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"The money the (U.S. networks) earn from their shows in Canada probably wouldn't cover Disney/ABC boss Michael Eisner's annual bonus; one post-Superbowl, 30-second commercial for Friends earns the U.S. network nearly as much as an entire season of one sitcom on a Canadian network."
- John Haslett Cuff, "Television",
The Globe and Mail, July 15, 1996, p. C1.
Canada is a small market for corporate culture monoliths like SONY, Disney and Time-Warner. Its importance is ideological. The success formulas of cultural conglomerates are being promoted. These are vertical integration - the corporate structure that maximizes profit through control of all aspects of research, production, promotion, distribution and spin-offs - and economies of scale - the strategy of maximizing profits by saturating the market with the largest possible number of units of a cultural product at once. Although Canada isn't a player in this superheavyweight Olympiad, our funding agencies haven't spearheaded the defense of alternative models. Bureaucrats at film funding agencies wear their best business drag while meddling in the scripts and all aspects of production of local films, supposedly championing the commercial viability of these "properties". But these are quasi-moguls; their imitation-corporate overlording occurs in a another, miniature universe from mass-market profit margins, because Canadian cultural producers never had access to the mass culture distribution system, which is controlled in Canada as elsewhere by an ever-smaller elite of US-based monopolies and their Canadian print and electronic counterparts, like Hollinger, Thompson and TorStar, that are openly hostile to state-culture funding and protectionism.
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