How Canada Reads makes class invisible

There’s so many Canadian books I’ve read that deal with class. It’s something that’s shocked me, because for most of my life, class in popular politics hasn’t been brought up much in a meaningful way¹ (though this has begun to change in the past five years or so).

It’s a problem that’s always fascinated me: how and why is culture better at taking up structural political questions — like those of class — than formal political discussions? And why don’t we see these cultural discussions making more of an impact on popular political conversation?

These questions drove the research for my MA thesis. In said thesis, I close-read three Canadian novels for how they talked about class, and then looked to how the books were talked about on Canada Reads, a radio program that’s a sort of “Survivor” for Canadian books (a little hokey, I know, but deeply influential in terms of what books become popular and sell; see the “Canada Reads effect”). What I wanted to see was how Canada Reads — a government-funded program — treated these class readings. Did these readings come through clearly on the program? Did they intentionally downplay readings that didn’t fit with their own narrative of supporting the “middle class?” 

Class? No thanks!

The answer, unfortunately, is the latter. Two of the books I read — Small Game Hunting at the Local Coward Gun Club by Megan Gail Coles and Birdie by Tracey Lindberg — unsparingly depicted the violence those in the margins of capitalist society face, and a key component that helped the books achieve this was their style. Both of the books were criticized on the program for being “inaccessible,” “too much” for the “average Canadian” to sit down and enjoy.

The third book I read — Fifteen Dogs by André Alexis — was more attached to mainstream Canadian understandings of class and power, even if it had moments where you could see those narratives fall apart. Fifteen Dogs was the only book I studied to have won its season of Canada Reads, being praised for its “beautiful prose” and how it addressed the “human condition.”

All in all, Canada Reads didn’t do a good job letting antagonistic class messages, or any structural political discussion, come into discussion. If anything, it obscured them! And this obfuscation, I argue, is intentional: it serves the interests of the Canadian state, which is deeply invested in perpetuating itself. 

Reading together otherwise

So what then? What are readers supposed to do? For me, the answer isn’t “fix Canada Reads;” I think it’s beyond fixing, given the iron grip the Canadian government has on it. I’d rather support collective reading alternatives that allow for discussions about class and power to happen.

In my thesis, I looked at two existing models for inspiration: Get Into Reading (GIR) in the UK (now known as Shared Reading) and People & Stories / Gente y Cuentos (P&S/GyC) in the US. Both groups take reading into the community, facilitating reading groups for the marginalized outside of the places people usually associate with group reading, like book clubs or libraries. Their focus, instead of promoting Canadian nationalism through edutainment, is instead to increase literacy and access to literature in order to transform people’s lives.

I think this type of focus allows for freer discussion of all the parts of a piece of literature, including class. And it’s the type of focus that must drive Canadians to build new collective reading models that allow for the reading of class and the fuelling of class-conscious politics. 

1. Most discussions around class in Canada talk about helping the “middle class,” something so vaguely defined that it doesn’t really help anyone.