Updated: March 7, 2001

MSU Canadian Studies Centre

CSC Occasional Papers

Listening Close, Listening Far: Cosmopolitanism and Radio in Canada
A Speech Given by Timothy Dugdale
Department of English University of Detroit-Mercy

at the 2001 Michigan Canadian Studies Roundtable
March 30, 2001

Last summer I spent three weeks visiting family and friends in Dakar, Senegal. As luck would have, Senelec, the national power company had just entered into a joint venture with our very own Hydro-Quebec. On evidence, it was clearly a case of the blind plugging in the blind. Every night without fail the power would go off for a few hours, leaving those unfortunate enough not to live in less than tony suburbs to swelter in darkness. I fondly remember lying on my bed, trying to find just the right angle to catch the feeble breeze coming through the window. On my chest I balanced a small transistor radio set to a local French station that played jazz documentaries. One man, one radio in one very dark, very hot room.

Extrapolating from Le Courbisier, Canadian communications scholar Marshall McLuhan extolled the virtues of listening in the dark. "All those gestural qualities that the printed page from language," he wrote in his landmark work, Understand Media, "come back in the dark, and on the radio. Given only the sound of a play, we have to fill in all of the senses, not just the sight of the action." McLuhan was admittedly conflicted when it came to radio - he notes at length that Hitler used it to awaken the tribal spirit of the German people. Indeed, the mystic element of radio lies in its ability to let the imagination to take flight, be it towards light or dark spirits. As McLuhan might it, radio can heat up or cool down depending on our psychic temperatures.

For all his harebrained prognostications and flea market scholarship of the humanities, McLuhan nonetheless understood the primal and essential equilibrium between human physiology and media technology. In short, some media are more welcome in our body and souls than others precisely because their extension of ourselves is more harmonious with ourselves.

Much is being made these days about media convergence. It is now possible for me to sit in my office in Detroit and listen to a streaming audio feed of that beguiling station in Dakar. Rumor has it that before long Palm Pilots and Blackberries will be the ultimate media device, part cell phone, part television, part web browser… part transistor radio.

So what?! The experience of hearing Rex Murphy coddle a chatty granny from Antigonish as I bomb along the 401 towards Toronto seems to me far superior than the one that takes place in my office. Radio is a medium made for controlled motion, for reflection. You move around your house with the radio on; it's like having an invited house guest, another consciousness there, converging and diverging with your own. You drive from Windsor to Quebec City, punching the dial all the way. Compared to the relative tyranny of the television, the computer and the cell phone, radio is liberation incarnate.

As a child of the '70's, two figures loom large in my imagination. More than his musical performances, I remember Glenn Gould for his wild and wacky radio plays. Gould had great in the Great White North. Just as recording technology allowed him to achieve the "perfect" performance that was denied to him in a live setting, radio allowed him to put into action his belief that Canadians could be brought closer to a perfection of nationhood. Through listening to radio content produced by Canadians for Canadians, Canadians could articulate and map a utopian psychic landscape onto a snowy desolate expanse of territory that conspired to keep them apart.

The tots of Canada will forever open their history books to find the picture of the Queen signing the repatriated Constitution with Pierre Elliot Trudeau looking over her shoulder, game smile on his face. Less likely to appear is the equally telling photo of Trudeau being ridden on a rail out of Western Canada. Oracular PET is seen flipping the bird to a gang of hecklers from the comfort of his railway car as it pulls away, headed towards Ottawa and civilization.

Trudeau's failure to sell Western Canada on nationalism was second only to his failure to sell it to Quebeckers. Trudeau believed that Canada was doomed to live along a surly fault line of English and French as long as the vast majority of Canadians failed to recognize the existence of two lingua francas. Canadian history demanded French not just be paid lip service. English Canadians had to move their lips in French. "Friends in Etobicoke and Cranbrook," you might imagine Trudeau muttering to himself, "curse the French on your cereal box if you must! But for God's sake do it in French!"

Looking back, twenty five year later, it's clear what Trudeau was really up to - he was promoting an intranational cosmopolitanism. If Canadians, all Canadians could converse with one another on a ground level, we might begin to penetrate one another's mysteries and discover not so mysterious after all. For a dyed-in-the-wool Albertan to saunter into a Montreal café, lay his ten gallon chapeau on the counter and order a glass of wine and foie gras appetizer in serviceable French would not just be a triumph of social engineering. It would be a triumph for, to borrow from Sartre, Canada's "original project". But a large part of what allows provincialism or tribalism to endure is a willful ignorance on the part of the tribe. They refuse to know the Other and their interests. Trudeau's aloofness and condescending tone denied a good message an effective messenger. The country always had the nagging feeling that we rubes were letting down our posh Daddy. He didn't like it. And we liked him even less.

Whither the global economy in all this? Well, for thing it has forced Canadians to mine yet another strata of paradox. We are told that we need the kind of well-rounded education that will allow us to move easily throughout the multinational, multicultural landscape of the global economy; yet at home, in a country that more than anywhere else personifies such a landscape, they are often rewarded, or at the very least not punished for being decidedly un-urbane. More than a few of us believe that since the Americans are in the driver's seat of globalization, the world will eventually look and sound just like it, a massive theme park complete with safaris sponsored by Starbucks, suburbs built by Disney and Chiapas Revolution action figures. Collect all eight and get a free Commander Marcos ski-mask.

No problem. We, like nobody else, know all about America.

Such an attitude is an extension of the tribalist rhetoric of aggressive passivity. The academy and its fetish for theory and more theory haven't helped matters. The noble concept of multiculturalism, a derivative of cosmopolitanism, has been shoved through the meat grinder of political correctness. Tolerance of others, enforced by harpies, do-gooders and Globe and Mail columnists is hardly the brass knuckle stuff needed to make multiculturalism a viable mundane practice in the streets of Lethbridge and Thetford Mines.

Canada is a diaspora of regions populated by a diaspora of Canadians. It makes sense then to have a radio broadcasting system in which the central node is less a programmer that a clearinghouse for the regions to exchange their programs. Think of how Napster functions and you begin to see where I'm headed. The CBC radio of middle aged, middle class Canada that many of us have come to know and tune out deserves a speedy bon voyage into oblivion.

To again borrow from Sartre, CBC radio is in dire need of a "radical conversion". Imagine if every community college and university radio station in Canada was required to carry at least six hours of programming currently heard on Radio 2, inclusive of the national news. In return, each station would be able to promote to the central "server" those shows that it deemed had star qualities sufficient enough to whet the appetites of other station managers around the country. Thus, the home office in Toronto would provide a menu of what the farm system had to offer and then provide it to enchanted parties. As it stands, the CBC develops talent in its regional bureaus. Under this new system, something much more comes to life - cultural reciprocity between regions and its peoples. Trudeau thought demystifying language was the key to nationalism. Perhaps he was right. But he was also put the cart before the horse. Acceptance of regionalism as a reality must come before the acceptance of learning a new language to move into those regions.

The CRTC would jack up the wattage accordingly of these hitherto enfeebled diamonds in the rough, these little radios stations that could but were never allowed to do their stuff. The regional bureaus of the CBC would quickly fold into the campus station infrastructure. CBC Windsor, for example, would merge with CJAM, the campus station of the University of Windsor. The local should be the globalizing influence, as it were. Whatever "slickness" is lost in the mix will be more than made up by a swashbuckling sense of creativity and darest I say, liberation.

If this sounds familiar, it is. National Public Radio is a treasure of the United States precisely because it took a model of the much ballyhooed private sector and made it work to glorious effect in the much cursed public sector. I contribute to a show that over its three years of life has quietly made its mark not just in Ann Arbor where it originates but all over the country. One by one, station managers have listened and liked what they've heard. And the home office has gladly given them what they want. As it should be.

Will Canadians buy into such a model? Can they? Radio is such a powerful media form, yet so many Canadians disappointed with the content. Commercial radio is, by and large, a wasteland of vulgarities, populated by broadcasters beholden to ratings, canned playlists and infotainment hype. The CBC is mocked relentlessly for being staid and quaint. "Take my CBC… please." But I think its problem is less ossification than reification. Canadians like to identify themselves by how they are different than Americans. We eat poutine, at least those of us brave enough to do so. Americans don't. We have socialized medicine. Americans don't. The CBC is a social institution, an icon, a collective investment in Canadian-ness. To tinker with the institution invites the danger of tinkering to the point that the thing is transformed beyond the limits of that old friend, the status quo. Many Canadians don't want the CBC radio budget cut a cent yet can't bring themselves to listen to what they're paying for.

Yikes! Radio at its best should be an adventure, allowing the individual room to think, to imagine, to dream about what they're hearing. But it should also foster a communion of thinkers, of imaginations, of dreamers. That, my friends, is a very apt definition of a country and of a nation.

Free your mind, Canada, and your ears will follow.