Binding Ambitions

Back when Scott McIntyre entered Canadian publishing, the business still carried the aura of a gentleman’s profession. Deals were sealed with a handshake, followed by wine or martinis in a posh restaurant. Jack McClelland, one of the central figures in McIntyre’s revealing memoir, was at his height, publishing the writers who would constitute a national canon. Pierre Berton and Farley Mowat topped the non-fiction lists, while Margaret Laurence, Mordecai Richler, and Robertson Davies led in fiction — all under the McClelland & Stewart imprint. For many, this was the golden age of Canadian letters.

In June 1967, McIntyre left Vancouver for Toronto to join McClelland & Stewart’s trade advertising department at a salary of $7,000 a year. Toronto’s publishing world struck him as “somnolent”: most firms were little more than distributors for American and British houses. The only long-standing Canadian-owned publisher, Ryerson Press — founded in the 1820s and owned by the United Church of Canada — was struggling and was soon put up for sale.

When American-controlled McGraw-Hill of Canada moved to buy Ryerson, outrage erupted. Demonstrations filled Toronto streets; the novelist Graeme Gibson famously draped a United States flag over a statue of Egerton Ryerson downtown. Ottawa eventually intervened, allowing the sale but attaching commitments to Canadian publishing. This controversy helped lay the groundwork for the cultural policies of the 1970s, designed to protect domestic ownership in publishing, broadcasting, and the arts.

It was in this atmosphere that young entrepreneurs — including McIntyre — saw an opening. On the West Coast, James Bacque, Dave Godfrey, and Roy MacSkimming founded New Press, while the student-run Talon poetry magazine transformed itself into a press, where Karl Siegler would land in 1974. In Ontario, James Lorimer launched his imprint in a converted warehouse that also held the House of Anansi. Others, including Oberon Press and the Porcupine’s Quill, began building reputations. These formed the vanguard of a new, fearless publishing scene.

Two years into his Toronto job, McIntyre and his wife, Corky, returned west, where he connected with “one of the most experienced book men of his time,” Jim Douglas. At first, McIntyre’s work was limited: covering Douglas’s shop two afternoons a week and selling books on commission for $300 a month. Far from dull, the life of a sales rep was formative, he recalls, introducing him to passionate booksellers and instilling a deep knowledge of the trade.

McIntyre continued as a sales rep for seven years and gradually acquired 40 percent of both Douglas Agencies and J. J. Douglas, the nascent publishing company that Jim and Scott had launched in the fall of 1971. It became Douglas & McIntyre years later.

Without family wealth to draw on, the partners relied on ingenuity —“guile substituted for working capital,” as McIntyre puts it. D&M would focus on books grounded in West Coast culture, particularly Indigenous histories and art. Its first titles, a reissue of John T. Walbran’s classic British Columbia Coast Names and Norah Mannion Wilmot’s Cooking for One, were successes, the latter going through twenty printings.

By the late 1970s, McIntyre had become general manager, overseeing marketing, production, and editorial projects. In 1979, D&M published Doris Shadbolt’s The Art of Emily Carr, a lavish book that topped bestseller lists and became a milestone of Canadian visual culture. A year later, McIntyre became the majority shareholder, determined to make his Vancouver-based company competitive nationally.

In some respects, it was the best of times for independent Canadian publishers. Arts councils expanded funding, the Association of Canadian Publishers was founded, and Ottawa introduced the Canadian Book Publishing Development Program (now the Canada Book Fund). Since 1980, it has disbursed over $1 billion to Canadian-owned publishers — an essential lifeline for many.

But challenges mounted. The rise of global conglomerates — Penguin Random House, HarperCollins, Hachette, Simon & Schuster, and Macmillan — squeezed independents. Their market share shrank from 20 percent to about 5 percent. In the mid-1990s, Chapters and Indigo reshaped bookselling and drove many smaller bookstores out of business. Reviews began to disappear, while Canadian bestsellers were relegated to separate lists. Distribution was a chronic headache: D&M changed distributors five times as arrangements collapsed.

McIntyre staked everything — including his home — to keep his company afloat. Mergers with Patsy Aldana’s Groundwood Books, whose titles were racking up international and national awards, and Rob Sanders’s Greystone Books strengthened his list, which at its peak offered seventy titles a year, yielding revenues of $10 million. But in 2007, D&M was sold to private equity; it went into receivership in 2013 and was reorganized under new owners. Greystone re-emerged as an independent house, while Groundwood had found stability with the House of Anansi Press.

The breakup of Douglas & McIntyre is one of Canadian cultural history’s most sobering stories. “It doesn’t matter what you do in Canadian publishing. It is never quite good enough,” McIntyre recalls confessing to the publisher Anna Porter (now a board member of this magazine). She replied that Jack McClelland had said almost the same before selling McClelland & Stewart to Avie Bennett in 1986.

McIntyre had once approached David Kent, the CEO of HarperCollins Canada, who hinted that he was interested in absorbing D&M. Negotiations continued, but HarperCollins was a Rupert Murdoch subsidiary. Although Kent was passionate about Canadian books and realized the value of adding D&M’s inventory, clinching a deal faced numerous roadblocks. The most formidable was the Investment Canada Act, which blunted the possibility of a Canadian publisher being sold to an American corporation.

The act “had been put in place to protect the Canadian sovereignty of Canadian-owned publishing houses but had in turn hurt the ability of Canadian companies to raise the equity necessary for expansion,” McIntyre writes. “A double-edged sword. The grant programs of Heritage and the Canada Council were supposed to provide an alternative, but stumbling government action is no match for a restructuring economy.” Yet in 2000, Bennett arranged for Random House of Canada to acquire 25 percent of McClelland & Stewart, while he donated the remaining 75 percent to the University of Toronto. Bennett successfully bargained for a $16-million tax break; in 2011, Penguin Random House purchased the university’s majority stake for a dollar. The deal cleared the Investment Canada Act hurdles.

Much more could have been done to save the original Douglas & McIntyre. What was needed was a clear-headed federal strategy, rooted in a commitment to preserving cultural sovereignty. McIntyre’s A Precarious Enterprise reminds us that the survival of Canadian publishing is not simply a business concern but a national one — more central to our future than ever before.