Canada’s PLR Program: The Untold Story
by Andreas Schroeder
(A condensed version of the speech given by
Andreas Schroeder, founding chair of the PLR Commission, at The Writer’s Union of Canada’s Annual General Meeting, May 26th, 2011, in recognition of the 25th anniversary of the PLR program.)
PLR in Canada was initially proposed in 1949 by the Canadian Authors Association, but the times back then weren’t propitious for a program of this kind. For me, the quest for PLR began in the fall of 1972, when I was a member of the League of Canadian Poets. On the day in question, the League was holding its 6th annual general meeting in Regina’s Hotel Saskatchewan.
The meeting, an unmitigated disaster, had been scheduled right into the middle of the Canada-Russia Summit Series and nobody was showing up for the meetings. The morning after Game #5 (which Canada lost) everyone was feeling badly, including Margaret Atwood. She said that the meetings had made her seriously doubt that the League had the ability or even the motivation to really take on the politicians and bureaucrats in Ottawa. There were big problems looming for Canada’s literary industry: the Americans were taking over our publishing houses, they were dumping American editions of Canadian books into Canada in direct competition with our own editions, and Canadian universities were ignoring Canadian literature in favour of British and American books. What we really needed was a writers’ union with enough clout to cause some serious shit-disturbing in Ottawa. In fact, she said, a small group of Toronto writers had been getting together on Marian Engel’s front porch with plans to start up just such a Union. Was I interested in getting involved?
I was, and I did. One of the first discussions I attended on Marian’s porch was about PLR. While we all supported Canada’s public library system, we couldn’t see why writers should be the only people giving up part of our income to finance it.
We founded The Writer’s Union of Canada 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. 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 at the Toronto Public Library in hopes of getting a more productive conversation going.
But the concept of a “free” library system is, and remains, a deeply entrenched ideology in Canada’s library world, and most librarians didn’t want to touch the topic of PLR. Finally, at a meeting of provincial librarians held at the Toronto Reference Library, Marian blew a gasket and accused Canada’s librarians of “ripping off Canada’s writers” by lending out their books for free, thereby undermining their book sales.
This caused such a ruckus, Marian joked she hadn’t been entirely sure 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.
Tragically, Marian was struggling with a slow-growing form of leukemia, and at this worst possible moment, it began to flare up. She asked me to take over the fight for PLR and to keep the momentum going.
So I agreed. If I’d known it was going to take another decade to achieve PLR, and then another one to get the program properly entrenched, would I have agreed to it? God knows. But it wasn’t long before I could readily understand Marian’s frustrations. It was already 1975, there were PLR programs flourishing all over Europe, but not in North America.
Every time we went to Ottawa to raise the issue, we were told: don’t even think about it until the whole book industry’s onboard – writers, librarians, publishers, translators, illustrators -- and make sure it’s everyone in both languages too. So we did, and for the next two years I met with every politician and bureaucrat within ten miles of Ottawa who was willing to talk about PLR. We sent out truckloads of letters, made hundreds of phone calls, put the topic on the agenda of every academic, literary, business, and political conference we could, made school visits, addressed teachers’ conventions, made presentations at book fairs and festivals, got journalists who were TWUC members to write sympathetic articles in every major newspaper in the country, got sympathetic librarians to distribute PLR-promoting bookmarks, we got the CBC to host phone-in shows, got several interviews with Peter Gzowski, had our MLA’s raise the issue in the house, had our most famous writers visit everyone from the Secretary of State John Roberts right up to Pierre Trudeau himself. In 1984, when Eugene Benson was chair of the Writer’s Union, we staged the “Great PLR March” on Parliament Hill, chanting and waving placards, over a hundred of us, the sight sufficiently terrifying that we soon acquired an escort of two police cruisers. It was pissing with rain, which made us look rather more forlorn than militant, and our subsequent meeting with the Minister of Communications, Francis Fox, was similarly discouraging.
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 did.
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.
By 1985 we’d been banging away at PLR for over a dozen years, and I have to admit, there were mornings when I got up and thought: this is the biggest waste of time since Sisyphus started rolling rocks.
And then, it happened. It happened so abruptly, so out of the clear blue sky, there are still days when it feels more like a fairytale than Canadian history.
In September of 1984 Brian Mulroney’s Conservatives 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. 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 began to circulate that Mulroney might actually pull him off his portfolio for the length of the negotiations.
By the spring of 1985, when Matt Cohen, Chair of TWUC, and I met Masse, he seemed to have considered his ouster inevitable, but he couldn’t resist at least a few more last-minute acts of cultural subversion – and PLR was going to be one of them.
We met him in a small restaurant off Bloor Street. What he wanted to know now, and in much greater detail, was exactly how we proposed to run such a system in Canada. I described our plan in detail from first to last. He listened carefully, and asked how much the scheme would cost.
We gave him three numbers. We could do a bare-bones, stripped-down version for about 2 million. For a plan paying a slightly higher fee for just literary works, including fiction, nonfiction, poetry and drama, we’d need 3 million. For total coverage of every book published in Canada, no exceptions, we’d need 4.25 million.
Masse looked at his assistants and said: “Well gentlemen, I think we can manage 3 million, don’t you?”
His assistants shook their heads vigorously. They protested that Treasury Board would have a fit over an amount that big, and that there would be insufficient support for PLR to make it viable. Masse waved all such objections away.
On September 24th, 1985, in Halifax, Marcel Masse announced the federal government’s commitment to pay for a PLR program. By the spring of ’86 he’d secured Treasury Board agreement for it, and by that fall, 3 million dollars had been officially earmarked for the program.
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 there was no time for that. So the program 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 its budget year.
We chose the Canada Council, since it already had a similar arrangement with UNESCO, and since it had helped us with the PLR campaign back in the mid-70’s by funding a committee (“Payment For Public Use” Committee) to research and design a prototype for a made-in-Canada PLR program.
The biggest challenge of Masse’s announcement, however, had to do with timing. By this time it was September 1986, less than 4 months before Christmas, and Masse had made it very clear that his promise of the money was only valid until the end of the year. If we didn’t have a fully-fledged, totally operational PLR program in place by December 31, and the cheques mailed out by the end of the fiscal year (March ’87), our first year’s 3 million dollars was toast. It was a take-it-or-leave-it proposition.
In practical terms, this meant that 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; find, 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 their cheques – and do it all by the end of March, or 13 years of Union effort would have been wasted.
So we hit the deck running. In two weeks we pulled 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. We used their Human Resources department 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 very reasonable.
We were able to use most of the PLR plan we’d designed in the Council’s PPU Committee, and by late December, the program was definitely “up and running” as Masse had required it to be. To keep the momentum going, many of us worked right through the Christmas holidays, and by mid-March, two weeks before D-Day, we were ready to print the cheques.
Unfortunately, Masse’s defence of Canadian culture at the free trade negotiations had resulted in his ouster from the Communications portfolio, but happily for us, his replacement, Flora MacDonald, proved every bit as enthusiastic, supportive and helpful. When I phoned her to tell her we were ready to print the cheques, she suggested we make it a celebration. So we gussied up our digs at the Canada Council and called in the press, she came over with her entourage, and on March 17, 1987, with cameras clicking and flashbulbs popping, she 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.
So that’s the story of Canada’s PLR saga, or at least the 13 years it took us to achieve it. I think we can be quite pleased with what we’ve achieved. Writers – in fact artists generally – produce the highest level of cultural expression, yet generally get paid at the lowest level of the food chain. We created PLR to address that issue, at least in part.
But it’s not just the creation of PLR that we can legitimately be pleased about. Something else was achieved here too.
Canada’s PLR program is arguably the leanest, most economically run program of its kind in Canada, with over 92% of its budget paid out to Canada’s writers each year. There are similar programs serving only half as many writers as PLR and yet their staffs have mushroomed to over 50 employees; compare that with the PLR program, which started out in 1986 with 4 employees, and today still operates with exactly that same number: 4 employees. Canada’s PLR program has never spent a nickel of its clients’ money on anything but the 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.
That said, PLR in Canada still faces serious ongoing challenges. One important challenge is maintaining its independence. Both the program’s creation and its thrift are the direct result of its governing structure, which is writer-controlled and writer-operated. Any change in that status might well endanger its legendary efficiency and thrift.
The other challenge, as everyone knows, is program growth. Canada’s PLR started out in 1986 serving 5,000 authors; today it serves over 18,000, and that number keeps growing by roughly 600 - 700 new authors every year. Canadian literature is drowning in its own success, and we’d be the first to applaud this achievement, but it does come at a cost. The PLR program desperately needs additional resources to keep up with both the national and international success of its writers.
Finally, I would like to acknowledge all those Writer’s Union members who, over the 38 years since we started this ball rolling, have given of their time and energy to help make this dream a reality: Marian Engel, Margaret Laurence, Andreas Schroeder, 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, and Ken McGoogan.
I also want to take this opportunity to acknowledge and thank two intrepid PLR supporters who weren’t writers. They helped us fight for a program from which they would never earn a penny, and who, at the time, took a lot of flak from their colleagues for the sake of PLR. One was Katherine Benzekri, back then assistant Head of the Canada Council’s Writing & Publication section, and the other was Basil Stuart Stubbs, then Head of UBC’s School of Library, Archival & Information Studies. A special thanks to them from Canada’s writing community.
