Copps Defends Canadian Culture

[CHIMO]

She was at it again last week - talking tough, grabbing headlines, infuriating her detractors - and just plain worrying her allies. Less than a year after her public humiliation over the Goods and Services tax, Sheila COPPS was back as the perennial political bad girl. There was the threat to "play hardball" with the United States as the war of words over Canada's cultural trade barriers escalated. There was the lofty promise to protect the CBC from further cuts. There was an internal party kerfuffle over her unexpected attempt to alter the new Copyright Act to benefit artists at the expense of broadcasters.

There was her startling suggestion that Ottawa exclude television news and sports from the calculation of Canadian content - a radical step that would force broadcasters to air much more Canadian drama, comedy and arts programming in prime time to meet the 50-per-cent Canadian-content requirement. And she stunned private broadcasters by proposing to force them to free up funds for domestic programming by putting a cap on the amounts they could bid for non-Canadian shows. Canada's minister of heritage and the government's ranking cultural guru was not just in the middle of the action - for much of last week, she was the action.
That is just where the outspoken, passionate, sometimes outrageous cabinet minister from Hamilton likes to be. Some of her ever-cautious government colleagues may have another view. Culture was not meant to be a Liberal election issue. But that was before the anger over the government's sweeping cuts to the CBC and the revival of invasion plans by American Culture Inc. Suddenly the question of whether Canada will have its own voice to tell its own stories is emerging as a hot-button issue. It is the touchiest of problems, one that has bedevilled past governments. But in many ways the culture flap seems tailor-made for Copps, with her flair for the dramatic, her sweeping rhetoric, her defiant just-watch-me attitude. "If you do things you become a magnet," she told Maclean's. "If you don't do things no one's feathers get ruffled."

But with an election expected as early as June, ruffling feathers could be costly. As one high-ranking Liberal cautioned: "We don't know what Sheila's going to do, her own people don't know what she's going to do - maybe she doesn't even know what she's going to do." Last week did little to calm party nerves. It began in a conference room in Ottawa, where Copps had gathered a blue-ribbon selection of the country's cultural elite to search for new ways to defend Canadian culture. The timing of the long-scheduled meeting was fortuitous: it came just weeks after an interim World Trade Organization ruling that could eliminate traditional protections for Canadian magazines from U.S. competitors.

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So we had a speech from the throne. Harper had been convicted by his peers of abusing parliament. A 21 year old was kicked out by Harpers' goons.

Later this month the NDP will have a meeting. So will Shelia win out or will the new Liberals under Jack win out?