Former CBC exec says DEI wasn’t meant to be a punishing exercise in ideological purity but to celebrate what had been arbitrarily suppressed
Set for release Jan. 27, Lament for a Literature is the new book from Richard Stursberg, in which he laments the decline of Canadian literature, for which he blames multiple factors. In this excerpt, he addresses the impact of Justin Trudeau’s Liberals, arguing they took over a badly weakened cultural sector from the Harper Conservatives and threw money at it without addressing the difficult structural issues affecting it, only making things worse. The government, he said, did not understand “that as Canadian media eroded and Canadians embraced the new foreign digital platforms, they walked away from Canada itself. They no longer consumed Canadian news, laughed at Canadian comedies, read Canadian books, watched Canadian documentaries, or heard the opinions of Canadian experts on domestic social, cultural, political, economic, or historical issues. They effectively left the national conversation and moved to another amorphous, filter-bubbling virtual country.”
