The Handover: How Bigwigs and Bureaucrats Transferred Canada’s Best Publisher and the Best Part of our Literary Heritage to a Foreign Multinational

Dewar, who won a Canadian Writers’ Trust Award for The Second Tree and many other journalism awards throughout her career, meticulously investigates the untoward nature of the sale of Canadian publishing house McClelland & Stewart to German-owned multinational Bertelsmann. More broadly, she insightfully examines the corporate undermining of Canadian cultural institutions for profit, and the resulting damage to Canadian culture. Focused primarily on the Canadian publishing industry (both media entities and publishers), Dewar’s exhaustive research and extensive annotation lay out her case for how successive Canadian governments and private interests have loosened and ultimately ignored long-held nationalist laws meant to safeguard Canadian creative and cultural institutions from foreign ownership. In so doing, Dewar also creates a legislative snapshot of the last half-century of Canada’s cultural landscape. She rightly describes her work as “inside baseball,” but it expands outward into Canada’s “evolving idea of nationhood” and “questions of identity.” Canada defines itself through its cultural institutions and output, and in light of that, this book is a damning indictment of a nation’s failure to safeguard its cultural currency in favor of colder, harder cash. Agent: Sam Hiyate, Rights Factory. (July)