For decades, Canadian books helped shape Canadians’ understanding of history, politics and national identity.
In Lament for a Literature: The Collapse of Canadian Book Publishing (Sutherland House, 2026), former media executive and longtime cultural policy insider Richard Stursberg argues this world has largely vanished.
In a wide-ranging conversation with Canadian Affairs reporter Sam Forster, Stursberg reflects on the decline of Canada’s literary ecosystem and the problems with Canada’s book publishing industry.
SF: You note how Canada lacks the literary ecosystem that promoted Canadian writers in past decades — the reduction in book reviews and tours, for instance. Can our literary scene survive without this ecosystem?
RS: It’s very difficult.
There are fewer and fewer places to promote Canadian books. The Globe and Mail used to have a Saturday supplement, which was a complete book supplement just like the New York Times does on Sunday. Now it’s gone.
Publishers don’t have a lot of money, and so their ability to finance things like book tours is hopelessly compromised. You can’t expect people to buy a book they’ve never heard of.
SF: Your book traces a shift in Canadian non-fiction throughout recent decades. Can you talk about how some genres are better than others at galvanizing a sense of national identity?
RS: What dominated non-fiction bestsellers lists in the second half of the 20th century was history, biography, works on economics, and works on the structure of the country. That’s how you come to know the country. That’s how you come to forge a sense of identity.
And what these books have been replaced by is sad. They’ve been replaced largely by memoir, cookbooks and how-to.
It’s true of fiction too. If you were to look at the bestsellers in Canadian fiction in the second half of the 20th century, they were almost all concerned with exploring Canada. They were set in Canada. They had Canadian characters.
Now, most of the successful Canadian books are not set in Canada. And if you were just a regular reader, you wouldn’t have any idea that these books were even written by Canadians.
SF: Do you think the desire for books set in Canada is in tension with the diversity priorities of the federal government and the publishing houses?
RS: Have we found ourselves in a situation where DEI has gotten a little out of hand? I would say the answer to that is ‘yes’.
Diversity, equity and inclusion was always supposed to be a way of bringing in people who were artificially excluded. And that’s a good thing to do because then you get more perspectives. And this is particularly interesting in terms of the emergence of Indigenous literature, all of which is set deeply in Canada.
But at the same time, there’s no doubt that white male writers have now become excluded. And you can see that in the prizes, in the kind of books that get selected for things like Canada Reads. Canada turned diversity, equity and inclusion — which was a very good idea — into a form of diversity, equity and exclusion.
Would anybody be interested in publishing Mordecai Richler in this day and age if he was just starting out as a writer? I think he’d have a really tough time.
SF: What’s the problem with a literary industry guided by DEI priorities?
RS: The problem with a lot of DEI is that it leads to basically saying that we will celebrate narrow segments of the population, and we will insist that those narrow segments of the population stay in their own lane.
That’s the opposite of having a collective and national sense of who we are.
So we stop being Canadians with common objectives. We turn ourselves into Indigenous-Canadians or gay-Canadians, or whatever we happen to be.
And in a way, DEI, the whole cultural effort, cuts against the strengthening of national identity — an identity in which we say we’re bound by the things we have in common.
SF: You note in the book that a majority [52 per cent] of publishing funding [from the Canada Book Fund] goes to Quebec. … To what extent do you think the chronic underfunding of Anglo Canadian literature is an issue, and do you think there are any politicians with the interests and willpower to change that?
RS: Well, it’s not just books.
The original rationale was because the [French] market was thinner, you needed to put in a little bit more dough. But now the splits have become really skewed, not just in book publishing, but in something I know, which is the CBC.
The traditional funding split was 33 per cent [French] versus 66 per cent [English] when the French population was 25 per cent of the total population. Now at the CBC, the split is 44 per cent [French] versus 56 per cent [English].
The French side of the CBC is one of the best-financed public broadcasters in the world, and the English side is the worst, despite the fact that the English side is, of course, intensely more competitive just because of the number of actors in the market.
What has to happen? Right now, the independent Canadian publishers are dramatically underfunded. There’s a simple solution to this, which is to say, let’s just take the [pool of funding distributed by Heritage Canada], top it up, and turn it into a tax credit.
[In Canada, film and television production is heavily supported through refundable tax credits, typically calculated on qualifying Canadian labour expenditures. Unlike capped grant programs, these credits are entitlement-based — meaning that if a production meets the basic criteria, it can claim the credit rather than competing for a fixed pool of funding.]
It’s very strange to me that we’ve had tax credits in movies and TV for 40 years, and they’re all administered essentially out of [Heritage Canada], the same department as the Canadian Book Fund.
But it never seems to have occurred to anybody that it clearly worked very well for television. So why they have this retrograde structure with respect to the Canadian Book Fund instead of book tax credits, it’s like the two sides of the house don’t talk to each other.
SF: Maybe this is cynical, but do you think that’s because there are some people who like having their hands on the levers of cultural power?
RS: You’re right; it’s much more fun if you’re a cultural bureaucrat to administer a program that is not automatic, but in which you get to make decisions.
Because what happens is that people become supplicants, essentially. And when you’re a supplicant, what do you do? You tell whoever it is that you’re trying to get money from how beautiful they are, how smart they are, how funny they are. I used to see this when I was at Telefilm [Canada], and I would see it again at the CBC when people were commissioning movies and commissioning TV shows.
And I’d say, ‘You must be careful, because everybody wants to believe that they’re smart and funny and good looking. But the truth of the matter is people are only saying that to you because they want money from you.’
But I understand that’s also addictive. It’s way more fun to be the person dishing out the money on the basis of what you like than it is to be dishing out the money on the basis of arithmetic.
SF: What’s the best Canadian book you’ve read lately?
RS: I’ll give you one fiction and one non-fiction.
The best fiction book is Fifteen Dogs by André Alexis. It’s very funny. Very charming.
The second book I would say is The Coutts Diaries, edited by Ron Graham. The entries are completely astonishing for their insight into how the [Pierre] Trudeau government worked, what they were thinking, and who was involved.
*This interview has been edited for clarity and concision
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