Canadian History

In Canadian history it is quite evident we are influenced heavily by the much stronger nations around us. Therefore our own content in Canada is sometimes overshadowed by other cultures, specifically with regards to the United States who have a big influence on our cultural industries. Pierre Trudeau expressed the feeling Canadians have with this co-existence, "Living next to you is in some ways like sleeping with an elephant. No matter how friendly or temperate the beast, one is affected by every twitch and grunt." Some may argue that Canada should not continue to develop regulations to protect its cultural industries. However, I will argue that Canada should continue to develop some regulations to protect its cultural industries. It is extremely important for a nation to promote and preserve its own culture because if we don’t preserve our culture now the people of Canada wont have a sense of nationalism or wont feel like they belong to something. Cultures important in a country because it helps to bring a nation together because it gives something to people in a country to relate to. We need it especially in Canada because of Canada’s relative population to the rest of the world we are an easy target for cultural penetration from foreign countries. There have been countless rules and regulations imposed on everything, from issues such as foreign takeovers of Canadian publishers to minimum standard of Canadian content on the radio. Therefore, despite the protections, we need to further foster and protect at least some semblance of the original identity. The concept of continentalism, which is the sharing of a continent between more then one nation, may be very detrimental to our ongoing struggle to broadcasting our culture but ...

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...wed by the much more influential nations without cost. With a fast growing interest in the Internet we have to be strict with these regulations as well because if we do not our future generations will not have the same opportunities, as the older generations did and that would be because of the fact that we could not sustain our own cultural industry when we did have one, opportunities such as being exposed to the market outside of Canada because we will have lost that privilege only because we were careless with our regulations now. The government might have some conflict because of trade agreements such as, the North American free trade agreement (NAFTA), or the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) but it is the government’s responsibility to continue to maintain the unique Canadian identity Canada has developed through its various cultural industries.