Over the past few years there has been a lot of discussion about the animation bubble in Canada, and the booms and busts the industry seems to go through every 7 years or so. This last boom, it could be argued, lasted well over a decade. However , such growth is not without substantial risks. The industry has long argued that one reason why the local animation industry has lagged behind its counterparts across the globe is its inability to compete against low cost animation from Asia. The government, in a bid to address this disparity, has enacted a law requiring broadcasters in Canada to acquire 50 percent of their animation content from local animation studios.

The response appears to have been substantial. According to figures, the total animation content procured from local studios rose from $10 million in 2001 to $180 million in 2011, with no letup anticipated in the next decade. The software tools available today, mostly Flash, allow smaller companies to produce animation at a rate that was not conceivable even 15 years ago. Because of this major shift, entire productions, TV series, and features are being produced almost entirely in house using a crew that is almost entirely Canadian — a smart thing to do because it allows the broadcasters to take advantage of the lucrative Canadian and provincial tax credits available for just this kind of production. As promising as this is for local studios, this increased patronage poses dangers for them, too.

First, local studios risk expanding too fast and overextending themselves financially, since most are small concerns unlike their Asian counterparts. They often need to make substantial capital investment in building technology capability in order to handle the larger volume of work. If, thereafter, the content fails to work with the audience and further episodes get cancelled, such firms can face potentially crippling losses.

A second risk is that these studios will end up creating work that is too specific to local audiences. Given the increased dependency on local broadcasters, the studios run the risk of creating content tailor made for local audiences rather than remaining culture neutral. This substantially reduces the ability of their products to sell beyond local boundaries.

Third, a local studio that secures the contract from one large broadcaster often runs the danger of becoming — and remaining — dependent on that single broadcaster. Even in the best of circumstances, fierce competition from Asian studios makes it difficult for small studios to broaden their customer base internationally: When such firms have nearly guaranteed orders from a single local benefactor, complacency from their current success may arise.

     It is a counterintuitive but well-documented historical truth that the economies of the classical cultures typically seen as the progenitors of western liberalism and political freedom were all founded on the development and perpetuation of agrarian slavery. Because the cultures of antiquity are often associated with Periclean democracy and Roman republicanism—both oligarchical political systems at least nominally dedicated to principled and representative rule—students of history are often confused to learn that the populations of these societies contained large numbers of disenfranchised individuals who were often indentured to members of the middle and upper classes for a lifetime of brutal servitude.

     Many historians attribute this confusion to the triumphalist mythmaking of previous generations of scholars of classical history; indeed, most interpretations of classical literature and history have been distorted, but one would nonetheless expect modern revisionism and understanding of the concept of presentism to provide balance.

     Historians note that there is little discussion of slavery or its moral significance within classical sources, seemingly because individuals in the classical period saw it as both an economic necessity and inherent to the world's natural order. They cite the example of the writer Heraclitus (535 B.C.E.–475 B.C.E.), a pre-Socratic philosopher. Heraclitus is known as the “Weeping Philosopher,” and he was among the most incisive thinkers working in antiquity but, even so, the omnipresent institution of slavery struck him as an immutable element of human affairs; he wrote that “War is the father of all, the king of all … he turns some into slaves and sets others free,” implying that slavery is beyond the power of political determination—and beyond intellectual moralizing. Heraclitus is not alone in his failure to question the moral underpinnings of a slave society. Aristotle, too, suggested that the taking and keeping of slaves was a component of natural law, a fundamental consequence of military activity rather than a conscious policy that could be actively perpetuated or proscribed by the laws of man. In promoting this view, though, Aristotle demonstrates an unusual degree of circumspection, wondering whether the taking of slaves could be justified if the war in which they were acquired was itself “unjust.” The figures of early modernity saw themselves as heirs to the classical tradition and inherited the Greek and Roman attitudes toward slavery and citizenship as well as their commitments to democracy and rational inquiry, and modern historians have, in their studies of these times, endeavored to avoid the interpretive trap of imposing their modern ethics on the people of ancient times.