Don’t underestimate the importance of the task facing Canada’s new Heritage Minister

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For those who care deeply about a political issue – climate change, say, or the decimation of Canadian media – federal cabinet-making can be a disheartening craft. When you have a top environmentalist in your caucus, why would you not make him Minister of the Environment? When you have a portfolio like Canadian Heritage that needs quick action to save the country’s cultural industries, couldn’t you, just for once, pick someone with knowledge of that field?

On Wednesday, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau named rookie Quebec MP Steven Guilbeault as Minister of Canadian Heritage, making him the third Quebecker with limited cultural connections that Trudeau has assigned to the job. The Montreal MP is perhaps best known as the guy who scaled the CN Tower as part of a Greenpeace climate protest in 2001. He’s an environmentalist who was serving as the director of Équiterre, a non-profit dedicated to sustainable agriculture that he founded. He is opposed to the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion, which of course made him a political impossibility for the environment portfolio, as Trudeau tries to balance the climate emergency with the Western Canadian economy.

But that is not stopping Quebec environmentalists from crying foul: They have been complaining that Guilbeault is being “hidden” in heritage, a “minor portfolio,” according to a CBC story in which several were quoted.

Ah yes, that minor portfolio. As Mélanie Joly, Trudeau’s first heritage minister, could tell her successor, it may be a small-budget portfolio, but the psychological importance of culture, the glamour of the arts and the eloquence of their media-savvy defenders can make it a noisy one. Joly, who started her stint with an ambitious plan to rethink Canadian cultural policy for the digital era, got lambasted when her so-called Netflix deal was exposed as little more than the status quo for the U.S. streaming service.

There’s a long history of Canadian politicians underestimating culture. When Stephen Harper lost a chance at a majority government in 2008, many attributed it in part to a thoughtless remark about galas that suggested most Canadians don’t care about the arts. Voters in Quebec, in particular, were not impressed. (There is a reason Trudeau has drawn all of his heritage ministers from a province where culture is synonymous with survival.)

The politicos always seem surprised by the controversies, yet cultural policy never seems to advance any higher up the agenda. Presumably, Guilbeault was promised a cabinet post in exchange for risking his professional reputation by affiliating himself with the party that bought the Trans Mountain pipeline, but he may find that his seat is very far down the table.

Yet culture desperately needs a loud advocate. The screen industries and the news media complain quite rightly that they are not on a level playing field as long as untaxed U.S. tech giants operate without regulation here. Canada’s local newspapers are being killed by Google ads in part because simple tax rules haven’t been updated to include digital media. Canadian broadcasters face content regulations and levies on their revenues that Netflix doesn’t. Meanwhile, copyright infringement eats away at the already paltry incomes of musicians and authors.

Addressing these issues in the borderless world of the internet is not technically impossible; Europe is both taxing tech and enacting European content regulations on streaming catalogues. But it can be politically difficult because consumers accustomed to large quantities of cheap American content don’t see or don’t care about the inequities in the system.

Before the election, Joly’s immediate successor, Pablo Rodriquez, declared, “If you benefit, you contribute.” Then the Liberals’ platform promised media giants would be required to offer Canadian content in both English and French and help pay for it. Is newbie minister Guilbeault equipped to do the manoeuvring – and negotiating with Finance, which would have to initiate any tax changes – that will be required to get the Liberals to keep their promise? Or will he, like Joly before him, find himself impossibly divided between attractive technology and fair policy?

In that regard, there’s an encouraging title on Guilbeault’s resumé. He’s a writer of occasional columns about sustainable development and the author of several books. The latest, published just last summer, is titled Le bon, la brute et le truand, or, as that phrase is translated in English, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. Guilbeault borrowed the title from the classic spaghetti western for a book on artificial intelligence. There’s the good: developments in energy and transportation that can wean us off fossil fuels, as well as new health-care technology. The bad and the ugly, however, include the threats to privacy, democracy, mental health and employment posed by big data, social media and automation. Some skepticism about the gospel of technological determinism is a crucial credential for a culture minister today. So at least Guilbeault gets it. Now, he must get to work.