The tragic death of filmmaker Jean-Marc Vallée on December 25 made us aware of his immense talent and of the giant’s place he occupied on the world stage. Watching several of her films again over the past few days (thank you sanitary restrictions!), It occurred to me that Canada had just lost a strategically important cultural ambassador, just as the head of the Canadian diplomacy is given the mandate to deploy new strategies to strengthen the country’s cultural representation abroad.
Mélanie Joly is well prepared to fulfill this crucial mission entrusted by the Prime Minister in his mandate letter. Since joining the government as Minister of Canadian Heritage, she has led several important international cultural missions, notably to the Organization internationale de la francophonie. That said, it will have to redouble its imagination and ardor to straighten out Canada’s image in an area where its influence has been significantly reduced in recent years.
If we trust the SP30 index1, which compares the soft power exercised by the main countries of the world, Canada would have gone from 7e to 15e world rank between 2015 and 2019 for everything related to culture. The SP30 was not alone in seeing this loss of influence. A report from the Canadian Senate also raised some red flags in 2019, prompting the government to raise the bar for cultural representation abroad, particularly in the area of trade. In 2016, the report noted, Canada imported more cultural content than it exported to its main partners, the United States, the European Union, the United Kingdom, Germany and France. With the exception of China, the cultural diplomacy of these countries was at the same time at the top of the list of the best performers on the SP30 scale.
At the invitation of the Minister of Canadian Heritage, the federal government will hold January 31 and 1er next February a national summit on culture.
As the responsibility of soft power culture is also the responsibility of Minister Pablo Rodriguez, we can expect that what relates to it will be well on the agenda of the summit, and that the government will present its ideas and the strategies envisaged to reverse the tendency of the last years.
Three fundamental ideas could be brought to the fore at this forum. The first is to put artists, creators and Canadian intellectual property clearly and resolutely at the heart of government policies and programs. The vitality and creative force of a country constitute the cornerstone of any approach to cultural diplomacy. If artistic creation remains very appreciable in the country, it may have seemed intimidated in certain sectors by the intense digital deployment. I can’t wait for a strong and clear message about the primacy of creation.
The second concerns the financing of the creative development, production and international distribution of artistic works. It’s hard to say what the Liberal Party had in mind when it called out the Business Development Bank of Canada (BDC) in the cultural portion of its most recent electoral platform. But it would be right to mobilize various public and private financing and investment actors to stimulate cultural entrepreneurship. In this regard, the new president of the BDC, Isabelle Hudon, could play a decisive role, because of her manifest interest in culture and her very successful experience in Canadian diplomacy.
The third, and not the least, calls for more commitment, cohesion and concerted action on the part of the crown corporations and cultural institutions under the Department of Canadian Heritage. Perhaps the time has come to force the walls of China, at the cost if necessary of a super authority of collaboration and synergy. Now is the time for alliances, not isolationism.
1– SP30 is an index of soft power created by American researcher Jonathan McClory and released between 2015 and 2019 by the Portland firm. McClory has since joined Sanctuary Counsel in London and his advice on trends in soft power and comparative diplomacy are often authoritative.