Valenti, Jack

The devil behind the U.S. Film industry. Jack Valenti ordered Brian Mulroney to attend a meeting with him near the end of negotiatory process of the Canada/U.S. Free Trade Agreement to explain just exactly why Canada needed an independent culture. During the meeting, Valenti supposedly slapped Mulroney around the room until the awed P.M. began to weep, after which Valenti dictated the wording of the alleged cultural exemption that has put Canada’s cultural industries, along with much of its media and communications into harms way in the guise of foreign corporations–or incountry corporations like CanWest Global and Chapters/Indigo that are almost worse. .

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