I should begin this talk with a
caveat. I am, of course, going to do my best to stay reasonably objective in my
reminiscences. At the same time, I want to make it clear that I’m not speaking
in any formal way on behalf of the PLR Commission -- the opinions expressed
will be mine alone, even if I occasionally slip into the first-person-plural
out of old habit. (After 35 years in the PLR trenches, it’s sometimes hard to
stop using that inclusive “we”.) Last but not least, it’s always good to
remember the general proviso that the long and impressive list of
accomplishments racked up by the Writers’ Union during our first couple of
decades – of which PLR was merely one – all tended to involve a substantial
intake of alcohol.
Now before I get into what will
necessarily be my rather more subjective view of Canada’s PLR history, I just
want to emphasize that it took the participation and dedication of a
significant number of Union members to achieve PLR. So I’ve ransacked both my
memory and my archives and have assembled a list of people whose assistance and
support I very much wish to acknowledge before I do anything else. Regrettably,
given that we’re going all the way back to 1973 here, a fair number of these
writers are unfortunately no longer with us, or no longer engaged in active
service. (In fact, when I showed her the list, my wife Sharon did a quick
calculation and said: My god, were you still in diapers when you joined the
Union? Which, I have to admit, was at least metaphorically true.)
Anyway, I’ve grouped these
names in roughly chronological order, not by age but by when they were
involved, and I’d ask you to please hold your applause until I’ve read them
all:
Marian Engel, Margaret Laurence, Graeme Gibson,
Charlotte Fielden, Charles Taylor, June Callwood, Lynn Harrington, Sylvia
Fraser, Janet Lunn, Robin Skelton, Rudy Wiebe, Eugene Benson, Audrey Thomas,
Margaret Atwood, Pierre Berton, Matt Cohen, Susan Crean, Betty Jane Wylie, Greg
Cook, Terry Heath, Michael Gilbert, Keith Maillard, Cathy Wismer, David Homel,
Fred Kerner, Nancy-Gay Rotstein, Ann Szumigalski, Bonnie Burnard, Karleen
Bradford, Joan Clark, Ken McGoogan, Andreas Schroeder.
Now – the history. As some of
you may know, PLR in Canada was actually first proposed by the Canadian
Authors’ Association way back in 1949, long before the Writers’ Union was
founded, but for me it all began in the fall of 1972, a year before the Union’s
birth. I was then a member of the League of Canadian Poets, and on this
particular day, the League was holding its 6th annual general
meeting in Regina’s Hotel Saskatchewan.
For reasons already implied,
what little I remember of that meeting was that it was an unmitigated disaster.
It had been scheduled right into the middle of the Canada-Russia Summit Hockey
Series, and even though the hotel was swarming with over a hundred of Canada’s
finest poets, nobody was showing up for the meetings. Our executive director
ran up and down the corridors, pleading for at least enough turnout to manage a
quorum, but she wasn’t having much luck. And when Canada gave up the final goal
that lost us Game #5, and poets all over the hotel hurled their beer &
pretzels into the air in despair (and John Newlove, who was watching the game
in Al Purdy’s room, hurled his beer bottle straight at the television
set, which promptly exploded), the hotel’s management informed the League that
it was no longer welcome to hold its AGMs in that hotel ever again.
The next morning everyone was
feeling pretty crappy, and this seemed to include Margaret Atwood, though I
wasn’t aware that she was much of a hockey fan. When I asked her why, she said
that the weekend’s shenanigans had made her seriously doubt that the League had
the motivation to really take on the politicians and bureaucrats in Ottawa, and
she was concerned about that. There were big problems looming for Canada’s
literary industry: the Americans were taking over our publishing houses,
dumping American editions of Canadian books into Canada in direct competition
with our own editions, Canadian universities were ignoring Canadian literature
in favour of British and American books, and suchlike and so on. What we really
needed was a hard-nosed, politically astute and strategically savvy writers’
organization -- a writers’ UNION is what we really needed, she said -- with
enough clout to cause some serious shit-disturbing in Ottawa. In fact, she
said, a small group of Toronto writers had lately been getting together on
Marian Engel’s front porch to kick this idea around, with plans to start up
such a Union. Was I interested in getting involved?
I was, and I did. And one of
the first discussions I attended on Marian’s porch was about PLR. Canadian
writers needed a new source of income; we were averaging less than $5000 per
annum in those days, not enough for even a single person to live on. And while
we all supported Canada’s public library system, we couldn’t see why writers
should be the only people giving up part of their income to finance it.
Librarians weren’t being dinged a percentage of their salaries; neither were
the janitors or the administrators. Where was the logic in that?
We founded the Union a year
later, on November 3, 1973, about a hundred of us, with Marian Engel elected as
Chair. Marian promptly chose PLR as her main focus, and then she let fly as
only Marian could. Over the next two years she arranged a string of meetings
with librarians all over Ontario, trying to explain and discuss the concept.
She even became a Board trustee right here at the Toronto Public Library in
hopes of getting a more productive conversation going. (In fact, some people
suspected that her decision to make the main character in her famous novella
BEAR a librarian wasn’t entirely free of tactical intent. Marian could be
pretty imaginative in her tactics when she needed to be.)
But the concept of a so-called
“free” library system is, and remains, a deeply entrenched ideology in Canada’s
library world, and most librarians didn’t want to come within a hundred yards
of that topic. Marian hit a lot of brick walls, and over time this really got
her dander up. I was on her committee right from the start, and she used to
call me, when she’d had an unproductive day, to bitch about how it was our
books that were making libraries possible, and yet no one who ran these
libraries seemed to give a crap about the people whose books paid their
salaries. Finally, at a meeting of provincial librarians held, once again, in
this very building, Marian blew a gasket and publicly accused Canada’s
librarians of “ripping off Canada’s writers” by lending out their books for
free, thereby undermining their book sales.
Well, let me tell you – think a
dumptruck load of TNT, and Marian waving a match. The resulting ruckus proved
so explosive that (as she told me later) Marian wasn’t entirely sure that she’d
make it out of that room alive. Even the Globe & Mail reporter who’d been
dozing in the back row woke up, and the next day’s headlines finally made PLR
part of Canada’s national conversation. I don’t think that’s how Marian had
planned it, but sometimes you’ve just got to grab your opportunities where you
find them.
Tragically, Marian wasn’t able
to follow up on this success. What a lot of people didn’t know was that she’d
been struggling with a slow-growing form of leukemia, and at this worst
possible moment, it started flaring up again. I got another one of her
late-night calls in which she told me she’d need all her available energy to
fight this off, and then she asked me – well, to be honest she basically
ordered me – to take over and keep the momentum going. That was another thing
about Marian; she was pretty hard to turn down when she had her mind made up.
So I agreed, though I really
didn’t have much of a sense of what I was getting into at the time. If I’d
known PLR was going to take another decade to achieve, and then another one to
get it entrenched, would I have agreed to it? God knows. But by then the Union
had adopted the tradition that anyone standing for the position of Union Chair
had to commit to at least one long-term project that would extend past their
chairing term, and I’d been elected Vice-Chair earlier that year, so I needed a
project of this kind anyway, for the following year when I became Chair. So I
signed on.
But now we had a country-ful
of pretty cheesed-off librarians to deal with, and I’ll tell you, it wasn’t
long before I could readily understand Marian’s frustrations. It was by now
1975, there were PLR programs popping up all over Europe, but not a spark in
North America. Everybody was dug in so deep you could barely see the tops of
their heads. In fact, feelings about PLR were running so high that it was
actually causing fist fights in the hallways of the UBC School of Library
Science, where the students of one of Canada’s few pro-PLR librarians at the
time – name of Basil Stuart Stubbs -- were caught duking it out on several
occasions with the students of one of Canada’s most virulently anti-PLR
librarians, Samuel Rothstein, whose office was right across the hall from
Basil’s. It struck me at the time as a touch uncivilized, though in retrospect,
considering the apathy that cultural issues seem to engender today, I’ve come
to view it with a certain nostalgia. And I just want to say, parenthetically,
that if the history of Canada’s PLR is ever written & published, Basil
Stuart Stubbs should be awarded some truly serious credit. He promoted PLR for
Canada’s writers at a time when all he could realistically hope to gain was a
lot of abuse, both in the press and from his colleagues, and he certainly got
that in spades.
Now you might be wondering why
we were even bothering to tangle with Canada’s librarians over PLR. Why didn’t
we just do an end-run around them? Well, the reason was simple: Ottawa. Every
time we went there to raise the issue, we were told: don’t even think about it
until the whole industry’s onboard – writers, librarians, publishers,
translators, illustrators -- and make sure it’s for both language groups. Get
an agreement from everybody first, and then come talk to us.
Of course we knew this was just
an easy way to get rid of us, but we were young and naïve and full of piss
& vinegar, so we headed straight over to the Canadian Library Association
and we said, okay guys, we’re here to deal: what’s it going to take? And they
said well, as long as you don’t call it PLR, or claim we’re causing you lost
sales, or ask us to pay for it, or expect us to do any unpaid work for it, or
use the information you gather for any other purpose – we won’t exactly support
it, but I guess we’ll put up with it – sort of.
Our initial discussions with
the publishers weren’t a whole lot more promising, but after half a dozen more
talks, one of the more productive of which ended up with our intrepid executive
director Alma Lee cavorting naked in Jack McClelland’s swimming pool – yeah
well, in those days being executive director of a writers’ organization
sometimes involved requirements that have more recently come to be frowned on
-- and after Sylvia Fraser moved things even more productively forward by
waltzing down the middle of Yonge Street in a rather translucent toga, on the
arm of a publisher who…(but you know, maybe that’s information that should
remain embargoed for another few decades). Suffice it to say that Canada’s
publishers did eventually acknowledge that they were already getting way more
financial support from Ottawa than the writers, so for the moment, at least,
they expressed themselves willing to zero-rate their claim to any PLR funding
we might be able to scare up. Meanwhile UNEQ, the Quebec writers’ union, was
working the francophone side of the street toward the same end, and they
managed that with pretty much the same results.
While all this was going on, we
also contacted the provincial culture ministries in the hopes that the
provinces might cough up a few dollars for PLR – because, technically, you see,
libraries actually fall under the jurisdiction of the provinces, not the feds.
But that proved a complete waste of time. Pay writers for the library use of
their books?? What kind of weird hippie idea was that? Not interested.
Close the door on your way out. About the closest we got to any sort of paydirt
was Saskatchewan, which said they might be willing to make a
contribution toward PLR – but only for Saskatchewan authors. But even then they
said they’d really have to think about it. So they really thought about it for
another ten minutes and then turned us down too.
So it was the feds or nothing,
and that’s where we put our entire emphasis. For the next two years I must have
met with every politician and bureaucrat in Ottawa who was willing to even just
talk about PLR. We sent out a truckload of letters, made hundreds of phone
calls, and put the topic on the agenda of every academic, literary, business,
and political conference we could convince to listen to us. We made school
visits, addressed teachers’ conventions, made presentations at book fairs and
festivals, and got journalists who were TWUC members to write pro-PLR articles
in every major newspaper in the country. By now some librarians had become more
sympathetic and willing to distribute PLR-promoting bookmarks to their library
users, so that was great. We got the CBC to host phone-in shows, got me several
interviews with Peter Gzowski on the topic, had our MLA’s raise the issue in
the house, had our most prominent writers visit everyone from the Secretary of
State John Roberts right up to Pierre Trudeau himself. In short, we did every
damn thing you’re supposed to do in this kind of political campaign, and we did
it three times over – and with the hindsight of 25 years, and much as I hate to
admit it, most of it was probably a total waste of time. When we finally did
get PLR, what made it happen really had little if anything to do with all that
work we’d done.
Why? Because it eventually
dawned on us that taking an issue to the public only works if enough of the
public is actually affected by it. Our recent campaign to fix Bill C-32, for
example; that was a perfect fit because the outcome will actually make a
difference to literally millions of people, either pro or con. Every Canadian
writer, every publisher, every employee in the publishing industry, every
student in the country, every teacher, educational bureaucrat and staff
member, librarian, library user, every Canadian parent -- those sorts of
numbers actually attract political attention. PLR never had that kind of pull.
Most people we contacted really couldn’t have cared less about the issue. They
might have had an opinion about it, but their own lives really wouldn’t have
been affected by it.
But that didn’t become clear
until later. What happened now -- and this will take us through to the early
1980’s – will probably always remain one of the most perplexing stages of our
PLR campaign. We’d gone to the Canada Council to ask for financial help to keep
the campaign rolling, because all this campaigning was costing us money we
didn’t have. And the Council agreed, but to everyone’s surprise it agreed on
one condition. They’d fund the campaign, but only if they could also run it.
I don’t know to this day what
the Council’s motives were. Was it a personal initiative by Naim Kattan, the
head of the Writing & Publishing section at that time, or was it the
Council’s Board of Directors, who wanted to expand their own program base? Did
they think that, with most of the gruntwork done, it would be an easy score to
pick up the ball in the final stages and run with it?
We discussed this at
considerable length at National Council, which was pretty leery of the whole
business, but I said look, let’s just not worry about what their motives are,
we need to get this job done and they’ve got the resources – if we don’t like
how they’re handling it, we can always just take it back. So that’s the basis
on which the Union eventually agreed to the deal, and we gave the Canada
Council the go-ahead.
It took the Council quite a
while to get their PLR Committee up and running (which, in deference to
Canada’s librarians they didn’t call PLR but rather the PAYMENT FOR PUBLIC USE
COMMITTEE, with the somewhat unfortunate acronym PPU) but by early 1977 it was
operational and its 6 members (two writers, two publishers, and two librarians)
set to work. The two writers on the committee were Lynn Harrington and myself,
with Lynn representing the CAA and I representing TWUC. Our job was straightforward
but huge: to research, design, build and road-test a PLR program, adapted
specifically for Canada’s unique circumstances.
This turned out to be a lot
harder than we expected – largely because it proved to be so frustratingly
counter-intuitive. It should have been a cakewalk because by that time there
were already a dozen PLR programs in operation around the world, some based on
straight circulation (in which authors are paid every time their books are
borrowed), some on holdings (in which authors are paid a lump sum for the
availability of their books on library shelves), and some on a mix of both. But
there were major problems with each approach. A circulation-based system seemed
on the face of it the most fair, directly addressing the issue of lost
royalties from borrowed books, but the librarians didn’t want a system based on
that premise, and anyway, a circulation-based system simply mirrored the marketplace,
which, after all, was the cause of the problem we were trying to fix.
What would have been the point of going to all this trouble if most of the
program’s benefit was going to go directly to the 10% of Canada’s writers who
didn’t need it? And finally, this system, especially in the early days of
computers, would have been extremely expensive to run. In Britain and Germany,
where it was already being used, over a third of the annual PLR budget went
directly into the pockets of clerks, not writers. That didn’t seem to bother
anyone else around the table, but we writers raised enough objections to that
notion to eventually put the kibosh on it.
So it was a holdings system
more or less by default, but even in a holdings-based system the really successful
writers can easily run away with most of the pot. So we kicked around the idea
of putting a limit on how much PLR income you could earn. Most of the committee
thought our successful writers would never put up with that, but I contacted
about two dozen of them – both anglophone and francophone -- and I don’t know
if this will surprise you, but with the exception of only two writers – one of
whom told me to stick it where the sun don’t shine -- every other writer not
only went along with the idea, but some even offered to contribute their entire
share to the common good – and did. So we built a $4,000 earnings ceiling into
our formula, which had the effect of redistributing well over half a million
dollars of the money that would have been earned by our most successful
writers, back into our general pot -- and in all the years I chaired or served
on the board of the PLR Commission, we never received a single complaint from a
maxed-out author about that. (I don’t know about you, but that still strikes me
as pretty darn impressive.)
There was still one last big
decision we had to make, and that was whether to operate PLR inside or outside
of the Copyright Act. Most existing PLR programs operated inside it, but the
downsides for Canada were pretty major. Back in the 70’s, CanLit was only a
fraction of the size it’s become today, and our public libraries were full of
mostly American and British books. A PLR system run within copyright law would
have forced us to include all British and American writers in our scheme,
meaning we’d be sending anywhere from half to two-thirds of our PLR budget
offshore. So that decision was a no-brainer. However, it wasn’t without serious
implications. A PLR scheme operated outside of the Copyright Act meant a scheme
unprotected by law, operated and financed at the pleasure of the government –
an ominous-sounding description that some people worry just might come back to
bite us in the butt someday. Given the Harper government’s fiscal priorities
these days, it’s a concern that’s not hard to understand.
Speaking of butt-biting, it
didn’t take long before this began to happen to the Canada Council’s PPU
Committee. During its first few years, while we were up to our eyeballs in
research and program design, we had meetings every couple of months and there
was a wonderful sense of surging progress. But once we started grinding our way
through the really contentious stuff, like which authors and which books would
be eligible, how the management of the program would be structured, who would
be on the Board and how the votes would be distributed, it wasn’t long before
people at the Council seemed to lose interest. The intervals between meetings
increased, and by 1982 we were down to meeting about twice a year.
We writers on the committee first
complained, and then raised hell, and that worked for a while, but only because
another unexpected PLR supporter came out of the woodwork -- Katherine
Benzekri, the Asst. Head of the Writing & Publication Section. She
repeatedly put her job on the line to keep the momentum going (and actually did
eventually lose her job over it), and that bought us another year or so of
further development work, but finally even Benzekri couldn’t budge the Council
anymore. So I got together with Robin Skelton, our Union chair at the time, and
it was decided that the Union would take back control of the PLR campaign as
per our agreed-upon fall-back position, and that’s exactly what we did.
So now we had the campaign’s
controls back in our hands, which was great, but now we needed some serious
leverage to get this train back on its tracks. One idea we spent a fair number
of brain cells on was a plan for a huge demonstration in front of this very
library, scheduled to coincide with the Union’s 1983 AGM, at which hundreds of
us would show up, check out our books, and pile them up in huge stacks on the
sidewalk outside, to demonstrate just how significant our contribution to our
country’s library system actually was. We didn’t end up doing that for some
reason, but we did organize a Canada-wide PLR Day in the fall of that year,
when Eugene Benson was our chair, with Union members conducting PLR
demonstrations of one kind or another all across the country. I don’t remember
many details, but I do recall some deathless poetry contributed by Margaret
Atwood and read by the actor Gordon Pinsent at the Toronto demonstration. It
went something like this:
There are strange things done
‘neath the Ottawa sun, By the men who moil for
(whatever they moil for), But PLR, is a thing they’ve
not, been noted to specially toil for.
(For some reason, we’ve never
been able to find that amazing poem in any of her subsequent collections.)
We also, the following year,
staged a Great PLR March on Parliament Hill, chanting and waving placards, over
a hundred of us, the sight so terrifying that we soon acquired an escort of two
whole police cruisers. Unfortunately it was pissing with rain, which made us
look rather more forlorn than militant, and our subsequent meeting with the
current Minister of Communications, Francis Fox, was no less sodden. Our only
revenge came when Audrey Thomas managed to pin a button on the minister’s lapel
that read: “He’s pretty, but can he type?”
By 1985 we’d been banging away
at this PLR thing for over a dozen years, and I have to admit, there were
mornings when I got up and thought: man, this is the biggest waste of time
since Sisyphus started rolling rocks. What the hell’s the point? This is never
going to happen. We keep going to Ottawa every few months for yet another round
of talks, and every bureaucrat or politician we talk with is being paid 100
grand a year just to give us the illusion that something’s being accomplished
when nothing actually is. They can keep doing this forever, while we’re wasting
our lives for sweet f-all.
And then, god help me, it
happened. It happened so abruptly, so out of the clear blue sky, there are
still days when it feels so much like a fairytale I’m almost embarrassed to
tell it.
Let me set this up for you. In
September of 1984 Brian Mulroney’s Conservatives had clobbered John Turner’s
Liberals after only two and a half months in power, and Marcel Masse became
Minister of Communications. Masse was a red Tory and a thoroughly cultivated
guy – he actually read Canadian literature, attended Canadian theatre
productions and films, and supported Canadian culture generally. (This I regret
to say, seems to have become something of a rare thing in a Canadian culture
minister.) So when Mulroney started negotiating his Free Trade deal with the
United States, Masse wanted to keep Canadian culture off the table, and when
this didn’t happen, he protested. He became so outspoken on this subject that
rumours started circulating that Mulroney might actually pull him off his
portfolio for the length of the negotiations.
Masse obviously knew about
this, but he kept up the pressure. He alarmed the PMO by promoting an increase
in Canada’s Canadian-Content airplay requirements, talking up the notion of a
similar system for Canadian films, and promoting the expansion of a
Canadian-controlled movie industry. He also stood his ground when the Americans
pressured him to back off on ideas of that sort, as did the PMO.
By the spring of 1985, when
Matt Cohen and I met him (Matt was the tenth Union chair with whom I worked on
PLR), Masse seemed to have considered his own ouster inevitable, but he
couldn’t resist at least a couple more last-minute acts of cultural subversion
-- and PLR just happened to be in the right place at the right time to become
one of them.
We met him in a small
restaurant off Bloor Street, where he was having a bite after some film opening
he’d just attended. He was accompanied by two or three assistants, and he
seemed in very good spirits – both literally and figuratively. He was familiar
with our proposal and had even, by this time, spent some time trying to get the
provinces to buy into it, but with no more success than we’d had some years
earlier. He didn’t need to have our latest version of it explained because Matt
had already done that for him at an earlier meeting. What he wanted to know
now, and in much greater detail, was exactly how we proposed to run such a
system on a purely federal basis in Canada.
We described that for him point
for point, and he asked a lot of thoughtful questions. He wanted to know how
the publishers and the librarians would be involved in this. And what about the
francophone/anglophone issue? What was the latest on that? Fortunately we were
able to assure him that we had everyone on side. He asked how much the
different versions of the scheme would cost, and what sort of options we
considered to be critical.
Now Matt and I had discussed
this earlier, and had agreed on the following tactic. According to my
calculations, we could do a bare-bones, stripped-down version for about 2
million. (That’d be about 6 million dollars today). For a plan paying a
slightly higher fee per book, but restricted to just literary works, including
fiction, nonfiction, poetry and drama, we’d need about 3 million (about 9
million in today’s dollars). For total coverage of every book published in
Canada, no exceptions, we’d need at least 4.25 million (just under 13 million
dollars today).
Our plan had been to give Masse
the largest number we figured he wouldn’t choke on -- but by the time we got to
this question, we’d both formed the impression that Masse wasn’t playing games
with us. So we didn’t play games with him. We gave him all three numbers.
He frowned; you could almost
see him running through column after column of figures. Finally he looked
around at his assistants, who’d been looking increasingly alarmed at all these
numbers. “Well gentlemen,” he said. “I think we can manage 3 million, don’t
you?”
Now here’s what I remember most
vividly about this meeting – although it was so weird, I had to check with Matt
afterwards to make sure I hadn’t just imagined it. Because after asking his
assistants this question, Masse turned to us – not to them – and carried right
on as if they’d all agreed. But the thing was: they hadn’t. In fact, after
initial looks of shock, they’d allshakentheir heads – vigorously.
They protested that Treasury Board would have a fit over an amount that big,
and, anyway, given the feelings about him at the PMO, was there going to be
enough political support for this plan?
But Masse waved all their
objections away; it was clear he’d made up his mind about this, and that was
that. He asked us to come to see him in Ottawa the following week to work out
the details, and over the next month or so, Matt, as Union chair, carried on
the negotiations, while I parked my carcass near a phone on the west coast in
case they needed more details.
That fall, on September 24,
1985, in Halifax, Marcel Masse publically announced the federal government’s
intention to pay for a PLR program. Naturally, writers all over the country
went nuts. But what totally threw us for a loop the very next day, on September
25, was Masse’s abrupt resignation of his cabinet post. Turned out he was being
investigated by the RCMP for alleged campaign overspending by his election
team.
Had he known about this for a
while already, and had he been working frantically to get our PLR program in
under the wire before he was bucked off his horse? It sure looked that way. God
bless the guy for that, if it was true! At the same time, the more urgent
question was whether his stand-in, a back-bencher named Benoit Bouchard, would
honor Masse’s commitments.
To our enormous relief,
Bouchard did. He kept the file moving, and when Masse returned to his post 2
months later (exonerated), Masse immediately resumed control of the project. By
the following spring he’d secured provisional Treasury Board agreement for it,
and by that fall, 3 million dollars had been promised for the program.
So Masse was proving as good as
his word – though there were some complications. The haste with which
everything had to get done forced us into a number of shortcuts that have
dogged the PLR program ever since. The normal way to set up this kind of
program would have been through an act of parliament, but with no time for
that, it had to be piggy-backed onto an institution that already had the
necessary accounting arrangements with the government to both receive the PLR
funds and to account for them at the end of every budget year. Therefore: did
we want to be put (purely for accounting purposes) under the aegis of the
National Library, the National Archives, or the Canada Council?
We chose the CC, since it
already had a similar arrangement with UNESCO (also an independent program) –
so we figured the Council’s management would be more familiar and comfortable
with such a deal. Twenty-five years later, I’m not so sure that “familiar” and
“comfortable” have always turned out to be quite the right adjectives for the
Commission’s relationship with the Canada Council. Depending on the attitude or
business philosophy of the Council’s various directors over the years, our
relationship has varied from remarkably generous to downright carnivorous. But
that’s a story for another time.
Another issue that almost ended
the party before it had really started was the sudden demand, by UNEQ, for 50%
of the total PLR budget, even though the French-speaking proportion of Canada’s
population was less than 25%. Their logic was that Canada had 2 official languages,
so each should get half the money. Debate on this issue quickly became heated,
because Masse was absolutely categorical: if anything about PLR was going to
cause him trouble in Quebec, he wanted nothing to do with it. It was to Matt
Cohen’s enormous credit that he managed to convince UNEQ to abandon that
position, and thus keep the negotiations from going off the rails at the last
minute.
But the biggest challenge had
to do with timing. It was now September 1986, less than 4 months before
Christmas, and Masse had made it very clear that he could only guarantee this
money until the end of the year. If we didn’t have a full-fledged, totally
operational PLR program in place by the end of the calendar year (December
‘86), and the cheques mailed out by the end of the fiscal year (March ’87),
that $3 million – and not impossibly, the whole program -- was toast. It was a
take-it-or-leave-it proposition.
Here’s what that meant in
practical terms. We had to assemble a full PLR Commission, elect an Executive,
thrash out a constitution and a voting structure, rent and furnish office
space, hire and train a complete staff, finalize our choice of a PLR program
and design the software to run it; contact and register over 5,000 Canadian
authors, create a 17,000-title database of their books, hire and train 10
groups of library students from across the country to match up this database to
the holdings of Canada’s 10 largest libraries, process the results and
calculate the PLR payments owed to the authors; print, collate and mail out the
resulting cheques – and do it all in less than 6 months, or 13 years of Union
efforts would be down the tubes.
Graeme Gibson, when I told him
about it, called it a classic “hang-noose” deal – we’d been given just enough
rope to hang ourselves. Then he flashed his trademark roguish grin and pointed
out that, on the other hand, if we flubbed the job and lost the money, we’d
have 5,000 seriously pissed-off Canadian writers on our tail, which, all things
considered, was going to be a damned effective motivator. As usual, he had that
pretty much right.
So we hit the deck running, and
it’s amazing how effectively people can work together when there’s simply no
room to screw around. It took us less than two weeks to pull together a
full-fledged PLR Commission (of which I became founding chair), with both
francophone and anglophone writers, translators, publishers, librarians, and
government representatives drawn from right across the country. We moved into
the Canada Council’s office building mere days later, and despite some of my
rather grumpy remarks about the Council in later years, I’d be a turd if I
didn’t acknowledge how invaluable their help and generosity was at this point.
We used their Human Resources dept. to hire our staff; we rented office space
from them, we furnished those offices with the Council’s castoff furniture, we
utilized their meeting rooms, computer facilities, accounting services,
nation-wide phone system and their mailroom. We paid for everything we used,
but what they charged us in those days was more than reasonable.
Since the research had largely
been done, we were able to use most of the PLR plan we’d designed at the
Council’s PPU Committee. To contact the writers, we combined the results of a
test registration drive that our PPU Committee had conducted 3 years earlier,
with the address lists of our Commission’s own writers’ groups plus those of
the Council, and everyone spread the word. Once registrations started pouring
in, we were able to use the Ottawa Public Library across the street to verify
much of the cataloguing data, and what we couldn’t verify there, we sorted out
at the National Library just a few blocks farther away.
Once it was clear our money
wasn’t coming out of their budgets, Canada’s librarians became increasingly
helpful, even giving us the names of their part-time staff so we could hire
them to do the library sampling. That turned into a total win-win, since they
got the extra work, we didn’t have to train anyone, and access to their library
catalogues effectively became an inside job. (And I just want to throw in,
parenthetically, that our relationship with Canada’s librarians over PLR has
been really quite excellent ever since – something I really hope can be
maintained as we all struggle with the issue of digitizing library books and
the lending of ebooks.)
By mid-November we were belting
along in high gear, with people often working late into the night and all
through the weekends. When winter kicked in, some of the staff who lived in the
suburbs stashed sleeping bags under their desks, so they could overnight in
their offices if a blizzard hit and the buses stopped running. (I had some
complaints from the building’s security staff about this, but once I’d
explained the situation, they actually got into the spirit too and sometimes
brought us coffee and doughnuts after-hours while we worked.) I eventually gave
up risking the wintery commute from the west coast and just moved into a
friend’s Ottawa townhouse for the duration; since he and his girlfriend were
planning to spend several years sailing around the world and were outfitting a
boat for this purpose, they’d already sold off all their furniture except their
own mattress, so I slept for almost three months in their empty dining room,
curled up in their boat’s inflatable life raft. I always thought there was
something appropriately symbolic about that.
The scariest part of the
operation was that we were doing a lot of stuff simultaneously that really
should have been done sequentially. It was a huge gamble, but we really had no
choice. So author registration was going on full bore while the software that
would process that information was still being written; similarly, we were
already assembling lists of eligible titles well before the library protocols
to process those lists had been finalized and tested. Any serious error in
synchronizing any of these operations could have collapsed the whole thing in
on itself, but by some miracle that never happened. In fact, the whole system
came together so effectively that it’s still being used in essentially the same
format today, 25 years later.
By early December, even the
naysayers were grudgingly admitting there was a chance we might pull this off,
and by late December there was no question that the program was indeed “up and
running” as per the first part of Masse’s requirements. Anyone that could,
worked right through the Christmas holidays, and when our executive secretary
came running in with the first library sampling results in late January, I knew we had it in the bag. By the end of February we had all the numbers matched
up, and by mid-March, two weeks before D-Day, we were ready to print the first
cheques.
By that time, just as he’d
suspected, Masse’s inconvenient defense of Canadian culture during the free
trade negotiations had resulted in his ouster from the Communications portfolio
(he was moved to Energy), but happily for us, his replacement, Flora MacDonald,
proved every bit as supportive and helpful. When I phoned her to tell her we were
ready to print the cheques, she suggested we make a celebration out of it and
that’s what we did. We gussied up our digs at the Canada Council and called the
press, she joined us with her entire entourage, and on March 17, 1987, with
cameras clicking and flashbulbs popping, Flora MacDonald turned on our
cheque-printing machine and triumphantly held up a lengthening scroll of the
first of 4,432 cheques destined for the bank accounts of Canada’s writers.
Our plan had been to have the
entire crew stuffing envelopes for the final 3 days of the fiscal year, so we’d
be done by midnight on March 31, after which the whole project would explode
into the loudest, craziest, most raucous party ever unleashed in the Canada
Council’s normally decorous halls. And we did make it – at least as close as
darn is to damn. By 3 o’clock in the morning half of us were still stuffing
envelopes, but the rest were already making paper chains and using paper
shredders to create impromptu confetti, some of which, I understand, actually
got into some of the final envelopes. So if you were one of the small
contingent of authors who got their first PLR cheques inexplicably garnished
with short curlicues of red paper, now you finally have your explanation.
So that’s the story of Canada’s
PLR saga, or at least the 13 years it took us to achieve it. And you know, it’s
worked fairly well since then, all things considered. I think we can all be
quite pleased with what was achieved. But it’s not just the creation of
PLR that we can legitimately be pleased about. Something else was achieved here
too, and perhaps I’ll be stepping on a few toes to make this point, but I think
the point needs to be made.
I’m old enough now to have seen
the following phenomenon too often. Writers – in fact artists generally –
produce the highest level of cultural expression, yet tend to get paid at the
lowest level of the cultural food chain. That’s why we created the Union, and
that’s why we created PLR. But what really troubles me is what so often happens
when artists of whatever stripe finally get it together to do something about
this. Hundreds, even thousands of volunteer hours get poured into the crusade;
dozens, sometimes hundreds of artists take time away from their art to put
their shoulders to the wheel -- and sometimes, if they’re lucky, they actually
manage to make their point and win the day. Resources are made available, a
program is established, staff is hired, and the artists can finally go back to
creating their art, relieved that the goal has been accomplished.
And maybe it has, but flash
forward a couple of years and here’s what we see far too often: the program is
still operating, but a shiny new office building has been acquired, the staff
has quadrupled or worse, the administrative costs have gone through the roof,
and the artists, for whom the whole undertaking was created in the first place,
are now getting a mere fraction of the money. Does that sound familiar? Why
does that keep happening? Well the answer is obvious: the artists have left the
building. There’s nobody left to adequately represent their interests – or the
people on the board won’t or can’t do the job anymore. We looked at half a
dozen such programs when we were designing ours, and I want to tell you: that
was one outcome we were determined to avoid.
And we have. Canada’s PLR
program is arguably the leanest, most economically run program of its kind in
Canada (and actually, in the world) with over 92% of its budget paid out to
Canada’s writers each year. That’s an administrative rate of less than 8%;
compare that with similar collective programs costing as much as 30% of their
total budget, and you’ll get a sense of what I’m talking about. There are
collectives in Canada serving only half as many writers or artists as PLR, with
staffs that have ballooned to over 50 employees; compare that with the PLR
program, which started out in 1986 with 4 employees serving 5000 writers, and
today, despite now serving over 18,000 writers, still operates with exactly
that same size of staff: 4 employees.
Now people will say: that’s not
a fair comparison; you don’t have the legal costs, or a lot of the travel
costs, or jury costs, or whatever. And we’ll say that’s right, we don’t, but do
you know why? Because we specifically designed the program not to need
those things. It can be done. You just take a good hard look at all your cost
benefit ratios. Travelling all over the world to set up reciprocal arrangements
with foreign countries that will never return more than a few dollars annually
may look enterprising, but it won’t do your clients much good. Neither will
using your program’s budget to fund cultural events and festivals all over the
country, all of which comes right out of your clients’ pockets too. And then
the artists or writers wonder why their cheques are so small at the end of the
year. There are a number of European PLR programs that do that sort of thing
too, and we became convinced that if they actually let their affiliated writers
vote on such initiatives, they’d never get them passed. Over at PLR, aside from
two extremely modest PLR birthday celebrations over the years, and attendance
at the international PLR conference every two years by its chair and its
executive secretary (and even that’s been recently cancelled), Canada’s PLR program
has never spent a nickel of its clients’ money on anything but the express
purpose for which the program was designed in the first place. I think that’s a
model to which all collective-type programs in this country should aspire.
So that’s another achievement
we can all be legitimately be proud of.
But despite such success, PLR
in Canada still faces serious ongoing challenges. One important challenge is
maintaining its independence. I don’t think there’s any doubt that both the
program’s creation and its thrift are the direct result of its governing
structure, which is writer-controlled and writer-operated. If that ever gets
lost, if the PLR Commission ever gets absorbed by some government body, either
directly or indirectly – and believe me, we’ve had to beat back plenty of
attempts to do that over the years – then I can almost guarantee you that it’ll
quickly become exactly the kind of bureaucratic operation we’ve been doing our
darndest to avoid. This very phenomenon is happening in Britain as we speak,
where their huge post-2008 austerity program has pulled their PLR program up by
its roots and absorbed it into a large umbrella organization completely
controlled and operated by government bureaucrats. May we never see the same
thing happen to our PLR program here.
The other challenge, as
everyone knows, is program growth. Canada’s PLR program now serves over 18,000
authors, and that number keeps growing by between 600 - 700 new authors every
year. Canadian literature is drowning in its own success, and we’d be the first
to give that a standing ovation, but it does come at a price. The Commission
has tried to address this with a graduated payment system in which PLR payments
per eligible book taper off over time, and that’s reducing some of the pressure
at least temporarily, but that’s a kind of hold-your-nose solution the PLR
Commission doesn’t like any more than its writers. More funds is the real
solution, and the Commission is doing its best to lobby for them, but let’s
face it, the times aren’t exactly promising.
But, you know, we’ve been here
before. Not just once, but many times. I remember once saying to someone, in a
reckless, overly-optimistic moment, that if PLR ever ran totally smoothly for
just two years in a row --- if it ever managed to go for that long without yet
another unexpected salvo from the government, or the Council, or the book
industry, or even from our own members, if we ever got just two years of
stability and peace, I’d be out of there in a flash. But when I finally resigned
in 2008, two decades later, it wasn’t because we’d ever had that kind of break.
It had more to do with the sign that my wife pinned up above my desk one
morning, that read: JUST BECAUSE IT’S A GOOD IDEA, SCHROEDER, DOESN’T MEAN
YOU’VE GOTTA DO IT FOREVER!
So yes: we’ve been there, we’ve
done that, and we’ve held our ground. For 25 years our PLR program has
out-performed the odds, out-flanked its adversaries, out-done itself, and will,
I’m sure, outlast its doomsayers. As long as our Union keeps backing it, and
Canada’s writers keep supporting it, and it keeps its faith with Canada’s
writing community, it will survive. Long may it prevail!
