Maple Leaf Rag

Maclean’s, Vol. 118, No. 41, Oct. 10, 2005, Toronto

The first issues of what would become Maclean‘s magazine did not bode well for the future of Canadian journalism. Subtitled "The Cream of the World’s Magazines Reproduced for Busy People," the publication was essentially a Reader’s Digest of warmed-over features from anywhere but its home soil.

Canada has changed a lot since then, and so has the publication that now bills itself as "Canada’s Weekly Newsmagazine." In an October 10 issue celebrating the magazine’s 100-year anniversary, regular columnist and former Editor-in-Chief Peter C. Newman suggests that the two developments are intimately connected. If the original Maclean’s (first called The Business Magazine, later The Busy Man’s Magazine) was barely a magazine when first published in 1905, Canada was barely a country — it was just 38 years after confederation, and 26 years before the Statute of Westminster finally granted full independence from the British crown.

With more than 50 years’ service at Maclean‘s, Newman can be forgiven if he overstates the magazine’s influence on ensuing developments — Canada’s growth from an ill-defined collection of backwater towns and unpaved cities to a multicultural haven with the world’s eighth-largest economy. When he suggests, for example, that Maclean‘s is "the closest Canada has ever come to having a national house organ," he is overlooking the more influential television and radio programming of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. Still, in a land so vast and sparsely populated, national magazines such as Maclean‘s were among the few binds that could tie the nation’s far-flung inhabitants together. And it remains true that Canadian journalism, more so than elsewhere, has been preoccupied with matters of national identity, covering not just the news, but as Newman writes, "who we are and why we are here."

The development of Canada’s national identity, and of Maclean‘s identity as a magazine, is on display throughout the centennial commemorative, the first half of which is largely filled with archival gems representing the first 10 decades of the magazine’s existence. The earliest issues are heavy with foreign essayists, such as Thomas Edison, Orville Wright, Winston Churchill, and H.G. Wells. But the contributors — and their themes (including hockey, of course) — become increasingly Canadian as the century progresses. Several excellent examples of its "obsessive hunt for some glimmer of what constitutes our identity" include a stirring 1916 call for women’s rights from Nellie McClung, a leader in the Canadian women’s suffrage movement, a grim portrait of life on the tramp in the 1930s, and a wartime account of Canadian forces during the assault on Normandy. The 1970s and 1980s are given over to a triple helping of worry and rumination over the Quebecois separatist movement and national unity.

The final selection, from 2002, is the most telling. In an eloquent, if occasionally paranoid, essay, Canadian novelist Douglas Coupland writes that "Canada and the U.S. have diverged to the point where it’s no longer true to say that we’re essentially the same thing." True unity — of identity, of language, of political outlook — may continue to elude Canada. But if Canadians, living in the shadow of the world’s most powerful cultural, military, and economic force, are still squabbling about what exactly Canada is, there’s near universal consensus about what it is not: American. If this assertion of national identity in the negative strikes some as lacking in substance, Coupland at least finds reason for hope. "[I]f we want to remain a country, we have to continue being Canadian. That’s news indeed."

It’s also not necessarily an easy thing to do — for either the country or its magazines. The Canadian media market is brutally unforgiving: The nation’s 33 million potential consumers are swamped by American media competitors and spread out across six time zones, making for monumental distribution costs. Maclean‘s chief newsstand rival isn’t even Canadian. The local edition of Time — with just enough Canadian stories shoehorned into the U.S. edition to meet federal regulations governing Canadian content in the media — regularly outsells Maclean‘s by a 2 to 1 margin.

Maclean‘s current editor-in-chief, Kenneth Whyte, says that he plans to surpass Time‘s 10,000 weekly newsstand sales within two years, and he may well be on course to do just that. After a decade-long drop in circulation, ads, and interest, newsstand sales for Maclean‘s were up some 15-20 percent during the previous year, at the time of the October 10 centennial. And that was before a major design overhaul, which debuted in late 2005. Whyte says, "What I really like is controversy" — and he has backed it up with projects including a recent cover story that all but warned of a coming war with the United States over Canadian water resources.

But can Maclean‘s — or any newsmagazine for that matter — survive another century of change? A bicentennial may seem like almost too much to hope for. Then again, that’s what people used to say about Canada, too.