It cost $2.8 million (the price of three primetime dramatic episodes or about seven one-hour documentaries or approximately one-sixteenth of the Cable Production Fund’s budget) and covers about 300 pages. The Juneau report is now available in black and white, but beneath a sea of well-researched documentation that has born some constructive recommendations for the future of the National Film Board, the cbc and Telefilm Canada, there are some decidedly fuzzy notions about Canadian culture.

Anybody might want to call out focus! when rifling through the pages and trying to nail down exactly what the mandate review committee intends as criteria to define something as crucial to the report’s thesis as ‘identifiably Canadian programming’.

If Paul Gross shares poutine instead of fries with costar David Marciano, does that mean Due South is identifiably Canadian?

Pierre Juneau hasn’t said he is interested in this sort of minutiae, but when he pronounces North of 60 a flag-waving patriot and says Due South isn’t, he is effectively dividing members of the production and broadcasting industries into the have’s and have-not’s.

Here, the have’s are the wealthy scions of international sales and the not-so-fortunate’s are the darlings and the inheritors of our own culture.

Where does that leave the overwhelmingly successful Love and Hate (made for cbc and subsequently sold to cbs) as opposed to the also victorious Million Dollar Babies (made by the same producer/writer team simultaneously for cbc and cbs). Is one worthy of Canadian taxpayers’ money but not the other?

Certainly, the debate has been raging for some time as to who needs government funding and who has outgrown it. Juneau’s report recommends Telefilm nurture small and medium-sized companies.

It’s an argument worth exploring. For example, should Atlantis get a wad from the shrinking kitty at Telefilm when it doesn’t even need a development department in Canada? Equally, should Canadian taxpayers help to line the pocketbooks of Alliance shareholders? Then again, if these two companies and their equivalents don’t have government incentives to produce the likes of North of 60 and Traders, who will bother?

To hop genres, most documentary filmmakers not only need the assistance of foreign presales to get their films made, but cash concerns aside, the editorial content is rarely made with a limited viewership in mind (aside from many nfb productions that have been criticized precisely for their limited scope and lack of ambition).

Does the Juneau committee mean to suggest the Canadian industry should ghettoize itself when it has neither the money nor the population to support itself?

Next on the list of questionables is the idea of taxing the cable companies and telephone companies (which would then be passed along to their subscribers) to support the cbc. Public outcry has already been piercing, and if this monthly charge gets added to the existing general tax, the Canadian people will, once again, make their views known.

Is the Juneau report worth the paper it is printed on (about $9,300 per page)? If it proves instrumental in guiding government policy, I’ll eat my Mountie hat topped with cheese curds and gravy.

If they have the answers needed to solve the quandaries of government cultural institutions, and have indeed found the Juneau report to be their guiding light in this matter, I’ll eat my Mountie hat. Topped with melted cheese curds and gravy.