURES ACT, imposed by the federal government, effectively blacked out the kidnappers' media activities and brought PUBLIC OPINION under the control of the authorities. One political scientist has remarked that the October Crisis could be seen as a battle for the temporary control of the communications systems in Québec.

Canadians receive most of their news from TV or radio, and, for both owners and journalists, broadcasting has become more profitable than newspaper and BOOK PUBLISHING. Newspapers, having lost much of their advertising revenue to the broadcasters, are increasingly subject to merger or elimination.

Nevertheless, they remain at the centre of the communications web in most communities and in both national language groups because they employ more reporters than broadcasting networks and publish more news and comment. Newspapers provide broadcasting with information and a sense of what is important.

Newspapers, not broadcasting networks, set the agenda for discussion of public affairs; in particular the GLOBE AND MAIL in English Canada and LE DEVOIR in French Canada play this role. Broadcasting, though it has drawn away much of the economic power of the newspapers, has magnified their role as shapers of opinion, a role the newspapers have played since colonial days.

One result of these media interconnections is the development of waves of opinion. A politician may be universally admired in the media one year, reviled the next, and then highly respected a few years later. Just such a series of transformations happened in the public career of Robert STANFIELD between his elevation to the leadership of the Progressive Conservatives in 1967 and his retirement in 1976.

Public issues seem to rise and fall in the same way; for instance, abortion was held to be a crime in one decade and a human right in the next. In most cases the media reflect what they perceive to be public opinion and public interest, slightly and inevitably distorted by the people who staff the newspapers and broadcasting stations.

The communications media sell fashions in thought and are themselves influenced by fashions. A popular broadcaster's intonation may be imitated by hundreds of newscasters, and a style of magazine writing may spread across the continent. There are times when the media seem dedicated to producing a pale sameness.

But McLuhan has taught us to look at the technological development of the media for an understanding of their influence, and if we follow that course we see a process repeating itself throughout the communications media, an unexpected process of sophistication and refinement that works against the creation of a homogeneous mass society.

Each medium begins in a fairly basic way, with an attempt to appeal to everyone. The early promoters treat the medium almost as a toy. Later, as the techniques develop and potential audiences are explored by both entrepreneurs and imaginative public servants, it becomes possible to reach smaller, more select audiences and to appeal to specialized tastes.

Thus, films began with a few studios in America and Europe trying to gain dominance; later, as the processes became widely available, scores of countries and hundreds of companies developed the ability to make films, often great films.

Phonograph records first became popular under the control of a few companies that dictated tastes everywhere; but with the rise of the economical LP record beginning in 1948, the process of differentiation began and thousands of companies sprang up to serve disparate minority markets.

Radio was born as a means of broadcasting popular music and later emerged as a way of conveying sophisticated documentaries, imaginative dramas and music on a specialized level. Something similar has happened to magazines recently: there are now perhaps 10 times as many magazines in Canada as there were in 1960, most of them catering to specialized tastes. In the late 1970s television began to fit into this historic pattern.

The Advent of Cable
With the rise of CABLE TELEVISION and PAY TELEVISION, "narrow-casting" (as opposed to broadcasting) became the object of many professionals searching for small, select, dedicated audiences. Only daily newspapers have moved in the opposite direction, growing fewer in number and broader in appeal despite their adoption of advanced techniques such as computerized typesetting. In the early 1980s it seemed that written JOURNALISM might find a new form through videotext systems of interactive TV.

With videotext, the consumer called up a text on a screen (sometimes with still pictures) by switching buttons. The text may have been an advertisement, a weather report, an article from an encyclopedia, a news item or anything that can be reduced to words and pictures. This produced a new form of "publishing." Many countries experimented with various videotext systems, including TELIDON, the Canadian system created at the Department of Communications in Ottawa during the 1970s.

As these media developed through the first 80 years of this century, Canada's experience was in some ways identical to that of other countries. Collecting hundreds of Mozart records was no more or less rewarding in Vancouver than in Melbourne or Vienna. But in many other ways Canada is a special case, because Canada exists next door to the most powerful and innovative communications system in the world. American mass culture dominates the Canadian imagination. Most countries regulate imported culture through quotas on FILM and broadcasting, but Canada has set up few barriers and even those have been ineffective.

In 1932, when Prime Minister R.B. Bennett introduced legislation that created public broadcasting, he declared in Parliament: "This country must be assured of complete Canadian control of broadcasting from Canadian sources, free from foreign interference or influence. Without such control radio broadcasting can never become a great agency for the communication of matters of national concern and for the diffusion of national thought and ideals, and without such control it can never be the agency by which national consciousness may be fostered and sustained and national unity still further strengthened."

Since then, most federal governments and several royal commissions have reaffirmed these views, but with only modest effect. News and public affairs programs on TV have focused the concern of all Canadians on national public issues, but in most other ways our media have lived wanly in the American shadow. As a result, mass communications have been the ground on which some of the most important battles of Canadian sovereignty have been fought.

Only occasionally have the forces of national culture been triumphant, as in the creation of French and English TV and radio networks by the CBC or the legislation that was in place 1975-99 which prevented American magazines from establishing Canadian subsidiary editions. One major reason is cost. Canada provides a small market split into 2 language groups: in broadcasting, as with paperback books and magazines and many other fields, Canadians have found it cheaper and more convenient to import what they view or read.

Another reason is the ongoing struggle between private and public interests. As a general rule, private interests have encouraged the cultural Americanization of Canada, on the grounds that it is more profitable to resell American films, TV shows and records than to make them in Canada.

The forces representing public interest (the CBC, the federal regulatory agencies and the provincial TV networks) have been sharply divided over the issue of regional interests versus national unity. The latter has implied increasing centralization, a Toronto-dominated system of production, similar to the growing power of federal agencies in Ottawa.

Regionalists contend that national media will extinguish the centres of provincial vitality and expression. Centralists argue that Canada's population can support no more than 2 first-class production centres, in Toronto and Montréal, and will be lucky if these cities can produce material good enough to meet foreign competition.

Canadian nationalism became a more powerful force in the 1960s and the 1970s than at any point since the 1920s, and the appreciation and development of national and regional Canadian culture became a public issue. This interest has led to fundamental changes in publishing and the performing arts, but has made no great impression on TV because a more powerful counterforce was at work: cable TV.

Bringing American stations to a majority of viewers, cable effectively put Canadian broadcasters in a minority in their own country, pushing Canadian TELEVISION DRAMA and entertainment out to the edge of the country's consciousness. In a period when mass communications in Canada might have flourished, they found themselves more overshadowed than ever.

The effect of cable was marked even in Québec. The first 2 decades of TV had tended to strengthen Québec identity by producing a generation of French Canadian TV writers, stars and commentators - the most famous being René LÉVESQUE, a commentator on Radio-Canada in the 1950s who became provincial premier in 1976.

But when cable made a broad spectrum of American stations available, French Canadians in considerable numbers began viewing them, and TV presented yet another threat to the survival of the French language. In mass communications, every fresh development brings social problems as well as benefits.

Author ROBERT FULFORD

Suggested Reading
P. Hindley, G. Martin and J. McNulty, eds, The Tangled Net (1977); P. Rutherford, The Making of the Canadian Media (1978); B. Singer, ed, Communications in Canadian Society (1972).

Links to Other Sites
Connecting Canada to the digital world
Michael Geist's column about how Canada can regain the lead in telecommunications network design and development. From thestar.com.

Canadian Journal of Communication
This website offers online abstracts of articles from the Canadian Journal of Communication.

In Depth: Internet
This CBC feature chronicles major milestones in the development of the Internet over the years.

Communications and Electronics Branch of the Canadian Forces
This site offers a detailed history of Canadian military communications from the pre-confederation era to modern times. Includes fascinating details about the Red River Rebellion of 1870, the early use of telephone technology, and much more. From the Department of National Defence.

Military Communications and Electronics Museum
Check the illustrated military history exhibits at this Military Communications and Electronics Museum website.

Telesat Canada
The Telesat Canada website offers the latest news and information about Canada’s Anik series domestic communications satellites. Features maps and other graphics that illustrate the role of satellites in global communication systems.

Canadian IT Law Association
The Canadian IT Law Association provides a national forum for Canadian practitioners to discuss the uniquely Canadian aspects of IT law and related fields of e-commerce and intellectual property.

Canadian Wireless Telecommunications Association
The Association represents the industry before governments and various regulatory agencies.

ideaCity
The website for "ideaCity," a Toronto conference focusing on innovative solutions for a broad range of contemporary issues. Described as a "meeting of minds," a "mecca for lateral thinking," and much more. Check out "The Great Wall of Ideas."

Michael Geist
The website for Dr. Michael Geist, the Canada Research Chair of Internet and E-commerce Law at the University of Ottawa. Features numerous articles and other resources pertaining to technology law issues. Check out his film "Why Copyright?"

Thomson Reuters
The website for Thomson Reuters, a leading international provider of information-based products and services.

newslab.ca
Newslab.ca offers news, commentary, and analysis on Canada’s media in an Internet age.The project is run by Alfred Hermida, a journalist who leads the ijournalism programme at the Graduate School of Journalism of the University of British Columbia.