Lament for a Literature: The Collapse of Canadian Book Publishing
by Richard Stursberg
Sutherland Press
2026/$19.95/100 PP.
The demise of print culture has long been forecast due to the rise of digital media, but Canada perhaps leads the world in hastening its decline. Unlike the strict regulation of radio and television by the CRTC, which requires both Canadian ownership and content, Ottawa has done little to enforce its competition laws or foreign ownership limits in print media. The result in newspaper publishing, which I study, now sees US hedge funds owning 98 per cent of our dominant chain, Postmedia, despite a supposed 25 per cent limit on foreign ownership. Postmedia gobbled up the historic Southam chain in 2010, added Sun Media in 2014, and more recently took over Atlantic Canada’s Brunswick News in 2022 and Saltwire Network in 2024 without a peep from Ottawa. Local news provision has been devastated from coast to coast as a result, while more than $500-million in debt payments has flowed south from our newspaper industry to the hedge funds.
The story in book publishing is similar and is ably told by Richard Stursberg in Lament for a Literature, which documents in only 88 pages of text the collapse of Canada’s book business over the past 20 years, deeming it now the “weakest domestically owned publishing sector in the industrialized world.” For this Stursberg blames government indifference to the foreign corporate takeover of our media and the rise of identity politics, which has seen Canadians “increasingly embarrassed by their country’s history.” The foreign takeover of our publishing industry, which has increasingly seen books by American authors sold to Canadians, began at the turn of the millennium, when Random House bought 25 per cent of industry icon McClelland & Stewart. Founded in 1906, M&S once sold tens and even hundreds of thousands of copies of books by such Canadian authors as Pierre Berton, Peter C. Newman, Farley Mowat and Mordecai Richler. (A best-seller in Canada now is 5,000 copies.) Random House, which is owned by the German media giant Bertelsmann, took over the rest of M&S in 2011 and two years later combined its publishing assets as Penguin Random House. The incursion into our market of Rupert Murdoch’s HarperCollins and US giant Simon & Schuster has led to three foreign companies now publishing about 95 per cent of the books bought in Canada. “They were essentially vehicles for the sale of foreign, mostly American, books,” notes Stursberg. “They were not much interested in Canadian authors.”
A similar crisis beset book retailing at the millennium, and not just with the introduction of Amazon’s better online mousetrap. Chapters, which controlled about 65 per cent of book sales in Canada, was swallowed by its smaller rival Indigo, all but removing competition from the sector. A federal Competition Tribunal blessed the marriage anyway, in one example of what Stursberg calls “often incomprehensibly bad decisions” at the federal level. Squeezed for margins by a dominant bookseller, long-publishing Canadian houses grew hard-pressed to compete and one by one folded or were taken over. This has left book publishing here in banana republic condition. Stursberg reserves particular scorn for the Department of Canadian Heritage, which he quips has proved “a patsy every time a foreigner wanted to buy a Canadian publishing asset.”
Along with these structural changes and the overwhelming dominance of multinationals came an emphasis on righting historical wrongs, and the emergence of DEI policies strengthened trends already evident in cultural works, according to Stursberg. “The collapse of the big Canadian independent publishers meant that there was little appetite or money left for books on Canadian society, politics, history or biography.” Spurred by the Canada Council’s prioritization of works of “personal reflection where the point of view of the author is evident,” the result was an explosion of memoirs. From 2018 to 2021 most (if not all) books on the shortlists for the Governor General’s non-fiction award were memoirs, he notes, a trend that “seemed congruent with George Grant’s contention that Canada was slipping away from its historic emphasis on community values and shared experiences to a much more individualistic, more American view of what was important.” Stursberg asserts that as DEI policies increasingly took hold, white male authors found it hard to find an editor willing to even read their work. These policies, which he argues need to be “recalibrated,” have perversely affected even the most progressive houses, prompting my long-time publisher, Rolf Maurer of New Star Books, to throw in the towel last year.
The demise of Canada’s book publishing industry is an existential crisis for our culture, Stursberg contends, as books provide “the most thorough and immersive explorations of identity.” Luckily, he sees some glimmers of hope in the recent rise of nationalism in our opposition to becoming a 51st state of Trump’s America. He urges that the $60-million in federal subsidies given to the book industry annually be converted to tax credits such as now underwrite our newspaper industry in a system he advocated in his 2019 book The Tangled Garden. Tax credits covering 40 per cent of publishing costs would depoliticize decision-making by federal granting agencies, Stursberg argues, and would allow publishers to borrow against such “bankable” subsidies. Unlike in news media, he adds, they should also be given to start-ups in an attempt to revitalize the industry. “Restoring the book industry would be a gift to the country,” writes Stursberg, who notes it won’t be easy given the inevitable US pushback to our strengthening our foreign ownership rules. It is nonetheless a necessary step if we want to continue as Canadians and not Americans. “Saving Canadian media, and most centrally Canadian books,” Stursberg concludes, “is essential to saving ourselves.”
Marc Edge is an associate professor of communication at University Canada West in Vancouver.
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