Warning: this is not a moralizing editorial to order our teenagers and young adults to trade their series on Netflix for STAT Where Indefensibleotherwise the future of the Quebec nation is in jeopardy.
Posted October 2
While our politicians spent part of the election campaign worrying about the future of French, young Quebecers are abandoning our cultural industry.
They watch American series and other foreign series on Netflix, listen to Anglo-American music on Spotify and are on TikTok and Instagram.
Do you think it’s a cliché? Two teachers from Cégep de Jonquière surveyed their 643 students in the media program. As our colleague Marc Cassivi reported, the results are as categorical as they are worrying:
• 23% of them watch a Quebec fiction series each week, compared to 85% for series on Netflix and 87% for content on YouTube;
• for 75% of them, their favorite series is American;
• almost half only watch series and films in English.
Radio-Canada did much the same exercise this week in a communications course at a Montreal CEGEP, to come to the same conclusions about this “Netflix generation”.
Do you want a real danger for Quebec culture and the vitality of French? Here is one.
There is a culprit if young Quebecers do not consume enough Quebec culture.
We.
We’ve been letting new digital platforms like Netflix flood us with foreign content for years, without forcing them to offer a certain threshold of Quebec content.
Without forcing them to finance the production of Quebec content (Netflix reached an agreement in 2017, but we quickly realized that Ottawa set the bar much too low). Without forcing them to promote Quebec content.
It’s been years that we cut in the budgets of youth programs, the poor relation of TV production. (It’s not all negative. There have been some great, very popular shows like The cottage and the galas Mammoth. Not to mention the return of Master key.)
And afterwards, we are surprised that young Quebecers, who have grown up in the digital world, prefer Stranger Things in the latest Quebec series.
Let’s not idealize the past: American culture has never been very far. Depending on the era, Quebec teenagers were passionate about Beverly Hills 90210, Dawson’s Creek Where The OC. Generation Y’s childhood was rocked by Master keybut also by Astro, the little robot and The little beavertwo Japanese anime translated by Radio-Canada.
Except there was a balance. A forced balance: young Quebecers watched a lot of Quebec programs, essentially…because they didn’t have much choice. We watched what was “playing” on TV. And federal regulations forced the channels to broadcast a large proportion of Canadian and Quebec content. Because we found, as a society, that it was important to have stories that resemble us, created by and for Quebecers.
This balance, the technological revolution, Netflix, Disney+, Spotify and YouTube have shattered it.
Since then, we have been trying painfully to find a new acceptable compromise.
Except that it blocks in Ottawa.
After years of studying the issue, the Trudeau government tabled a bill in 2021 to force online content broadcasters to fund the production of Canadian content and showcase Canadian content on their platforms. Perfect. But from the start, the Conservatives and some pundits have been trying to derail this sensible and reasonable bill. The Trudeau government is accused of wanting to control or censor the internet. It’s ridiculous. We wave a fake scarecrow to scare people.
After being passed by the House of Commons last spring, Bill C-11 is now before the Senate for a vote later this fall. Friendly advice to the Senate: you should adopt it as soon as possible. Television has been regulated for decades without Canada having transformed into the world of George Orwell. Above all, this bill, so crucial in the long term for Quebec culture, should not die on the order paper a second time because of the calling of a federal election. Because there is a minority government in Ottawa.
C-11 alone will not solve the problem of young people’s lesser attachment to Quebec culture. It does not guarantee that all teenagers will begin to consume twice as much Quebec culture overnight.
It will also be necessary to better fund our youth programs (the CAQ and the PQ proposed this during the election campaign). Attract young people by broadcasting a few episodes of series on the digital platforms they use.
A heavy series in Quebec has a budget of $750,000 per episode. Stranger Things costs around 16.5 million per episode. The Crown, 18 million. We will never fight on equal terms with Anglo-Saxon culture.
Without C-11, we may no longer have the means to fight at all.