Set for release Jan. 27, Lament for a Literature is the new book from Richard Stursberg, in which he laments the decline of Canadian literature, for which he blames multiple factors. In this excerpt, he addresses the impact of Justin Trudeau’s Liberals, arguing they took over a badly weakened cultural sector from the Harper Conservatives and threw money at it without addressing the difficult structural issues affecting it, only making things worse. The government, he said, did not understand “that as Canadian media eroded and Canadians embraced the new foreign digital platforms, they walked away from Canada itself. They no longer consumed Canadian news, laughed at Canadian comedies, read Canadian books, watched Canadian documentaries, or heard the opinions of Canadian experts on domestic social, cultural, political, economic, or historical issues. They effectively left the national conversation and moved to another amorphous, filter-bubbling virtual country.”
Instead of attending to the challenges of the creative industries, the new government’s biggest cultural initiative was to fully embrace Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI). In a famous remark, Justin Trudeau, when asked why half his cabinet were women, he simply said, “Because it’s 2015.” He went on to inaugurate a “feminist” agenda that penetrated all aspects of the government’s work. Every initiative, including the budget, had to be accompanied by a detailed analysis of what it would mean for women.
At the same time, the major cultural institutions, falling in line with the government’s new orientation, created measures designed to improve the access of “equity-seeking” groups to their programs. The CBC, the Canada Council, and Telefilm all moved to embrace DEI. In most cases, this took the form of requiring applicants, producers, artists, and publishers to provide detailed accounts of how many BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Colour) people were involved in their projects and what roles they occupied. If an insufficient number appeared, the project was turned down.
As DEI advanced, another strange aspect of identity politics emerged: the assumption that people have a right not to be offended. In the case of Wendy Mesley, for example, her distinguished career at the CBC was cancelled because she had made reference to Pierre Vailiere’s seminal text on Quebec nationalism, Les Negres Blancs d’Amerique. Someone was apparently offended by the use of the word “negre.” She was dismissed. As Anne Applebaum noted in The Atlantic: “…it is possible to meet people who have lost everything — jobs, money, friends, colleagues — after violating no laws and sometimes no workplace rules either. Instead, they have broken (or are accused of having broken) social codes having to do with race, sex, personal behaviour, or acceptable humour, which may not have existed five years ago or maybe five minutes ago.”
Fear of violating these codes of conduct inevitably leads to caution, particularly when the consequences can be so terrible. Writers, publishers, and booksellers will all be careful not to offend. They will search out the bland, the non-controversial, and the politically acceptable. Again, Applebaum: “How many manuscripts remain in desk drawers or unwritten altogether, because their authors fear an arbitrary judgement?” The resulting chill limits freedom of expression and artistic daring. It is hard, if not impossible, to imagine publishers in 2025 releasing anything as comparably challenging as Beautiful Losers, Bear, or Oh Canada! Oh Quebec!
The movement to right historical discrimination expanded dramatically. The practice had started with the Mulroney government, which had apologized for the internment of Japanese Canadians during the Second World War (1988) and the similar treatment of Italian Canadians (1990). The Harper government apologized for the Chinese Head Tax Act of 1885 (2006), residential schools (2008), and the Komagata Maru incident of 1914 (2008). The Trudeau government accelerated the pace, apologizing again for the treatment of Italian Canadians, the Komagatu Maru, and residential school abuses. It went on to seek forgiveness for the bad treatment of Jews (the MS St. Louis), the Inuit, and the Number 2 Construction Battalion of Black workers.
The legacy of Sir John A. Macdonald, the architect of Confederation and father of the country, was sharply reassessed. He was blamed, often (not always) unfairly, for policies that harmed Indigenous peoples, including residential schools, famine, and cultural suppression. Statues fell and his name was removed from schools and institutions as Canadians erased the narrative of their country’s founding.
The national purification had consequences, some good, some not so good. Most importantly perhaps, it clarified Canada’s relationship to its Indigenous peoples, allowing new voices to be heard. In writing, the emergence of Richard Wagamese, Michelle Good, and Eden Robinson enriched the country’s understanding of itself and its identity. The quality of their novels resulted in significant bestsellers and important prizes, and they also made clear in a way that nothing else could, the terrible sadness and betrayal involved in the government’s policies.
An outpouring of Indigenous nonfiction also resulted in important bestsellers. Tanya Talaga’s Seven Fallen Feathers: Racism, Death and Hard Truths in a Northern City broke new ground in understanding the systemic racism that bedevilled aboriginal children, shipped away from home to go to school. The seven fallen feathers are the seven children who killed themselves in despair over their circumstances. 21 Things You May Not Know About the Indian Act by Bob Joseph documented the discriminatory policies embedded in the almost 150-year-old act that defined and controlled the lives of Indigenous people.
While these books were clearly of value in making sense of Canada’s identity, the sweeping reconsideration of the country’s past inevitably had consequences for Canadians’ sense of themselves. The revelations surrounding the appalling behaviour toward Indigenous people coupled with the seemingly endless apologies for past bad behaviour toward women, Jews, Black and Brown Canadians, Italians, and Japanese Canadians, along with the denunciation of Sir John A. Macdonald, left Canadians questioning the virtue of their country. People of conscience began to feel shame. Canadians’ traditionally intense pride in their country began to erode. What began as a slide under Harper’s Conservatives became a flood under the Trudeau Liberals. By the end of his administration, attitudes had shifted significantly. Where in 1985, almost 80 per cent of Canadians were very proud of their country, by 2024 it had fallen to 34 per cent.
The pervasive recasting of Canadian history had the concomitant effect of strengthening Canada’s commitment to DEI. The revelations that many groups had been treated badly created an appetite to make amends. Simple fairness required a recognition and celebration of the different peoples who had been smeared and abused in the past. The history of denigrating LGBTQ+ folks had not only to come to an end, their specific identities needed to be explored, understood, and lauded as Canada itself had been during the nationalist 1970s and 1980s. Identity politics replaced the politics of national identity.
The intersection of the structural changes in the publishing industry with the overwhelming dominance of the multinationals, the emphasis on righting historical wrongs, and the Liberal government’s insistence on DEI strengthened trends that were already evident in the kinds of cultural works and books that were being produced.
Deeply researched narrative nonfiction was already in steep decline. The collapse of the big Canadian independent publishers meant that there was little appetite or money left for books on Canadian society, politics, history, or biography. For their part, the multinationals were principally interested in selling their U.K. and U.S. bestsellers in Canada. Dan Wells, the publisher of Biblioasis, a distinguished Canadian publisher of poetry, novels, and Canadian history did a count of the number of researched Canadian nonfiction books produced by Penguin Random House, Simon & Schuster, and Harper-Collins collectively. He estimated that: “between these three multinationals they publish between 250 and 300 Canadian books every six months … four or five might be works of Canadian history or researched nonfiction.” He attributed their indifference to traditional Canadian nonfiction to the fact that they’re not Canadian, and that their priorities are either set by or designed to please masters and shareholders in foreign countries. That leaves Canada “in the intellectual position of being more or less a colony in the large extra national entities … We are no longer able to decide which of our stories deserves to be told.”
At the same time, the Canada Council’s zealous pursuit of “decolonization,” and its prioritization of works “of personal reflection where the point of view of the author is evident,” gave further momentum to personal narratives at the expense of history, biography, science, or politics. There was an explosion of memoirs. Many were trauma memoirs, recounting the horrors of growing up gay, Black, female, Indigenous, or some combination of all of them. Others were memoirs by famous people, as we have seen, sports stars, politicians, and media personalities. Charlotte Gray, the distinguished Canadian historian, noted: “The top 2018 Governor General’s award shortlist for nonfiction contained five memoirs; the 2019 shortlist was dominated by personal stories; all five of the 2020 nominations were memoirs. In 2021, there was only one book on the shortlist that was not a memoir.” In 2023, four out of five nonfiction nominees for the Governor General’s Award for nonfiction were memoirs: Gendered Islamophobia; Unbroken: My Fight for Survival, Hope and Justice for Indigenous Women and Girls; Unearthing; and Invisible Boy. The 2024 shortlist is somewhat more balanced with only two memoirs.
The decline of books on Canadian history and its ongoing denigration, accompanied by the celebration of individual life stories, seemed congruent with George Grant’s contention that Canada was slipping away from its historic emphasis on community values and shared experiences to a much more individualistic, more American view of what was important. The things that count are not the large social and political acts of collective effort, for good or ill, with all their warts and triumphs, but how people feel within the confines of their own experiences. Reality manifests itself in the subjectivity of perceptions rather than the hard facts of the broader world in all its tumults and contradictions.
Also in these years, a new set of Canadian novelists was emerging, still with little direct interest in Canada and Canadians. In 2016–17, almost all the bestsellers were not set in Canada. Only the great Fifteen Dogs by André Alexis and Madeleine Thien’s Do Not Say We Have Nothing (winner of the Governor General’s Award and the Giller) were set at least in part in Canada, although most of the characters in Thien’s book are Chinese and those in Alexis’s are dogs. The wonderfully gifted Omar El Akkad produced American War, an enormous international bestseller. It is set in the 2070s in a United States that has once again split into warring factions as a result of environmental collapse.
More broadly, the Canadian fiction bestseller lists showed ever more clearly the trends that had been emerging over the previous two decades.
The most popular books were very rarely set in Canada or involved Canadian characters. The Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield’s thriller takes place in space; Lawrence Hill’s The Illegal is set in a fictional country called Freedom State; the wildly successful Shari Lapena mysteries — A Stranger in the House, Someone We Know, The Best Kind of People — are all located in New York or Connecticut; and Margaret Atwood’s Booker Prize-winning The Testaments, a follow up to The Handmaid’s Tale, continues her exploration of the fictional republic of Gilead. Only three bestsellers during that ten-year time period were set in Canada: Michael Redhill’s Bellevue Square, set in the Kensington Market in Toronto; The Break, by Katherine Vermette, about a Métis-Anishnaabe family in Manitoba; and Louise Penny’s Glass Houses, featuring Chief Inspector Armand Gamache of the Sûreté du Québec.
The issue of settings is not restricted to novels. It pervades a lot of the culture. The most celebrated comedy ever created in Canada demonstrated similar unwillingness to have visibly Canadian characters. The producers were quite explicit about not wanting it to appear Canadian, despite the fact that setting it in Canada would have strengthened the show’s main premise: a wealthy, entitled family in Los Angeles goes bankrupt and has to move to a tiny town that they own called Schitt’s Creek, a complete fall from grace and a humiliation. The show was made by Canadians and financed by the CBC. It was picked up by Netflix and garnered a record number of Primetime Emmy nominations for a comedy series. It also received three nominations for GLAAD Media Awards for its portrayal of LGBTQ+ people, winning twice for Best Comedy. Nobody, whether Canadian or American, would know that it was a Canadian show from its content.
The cultural environment in Canada became so constrained that the writer Stephen Marche commented, “There has never been a worse time to try and tell a Canadian story. To come into existence, a Canadian story must either be transferred to an American setting or submit to the national virtue machinery. Either way, the connection to the political entity called Canada perishes in the process. The disappearance of Canada, the end of the Canadian story, would be a strange kind of death. No one is coming to conquer us. No ideology is exploding under our feet. The death of so-called Canada would be a death by willed irrelevance, a narrative suicide.”
During the same period, the rise of previously marginalized voices coincided with a decline in those of White men. As DEI advanced in publishing, it became increasingly difficult for White male authors — unless already famous — to find editors willing to read their work. Joyce Carol Oates remarked that even brilliant young White men “are just not of interest” to publishers.
Some blamed a misreading of DEI as “Diversity, Equity, and Exclusion,” or the Canada Council’s zealous “decolonization” agenda; others noted that with only about 25 per cent of editorial staff male, female editors naturally preferred female perspectives; and some disputed that White male authors were disadvantaged at all, or, if true, that it mattered. Whatever the cause, male writers appear to have fallen out of fashion. The 2025 Sobey Arts Award shortlisted twenty-six women and twelve Indigenous artists among thirty nominees — none of the four men were White. Recent Giller and Governor General’s prizes show similar trends: roughly two-thirds of winners were women, and only one White man among them. These results likely reflect publishing priorities rather than overt bias, yet they signal a profound cultural shift.
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Fundamental to any program to resurrect Canada’s book business is the necessity to reform its major cultural institutions. Over the last decade or more, they have become deeply politicized, pursuing a specific and polarizing social and economic agenda. They have turned it into a wedge that excludes certain people from consideration, certain forms of address from polite society, and certain manners of speaking as incompatible with good behaviour. The penalties for violating these often ambiguous standards can be devastating. These strictures have narrowed the boundaries of discourse and cast a chill on what can be said, written, or shown, radically restricting artists’ freedom of expression.
Diversity, equity, and inclusion were never supposed to evolve in this direction. Properly understood, it is not a negative, punishing exercise in ideological purity, but a formula for discovering and celebrating what had previously been arbitrarily suppressed. Murray Sinclair, the chairman of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, made the point explicitly when he explained that reconciliation was not about tearing down the statues of John A. Macdonald, but raising up statues to Big Bear. It is a program that calls for a deep understanding of both the good and the bad in historical figures and events. It assumes that people are sufficiently sophisticated to hold two thoughts in their heads at the same time. Some of the things Macdonald did were good; some were bad. There is no need to choose sides, only to see clearly what happened. That is precisely why it was called the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
When major funders like the Canada Council set out to “decolonize” Canadian literature, they are pursuing a political agenda as surely as the censors of the Soviet Union insisting that all writing conform to the dictates of “socialist realism.” When tenured bureaucrats can harass people for wrongthink, and when it’s possible to lose essential public support for straying beyond the boundaries of correct and morally appropriate thinking, creators and cultural workers will be cautious, often second-guessing themselves. Great work flourishes in environments where people can take risks, knowing that the worst consequence will be failure, not penury and banishment.
The DEI project in Canada’s cultural agencies, government, publishing houses, and media needs to be recalibrated. It needs to focus on its original aims of combatting racism, sexism, and intolerance. It needs to seek truth, not for the purpose of punishment, but for learning. When mistakes are made, when the wrong word or hurtful language is thoughtlessly used, it needs to be treated as a teachable moment, not as a call to puritanical vengeance. It needs to start from an assumption that the overwhelming majority of Canadians are people of good will. Do they sometimes make cruel mistakes? Of course. The important thing is to learn together and bank the fires of self-righteous rage.
— A former executive vice-president of the CBC, Richard Stursberg has written widely on Canadian media and cultural policy. His previous books include The Tower of Babble, named by the Globe & Mail as one of the best books of the year, and The Tangled Garden, which was short-listed for the Donner Prize for the best book on public policy written by a Canadian.
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