by KRISTIAN GRAVENOR

In spite of all the distractions these days, there's a chance that what you've really been wondering lately is: what's the best way to shape my eyebrows? That's the question of the month in Flare, a mag that's been getting a quarter-million a year from the Canada Magazine Fund, a $35-million gift that goes out each year to a variety of publications thanks to Sheila Copps' Heritage Ministry.

And next time you're flipping through Canadian Pizza Magazine, you might want to say a little thanks to the Liberal government for allowing us to learn about "pepperoni and what makes up pepperoni from a point of view of the content of the sausage," according to editor Drew McCarthy. They've got "a couple of interviews with pepperoni manufacturers in Montreal, which is an important place for pepperoni." The Delhi, Ontario-based magazine scores a nice little $20,000 year from the fund.

The process of putting our fifth estate on corporate welfare started in 2000, when the World Trade Organization ordered us to end the ban on split-run publications, which is the name for a foreign magazine that steals Canadian advertisers after putting in a few stories about Canada.

The government has managed to give away $35-mil, on top of the 90 per cent discount on postal deliveries the ministry already subsidizes under the Publishers Assistance Program.

Anyway, the scary split-run magazines that were going to wreck our country are here. Magazines like Maxim and People are putting out Canadian editions, but only one or two ads are from Canada.

The hard-hitting, high-principled, investigative journalists of this country have no price. There's no way that our fifth estate would take payoffs from the government that they're constantly monitoring for corruption and malfeasance, right? Sorry, but Alberta Report, now called Citizens' Centre Report, a rabidly anti-socialist mag, is on the tit. Maclean's, that perennial favourite of the dentist's office, gets a sporty $1.3-million a year because, "It's being made available to us, we're using it," says Suneel Khanna, the magazine's manager of public relations (yep, they got one of those). "Maclean's is a magazine that's about giving the Canadian perspective. The fund is about having more resources, it lets you do more things." What the hell is the "Canadian perspective?"

The Maclean's thingamajig guy - like several other magazine types I interviewed - deny they're beholden to the Liberals or Sheila Copps, who could single-handedly unharness their feedbag at any whim. To test this purportedly widespread indifference to Ms. Copps' influence, I called fund recipient Canadian Hairdresser to see if they'd give me an honest opinion on Sheila's hair-helmet 'do, but couldn't get through.

If the program is meant to protect Canadian publications from American predators, then French mags should not qualify for the cash. That's what Bill Shields, editor of Masthead magazine points out. "How likely is it that a foreign publisher is going to launch a French language magazine?" But the cash is spread out to magazines like L'Actualité, which once had its funding axed temporarily because it didn't seem magaziney enough.

As a petty bourgeois egalitarian, I distrust and despise government meddling into such a sacred thing as freedom of the press, although other lefties that I spoke to, like Julie Crysler, who edits This magazine, seem quite at home with it. But she grumbles, quite reasonably, that the application that netted her mag a few thou took "six months and 50 pages, whereas Maclean's has only to fill out a two-page form."

But the future of the fund could be in peril. "Soon we'll enter into a review of the magazine fund to examine what its impact has been," fund rep Scott Shortliffe reports ominously.

I often daydream about somebody discreetly handing me a sack full of cash to persuade me to sell the world on their point of view. It hasn't happened to me, but it seems to have happened to almost every magazine across our country. :

Comments? kgravy@openface.ca