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Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. May I say at the outset what a pleasure it is to find myself in the city of lights, a city renowned equally for its beauty and its intense intellectual life.

It is a little daunting as well, particularly as I am here to speak and my grasp of "la langue de Molière" is far from perfect. I hope you will bear with me.

Since culture can refer to phenomena ranging from a few cells in a petrie dish to an evening of Wagner, I shall begin, in the interests of clarity, by defining it, and shall try to stick to my definition as I go on.

Culture is ideas made manifest: ideas as they are embodied in society through language, manners, institutions, ritual and - most important in my view - the arts. Culture is not defined or determined by race, although race may be an associated element. Nor can it be determined or delimited by nation states, although national policy can affect its forms and expressions.

The power of culture is like the power of the sea: it is vast, turbulent, and unpredictable in its effects. Its currents set the air moving and shape lives lived half a continent away.

Culture involves the exchange of ideas in many forms, and the technology of contemporary communications makes it inevitable that ideas and their cultural embodiments will be broadcast in increasingly complex and dense patterns around the globe. Through tourism, the entertainment industries, the manufacture of luxury goods and the fine arts, culture is also a significant contributor to world trade.

Although it contributes to trade, the fact that most countries maintain a Ministry of Culture separate from their Trade Ministry suggests that culture is not a simple product. Culture follows many wandering paths to form and meaning. It has a spiritual quality and people's senses of self and belonging are often caught up in it.

A defining characteristic of contemporary societies living with the effects of globalization is cultural pluralism. Through the migration of peoples and the penetration of electronic communications, virtually every group of people marked by some form of culturally distinctive expression has been touched, and to a degree transformed, by ideas from the "outside world."

Though I have used the term cultural pluralism, I could have said cultural diversity. Here I want to establish another definition.

An excellent recent study by the UK Commission for UNESCO pointed out that the term "cultural diversity" is commonly used in two contradictory ways.

On one hand, it is used in a static sense: to describe the attempt - the useless and counter-productive attempt in my view - to isolate individual national cultures from foreign influence.

On the other hand, it is used in a dynamic sense, accepting as a given that people and ideas move about as never before, that an individual accumulates influences and makes choices in a lifetime, and that the population of a country will have heterogeneous cultural characteristics, all of which can contribute to the overall national identity and be a significant source of innovation and creativity.

I am interested in this second, dynamic sense of the term, and want to look at what it implies. To avoid confusion, I shall refer to cultural diversity in this dynamic sense as cultural pluralism.

The value of cultural pluralism lies precisely in its dynamism, in the alchemy of expression when solitudes come together, individual contacts bear fruit, and literary and artistic forms are transmuted.

Hybridization produces both variety and vitality. I could cite two millennia of examples, from the Hellenistic Buddhist sculptures of Bamian to the influence of Japanese art in the work of the Impressionists and of African art in the paintings of Picasso.

I am even prepared to advance the radical hypothesis that without the stimulus of the American empire on its doorstep, Canada would have remained a duller, and less innovative society.

The range and variety of cultural and artistic experience open to the ordinary individual today is breath-taking, and the growth of tourism and of artistic collaboration and exchange suggests that this openness is a welcome and stimulating phenomenon for many.

In thinking about cultural pluralism and how it is playing out, particularly in Canada, I want to look at it from three aspects: from a historical perspective, from a policy perspective and from a creative perspective.

First, from an historical perspective, it is important to keep in mind that globalization has been developing for a long time. Trade, travel and technology have always been cross-fertilizers of cultures and the arts, but in the last three or four centuries, with the growth of capitalism, cultural cross-fertilization has increased exponentially.

One overwhelmingly positive consequence of this cross-fertilization has been an increasing willingness in the contemporary west to look at all the peoples of the world as linked populations, to take an inclusive view of humanity.

This inclusivity has come from an expanding intellectual life and an expanding cultural and historical knowledge of the world. It is what Nobel Prize winner V. S. Naipaul describes as "the extraordinary attempt of [contemporary western] civilization to accommodate the rest of the world, and all the currents of that world's thought." ¹

Contemporary globalization and cultural pluralism are part of this historical continuum.

My second point is that from a policy perspective, cultural pluralism can be managed so as to enrich society.

As populations shift and economic forces centralize, governments increasingly recognize the importance of developing effective international measures and crafting appropriate internal policies (including deterrents to anti-competition practices) to maximize the benefits and minimize the disadvantages of this movement.

Canada's Minister of Finance, Paul Martin, put it in a nutshell in a speech to the G20 last fall, "globalization is what we make of it.... Fundamentally, the answer lies in how we choose to govern ourselves as an international community."

Canada has much to contribute to any policy discussion. Combining a fundamental dynamism with certain geographic and historical advantages and a pervasive regard for the collective good, we have become what the Aga Khan described in a visit to Ottawa last month as "the most successful pluralist society on the face of our globe."

Long before globalization was identified as a force, Canada was grappling with the twin issues of cultural policy that now, in some form, occupy most countries.

One issue was how to forge a cultural identity in a highly pluralistic society characterized by two founding peoples, an increasingly articulate Aboriginal population and large and influential immigrant populations.

The other was how to preserve a distinctive Canadian cultural presence in the face of overwhelming influence from the mass commercial culture of the U.S.A.

Today there is a widespread fear of America's ability to redefine politics, religion, economics and entertainment and to create a radically new global information market through her commercial strength, convergence capacity and command of new technologies. Have we faced any similar situation before?

Yes, radio. When it was introduced in 1922, private U.S. radio stations appropriated every clear channel on the band, blocking out the weaker Canadian stations. NBC and CBS were organizing to control every link in the chain, from the manufacture of radio sets to the ad agencies that made commercials.

From across Canada, from political and religious leaders and a mass of organizations ranging from the YMCA to the United Farm Women of Alberta, there came an upswell of demand for a national broadcasting policy. In 1932 the Conservative prime minister, R. B. Bennett, introduced the Canadian Radio Broadcasting Act with the words: "No other scheme than that of public ownership can ensure to the people of this country, without regard to class or place, equal enjoyment of the benefits and pleasures of broadcasting." ²

Over the intervening 70 years, the government has stepped in again and again to set cultural policy. In mid-century, Vincent Massey and Georges-Henri Lévesque headed a massive Royal Commission on National Development in the Arts, Letters & Sciences that underscored the primary need for a national council of arts and letters. The result, over time, has been an enviable network of public agencies, including the Canada Council for the Arts, that foster Canadian cultural expression. Despite occasional controversies, this support all falls acceptably within the terms of the North American Free Trade Agreement.

The proof of the pudding is in the eating.

Despite gloomy predictions, free trade has not hindered the growth of Canada's cultural industries: they have been penetrating foreign markets as never before. In the last half of the 1990s, the number of Canadian-controlled film distribution companies increased by a third. Sales by these firms doubled, and exports tripled. Export and foreign sales by book publishers rose by 20 per cent. The Frankfurt Book Fair has become a major market for Canadian literature. Canada has become the world's second-largest exporter of television productions. ³

Public support of the arts has also produced a remarkable number of outstanding artists. In the past two years, for example, Canadian artists have won a large number of major international prizes.

Inuit filmmaker Zacharias Kunuk won the Caméra d'or for Best First Feature at the Cannes Film Festival. Novelist Margaret Atwood won the UK's Booker Prize. A Nova Scotian novelist, Alistair MacLeod, won the Dublin IMPAC Award. Michael Ondaatje won both France's Prix médicis étranger and the Irish Times Literary Prize for Anil's Ghost.

Two more novels, by Ann-Marie Macdonald and Rohinton Mistry (an Indian-born writer who has been twice a Booker nominee), were made Ophra Winfrey Book Club selections in the USA, a recognition that ensures massive popular sales. This past January, Montreal poet Anne Carson became the first woman to win the UK's T. S. Eliot Prize. (She had previously won the Lannan Literary Award for Poetry in the United States.)

In visual art, Albertans Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller won the Special Jury Prize at the Venice Biennale. In music, British Columbia jazz singer Diana Krall won a Grammy Award for Best Jazz Vocal Performance. Isabel Bayrakdarian won first prize in Operalia, an international competition for singers under 30 founded by Placido Domingo. UNESCO recognized Oscar Peterson with the International Council of Music/UNESCO Music Prize. Just a month ago, violinist James Ehnes was named Young Artist of the Year at the MIDEM music conference in France.

And that's just the tip of the iceberg.

In light of these remarkable successes, I am prepared to go out on a limb and predict a continued increase in public funding for the arts.

The third point I want to make this evening - and I have begun to make it already, because it is certainly a factor in the successes I have mentioned - is that cultural pluralism is a spur to the production of new, challenging and engaging work in the arts.

No one with a knowledge of art history can doubt that exciting things happen when one set of artistic traditions and practices washes up against another.

Let's explore briefly how it happened for Zacharias Kunuk in a tiny village in the High Arctic. In 1966, when he was nine years old, Zacharias paid 25 cents to watch some 16 mm. films at a children's matinée in the local school building. Seeing the films, he was seized by the creative ferment that fresh experience stimulates. The possibilities of photography took hold of his imagination. In 1982, he took all his savings from soapstone carving and bought a hand-held video camera. Last year, Atanarjuat, his first feature film, the first film, in fact, to be made in the Inuktitut language, won, as I mentioned, the Caméra d'or at Cannes.

This is cultural pluralism, functioning at its best. What characteristics do we observe in it?

We see a talented and committed individual artist seeking fresh possibilities. Two years after he bought his first hand-held video camera, Zacharias became a senior producer for the Inuit Broadcasting Corporation.

We see a readiness to capitalize on accidental elements. A chance visit to Igloolik by New York video maker Norm Cohn led to a lasting artistic partnership. Igloolik Isuma Productions, co-founded by Zacharias Kunuk, Norm Cohn and Paul Qulitalik in 1990, was Canada's first Inuit-owned independent production company.

We see an undertaking that receives official support through enlightened policy. A solid commitment by the Canadian government to arm's-length funding of innovative work over a 15 year period made the development of Inuit-made video and the filming of Atanarjuat financially possible.

We see the outcome attracting wide public recognition. In 1994, Zacharias Kunuk and Norm Cohn jointly won the Bell Canada Award in Video Art for Nunavut, their series of 13 half-hour television programs. Atanarjuat, in addition to its wins at Cannes and at the Montreal International Film Festival [CHECK], is now Canada's entry in the international category of this year's Academy Awards.

Paradoxically, we see the old culture being strengthened as new elements are introduced. As Zacharias explains of his documentary video work: "If a word exists, there's got to be a bone to it. We're recording on video the real meaning of our language.... With the help of the Canada Council, we have put the culture of Igloolik into the heart of Nunavut."

In his controversial, best-selling book, Empire, the Italian writer and political activist, Antonio Negri, made some acute observations about the characteristics of the new global order. Although they have important implications at many different levels, I mention them here because of their special pertinence to our understanding of how cultural pluralism functions in the arts.

This new order, Negri says, is deterritorialized, not functioning on the basis of fixed place. It is mobile and flexible, managing differences and often incorporating them. It evolves new forms of cooperation and sharing, for example, of communications networks. It tends, in the name of science, innovation, technological progress and tolerance, to break down traditional barriers.

Artists instinctively understand this new order that Negri describes. They are far advanced in deterritorialization, mobility, flexibility, shared communication and impatience with old barriers. They are comfortable with the inclusivity of a global network.

The appetite of Canadian artists for international performance, exhibition and collaboration is insatiable. The Canada Council and the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade are receiving a growing stream of requests for assistance with international tours, co-productions and performances at international festivals and exhibitions.

The Council has responded by launching international co-production programmes in dance and theatre and creating an audience and market development office to support the cultivation of foreign audiences. A partnership between the Canada Council and DFAIT to promote Canadian literature abroad funded 86 translations in fiscal year 2000-2001 alone.

In the mobile and flexible discipline of music, new genres and sounds continue to multiply.

Musique actuelle, for example, originated in Quebec. This is music with a progressive, experimental edge. Many of its musicians are heavily into technology (electro-acoustic music is now 20 years old) and younger artists are experimenting with techno-minimalism, transforming works through digital layering into ambient pieces that last 60-70 minutes. This kind of music has frequent crossover with media arts.

Montreal's world music bands provide striking examples of cultural pluralism. Zekuhl, for example, produces a sound that transcends geography. Jean-Emmanuel Njock, the singer and group leader, spent most of his youth in the Cameroons. The percussionist, Miguel Zamarripa, is of Mexican parentage. A third group member, Rodrigo Bustamante, was born in Chile. The bassist, Jean-François Valade and the drummer, Justin Allard, are Quebec born and raised. This is true fusion music.

Artists are cooperating and sharing to create new relationships. They are exploring the possibilities of shared authorship and collective creation with specific communities (geographical, ethnic or occupational) in the conception and production of new work.

Canada is the most wired country in the world, and arts organizations are rapidly exploring the possibilities of web dissemination. There is also a general trend of convergence toward interaction with new media and digital creation as a creative resource.

Impatience with barriers is nothing new in the arts. Three years ago, the Council established an InterArts Office to work with the increasing number of artists whose work does not fit into one traditional medium. The science/art barrier has been breached by artists such as David Rokeby, whose Very Nervous Language has been applied, not only in media art installations around the globe, but in medical rehabilitation for quadriplegics. Just this past year, the Council established two new senior arts fellowships in partnership with science labs belonging to the National Research Council.

I have a great many more examples that I hope you will ask me about, but first, in conclusion of this talk, I want to come around again to my main theme of The Power of Culture, and hand the last word to the architect of one of the great buildings of the 20th century, Douglas Cardinal.

Of Aboriginal and Métis ancestry, Douglas Cardinal followed the spiritual practices of his people and consulted with elders in arriving at the concept for the Canadian Museum of Civilization, a spectacularly moulded building embracing a low bank of the Ottawa River. At the same time, he exploited every resource of computer-assisted design, in which his firm is a world leader. Last spring, he was an honoured recipient of one of the seven annual Governor General's Awards in Visual and Media Arts.

Because of his deep respect for spiritual and religious practices, his understanding of cutting-edge technology and his experience with the international business world, I think that he can cast important light on the power of culture in contemporary society. These are his words:

"Chaos and creativity are part of existence. Our power lies in how we see chaos.... We do not view chaos as out of place; its presence is in the natural order of things. We see chaos as an opportunity. We deal with the unexpected as an ally, not an enemy.... We encourage each individual to realize his potential."

I spoke earlier of the dynamism that infuses cultural pluralism in contemporary society. We see it in operation here, in the seizing of opportunity, as an artist embraces chaos and finds creative strength.

Of course, as the world evolves, and the chaos of contemporary life brings forth new opportunities, some arts and techniques will be lost. We see the stress of adapting to modern audience and market demands in forms as various as basketry and symphony orchestras.

But as we watch this often-painful process we must keep in mind that the value of the arts lies not in preserving forms that have lost their meaning, but in enabling vital artistic expression of our spiritual lives, while respecting the cultural roots from which it springs.

The power of culture lies ultimately in its spiritual honesty and depth, because by expressing and communicating the full contemporary manifestation of the human spirit, it gives impetus and form to our everyday lives.

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^1. V. S. Naipaul, "Our Universal Civilization," The Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, The 1990 Wriston Lecture.

^2. Source: article by Mark Starowicz (circulated by Claude Schryer, don't know from where)

^3. Source: Paul Stothart, "A Culture Strong and Free," Ottawa Citizen, 5 February 2000, p. A13.