On Canada Day 2026, I have one modest question and one modest proposal.
A modest question:
Where is Canada’s National Cinema?
Why did we let the cultural and commercial success of the 1970’s and 1980’s wither? Why has the box office revenue for Canadian features consistently been dwarfed by that of foreign movies, in spite of millions in government funding?
Or, are we truly content to simply sell the labour of our film craftspeople to foreign producers, like Canada exports its raw materials (crude oil, auto parts, gold, copper, iron, natural gas, wood and lumber) to the world?
One answer, as Don Shebib told me in 2008, is that Canada doesn’t have the, um, back-bones.
We can do better, and we can start here.
A modest proposal:
Let’s legislate a Canadian presence on all the movie screens in Canada, starting with a Canadian short in front of every movie.
One short, five to ten minutes long. In front of every movie.
Let Canadians decide online which shorts, by audience vote, to create genuine discovery and stakes.
Playing these winning shorts in front of features will build audiences who feel Canadian cinema belongs to them. Soon this will become a talent development pipeline, not just a programming slot.
My take: I wrote this post because I truly believe Canada deserves a national cinema. Look at South Korea. They’ve had mandatory screen quotas from 1966, scaled them intelligently, and built enough domestic production volume that Korean cinema developed and eventually broke into global markets on pure quality. Canada’s problem is it never committed to a quota mechanism seriously enough or long enough to generate any meaningful effect. The actual competitor for audience attention isn’t Hollywood. It’s indifference. Quotas force a confrontation with indifference that subsidies alone never do.
