Florida oranges. American cheese. Even bourbon. It seems nothing is beyond the newfound patriotic urge to shun American products amid the growing U.S.-Canada trade war.

But after years of purposefully enmeshing our various industries, buying Canadian is easier said than done. 

Nowhere, it turns out, is that more evident than in film and television. 

Canadians have “spent a lot of time figuring out how to attract other countries to us,” said Tonya Williams, founder of the Reelworld Screen Institute. And so the Americans, in particular, “have slowly kind of seeped into every part of our culture.” 

According to the Canadian Media Producers Association, English-language domestic films made up 1.4 per cent of the national box office in 2023-24. But Canada’s reliance on U.S. entertainment is nothing new.

The reasons, Williams says, are varied. Aside from Quebec’s successful French-language output and the National Film Board’s early international acclaim, a star system in this country is lacking. Films are rarely promoted to the same level as their American counterparts, Canadian actors are rarely made famous here and, due to poor messaging, audiences struggle to tell which movies are even Canadian. 

But worse is the general apathy toward Canadian content. Outside of government organizations, there hasn’t been much grassroots push to build a robust entertainment industry when America’s is so prodigious, and their culture perceived to be so close to our own. 

Williams thinks that’s changing because of the newly antagonistic relationship. 

“I think the will is there now in Canada,” she said. “I don’t think any country should be so reliant on another country that its own economy could crumble, you know, because of what happens [there].”

A paltry trade

Canada’s reliance started early, says filmmaker and historian Caelum Vatnsdal. 

After an early start during the silent era, the industry here was marked by years of under-funding and neglect. The difficulties of shooting in Canadian weather and wilderness was part of the problem, though other countries — Germany, England, France, Japan — managed to start up fledgling, and even thriving, industries of their own.

Canada was also hobbled by American-made obstacles. We sit astride the world’s longest border with the world’s biggest pop-culture exporter, with whom we share a language. And given that, even to many Canadians, our culture seemed virtually indistinguishable, there was a general lack of interest in building a robust film industry of our own.

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That indifference led to the Canadian Co-operation Project.

Running from 1948-1958, it was designed to largely keep the Canadian government from laying claim to its own box office, Vatnsdal says. Because the major theatre chains here were foreign-owned at the time, Canadian-produced films were hobbled from the start and kept from competing with American releases. Meanwhile, nearly $20 million in yearly theatrical revenue largely went south of the border.

Under the project, U.S. productions promised to work in Canada, make documentaries promoting Canada as a tourist destination and insert (often laughably insignificant) mentions of Canada’s existence into Hollywood films. 

In Vandstal’s opinion, it was a paltry trade.

“A lot of the money that people would pay to see Hollywood films in all these other countries — European countries — mostly would stay there, and they would use that money to make their own films,” he said. “In Canada, we gave that up willingly.”

Eventually, he said, Canada wised up: creating what would eventually become Telefilm, and enacting a tax shelter system to promote a homegrown industry. But having started so late, the industry was at a disadvantage, compounded by the fact that movies produced through the tax shelter system of the ’70s and ’80s, Vandstal says, were mostly low-grade castoffs rejected by Hollywood. 

As a result, Canadians developed a sour opinion of their own offerings. The general public — and occasionally even critics — came to associate “Cancon” with self-indulgent art projects, meant more to pointlessly inflate Canada’s opinion of itself rather than entertain. 

And with the world’s most influential filmmaking nation right next door, propping up our economy with frequent shoots in Vancouver and Toronto, why bother being independent? 

Shifting opinions

Until recently, some filmmakers even wondered whether they should advertise their film’s Canadian connection.

“Would we have used it?” said distributor Olivier Gauthier-Mercier about marketing his German-Canadian produced children’s film Elli and Her Monster Team, before the trade war. “No, not as a hashtag or not as, like, an algorithm pleaser.”

And now?

“Absolutely,” he said. “Because moms are reading this, and moms are all about this — and moms make the decisions.

He hopes changing opinions will finally infuse the public with the desire to watch Canadian — a shifting of the tides that Junos president Allan Reid recently told CBC News is also happening in the music world. 

Gauthier-Mercier predicts theatrical pre-shows will soon be awash with Canadian-branded trailers. But right now, the historically hobbled system is still an obstacle for Canadians hoping to eschew American entertainment. 

There’s a somewhat complicated points system to determine when a film counts as Canadian. But instead, Vatnsdal recommends looking at which company is releasing a given film, then looking backwards at the production company, cast and crew for those hoping to keep their entertainment at home. 

If the trade war continues “then a bright side to it all will be a sort of a crystallization of Canadian culture, Canadian-ness,” he predicts.

“I think there is actually a shot at unmooring ourselves.”