The big fix for Canadian publishing
Lament for a literature, Part Three, the finale
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Two weeks ago in SHuSH 311, we reviewed the precipitous decline in Canadian book publishing over the last several decades as documented in Richard Stursberg’s Lament for a Literature: The Collapse of Canadian Book Publishing, now available from Sutherland House.
The upshot of the piece was that despite throwing laws, regulations, legions of bureaucrats, and hundreds of millions of dollars into a regime to encourage Canadian ownership of publishing companies, the Canadian-owned part of the industry has collapsed. Canadian-owned publishers now control between 3.7 and 5.3 percent of our domestic market, by far the weakest outcome in the industrialized world. We are dominated by foreign multinationals and Canadians consume less of their own literature than any of their peers, making us, in Atwood’s famous phrase, a nation of “cultural morons.”
Last week in SHuSH 312 we reviewed Richard’s account of where the government went wrong. It adopted a book industry policy that was both weakly designed and poorly enforced. The design problems started with the government’s failure to enforce its stated policy of Canadian ownership and control of both the production and distribution of books. Large multinational firms have been allowed to leverage their global scale to dominate the Canadian market and buy up prime publishing assets like McClelland & Stewart. This is in stark contrast to how the government managed the broadcast sector, where Ottawa insisted on Canadian ownership and control over the whole broadcast sector—the making of content and its distribution over various channels—with enforceable public rules and mandatory reinvestment when broadcast assets changed hands. On the book side, foreign ownership was tolerated and normalized, distribution of books and online selling of books were left largely to multinational control, consolidation was permitted to occur without reinvestment in the industry, and policy was generally administered in secret. That amounted to near total surrender to the multinationals—Penguin Random House, HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster.
The government hoped that subsidies to the Canadian-owned book industry would be sufficient to help it flourish. But the subsidies, too, were poorly designed: a finite envelope of money was made available, making competition among publishers a zero-sum game. The mechanics of the subsidies discouraged growth, consolidation, capital accumulation, and risk-taking. They actively penalized success. The result was predictable: Canadian-owned publishers were kept alive but never allowed to become strong, while multinational firms, armed with scale and market power, steadily captured authors, shelf space, and readers. In the end, policy preserved the appearance of a domestic industry while quietly hollowing out the institutions needed to sustain it.
So where do we go from here? There’s no single trick that will make up for decades of mistakes and inaction. But there is a move that could make an enormous difference: the introduction of a Canadian Book Law. This single federal law—think of it as a cousin of the Canadian Broadcasting Act—would treat book publishing as a strategic cultural industry, on the same footing as radio and television.
In practice, the Book Law would rest on four pillars:
Canadian ownership and control: book publishers operating in Canada would be required to be Canadian-owned and Canadian-controlled, in substance and not just form.
Canadian control over distribution and market access: the law would recognize distribution as the strategic leverage point in publishing and encourage foreign-origin titles to flow into our market through Canadian-controlled publishing and distribution structures in ways that build domestic capacity.
Publishing policy would be administered openly, with public hearings, published decisions, and the ability for affected parties to participate and challenge outcomes; this would replace the current system of opaque industrial-policy reviews with a regulatory framework that has legitimacy and accountability.
Sales, mergers, or transfers of Canadian publishing assets would trigger reinvestment obligations into Canadian authors, marketing, and publishing infrastructure, ensuring that consolidation strengthens the system rather than strips it.
Admitting that it’s probably too late to require the likes of Penguin Random House and HarperCollins to divest their Canadian operations to Canadians (although that happened in broadcast in 1969), Richard suggests concentrating on the entry of foreign-originated books to our market. Borrowing from Australian precedent, he suggests that the release of any book produced by a foreign publisher would be delayed from entry to Canada by six months to allow Canadian publishers the opportunity to buy rights to the book. If rights were promptly sold to a Canadian publisher, the book could be released simultaneously with its international release. If no rights buyer was forthcoming, booksellers after six months would be free (as now) to import the title directly from its country of origin (or anywhere else). To make it worthwhile for the foreign publishers to sell Canadian rights to their books, subsidies would be available for the Canadian publishers buying them, with higher amounts available for books by Canadian authors.
“To give a sense of the potential value of such an arrangement,” Richard writes, “the English Canadian book market was worth $1.1 billion in 2023, of which 12 percent went to Canadian titles or roughly $130 million. This means that almost $970 million of foreign books were sold. If only 25 percent of this were put in the hands of Canadian publishers, their total revenue would increase by almost $200 million. This would be a colossal shot in the arm that does not require extra government expenditures.”
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In addition to addressing distribution, the Book Law would:
Adopt rules employed by France and Germany requiring booksellers to sell their books at the publisher’s suggested retail price. This would prevent Amazon from undercutting Indigo, and both of those firms from undercutting independent booksellers and publishers who sell direct to consumers.
The discounts at which publishers, both independent and multinational, sell books to retailers would also be standardized to prevent larger firms from offering retailers better deals that crowd smaller Canadian publishers off the shelves.
All schools, universities, and libraries would be required to buy their books from accredited bookstores, and bookstores would be accredited by stocking minimum quantities of books published by Canadian-owned publishers (this is an adaptation of existing Quebec law).
Large bookselling platforms, whether Amazon, Audible, Apple, Kobo, or Indigo, would be required to feature Canadian books in their marketing, as is required in the broadcast sector.
Subsidies would support these structural rules. At the moment, Canada Council funding and the Canada Book Fund are not only insufficient to support a strong publishing industry and capped in ways that keep publishers small, they are also overwhelmingly geared toward Quebec (40 percent and 52 percent respectively), despite it having a relatively healthy publishing industry and just 22 percent of the population. Richard suggests rolling the money in these two programs into a single uncapped tax credit like those available to movies and television (it is bizarre that Canada offers uncapped tax credits to mostly American screen producers and ruthlessly caps its grants to book publishers). The advantages are several:
One program instead of two saves both the government and publishers administrative expenses
An uncapped tax credit would link subsidy to performance, grow as the industry grows, and support the ambitions of those publishers inclined to pursue scale; they are also predictable enough that governments will lend against them, which will help alleviate the chronic capital shortages that plague independent publishers
Because tax credits are largely mathematical, they would allow little scope for bureaucrats to attempt to direct literary publishing, as has happened at the Canada Council, especially in the last decade.
Two further proposals: Canada needs to rewrite its copyright act—no other developed country allows educators and libraries to ride so freely on their publishing industries. And it should follow France’s lead in creating financial supports—grants and interest-free loans—to fund takeovers and start-ups in the Canadian-owned publishing sector, perhaps through the Federal Business Development Bank. This would inject new energy into the aging ranks of independent publishing and give those publishers looking to retire a way out. It would also encourage some necessary consolidation in a sector with hundreds of small publishers, few mid-sized, and none large.
The sum of these measures would be to signal that Canada believes in the importance of a Canadian-owned publishing industry and is serious about redressing the policy failures that have contributed to its near disappearance. It would put an end to federal programs that manage decline and replace them with a regime designed to build a durable, Canadian-controlled publishing ecosystem capable of reaching readers at scale. It would reward publishing success, measured by readership, visibility, and impact in the Canadian market, not solely by the number of books funded or produced. All of this would be of great benefit not only to Canadian publishers, but authors and readers, as well.
Start the year informed
As a SHuSH subscriber, you are eligible for this special offer: buy a subscription to Sutherland Quarterly (or treat a friend) and we’ll send you the Sutherland House book of your choice at no charge.
Launched in 2022, Sutherland Quarterly is an exciting new series of captivating essays on current affairs by some of Canada’s finest writers, published individually as books and also available by annual subscription—four great books a year, mailed to your door, for just $67.99. Subscribe now at sutherlandquarterly.com and we’ll immediately be in touch to send you the free book of your choice.
Sutherland Quarterly is also pleased to announce its next edition, coming January 27, will be Richard Stursberg’s Lament for a Literature, a sweeping account of how English Canada once forged a confident literary culture—and how that culture has steadily collapsed.
For decades, books provided the country’s most searching reflections on its history, politics, and identity; they shaped the national conversation and anchored a shared sense of who Canadians were. Author and media executive Richard Stursberg traces how this ecosystem emerged, flourished, and then eroded. He follows the rise of a vigorous publishing industry in the 1960s and ’70s, the period when Canadian writers reached international prominence, and the subsequent decades in which foreign ownership, shifting cultural priorities, fragile institutions, and policy failures hollowed out the sector.
Clear, forceful, and grounded in deep research, Lament for a Literature shows what happens when a nation loses the infrastructure that sustains its stories—and outlines practical reforms, including a Canadian Book Law, to rebuild the foundations of a literary culture capable of renewing itself.
Thanks for reading. Please either:
Our Newsletter Roll (suggestions welcome)
Banuta Rubess’s Funny, You Don’t Look Bookish, reviews five books a week.
The Bibliophile from Biblioasis, an independent publisher based in Windsor.
The Literary Review of Canada’s Bookworm, “your weekly dose of exclusive reviews, book excerpts, and more.”
Art Kavanagh’s Talk about books: Book discussion and criticism.
Gayla Gray’s SoNovelicious: Books, reading, writing, and bookstores.
Esoterica Magazine: Literature and popular culture.
Benjamin Errett’s Get Wit Quick, literature and other fun stuff
Lydia Perovic’s Long Play: literature and music.
Jason Logan’s Urban Color Report: adventures in ink (sign-up at bottom of page)
Anne Trubek’s Notes from a Small Press: like SHuSH, but different
Art Canada Institute: a reliable source of Canadian arts info/opinion
Kate McKean’s Agents & Books: an interesting angle on the literary world
Rebecca Eckler’s Re:Book: unpretentious recommendations
Anna Sproul Latimer’s How to Glow in the Dark: interesting advice
John Biggs Great Reads: strong recommendations
Steven Beattie’s That Shakespearean Rag, a newsy blog about books and reading
Mark Dykeman’s How About This: Atlantic Canadian interviews and thoughts on writing and creativity.
J. W. Ellenhall’s 3-Page Book Battles: Readers help her choose which of three random books to review each month.
Donald Brackett’s Embodied Meanings: “Arts music films literature and popular culture.”
A shocking number that shows just how ineffectual we are in caring about Canada . The proposals make good sense . Will help carry the message
I’d like to see the publishing industry stop leaning so hard on so-called Canadian authors who neither live or work here. I’m thinking of like Rachel Cusk, Sarah Bernstein, and others who crowd out domestic authors for “buy Canadian shelf space but are writing for a foreign publisher and audience.