In some cynical circles, the kind of circles Raffi is impervious to, it might be de rigueur, even marketable, to dismiss the children’s songwriter and his anthemic ode to a sea creature as facile, and in post-toddler retrospect, downright sappy.

An episode of The Simpsons sums up the way the adult mind finds cold comfort in contempt for what was beloved in babyhood: Homer’s younger, smarter brother invents a machine that can read the mind of pre-verbal babies. The marketing potential is astronomical. Every mother wants and buys one. What stressed-out mom wouldn’t kill for a gizmo that could tell her what the hell the baby was crying about now? Ten-year-old Bart uses the machine to interpret the babble of his infant sister Maggie. Someone thinks the binky-sucking babe is trying to say something adorable and precious, like “I wuv you.” The show’s adult writers then have Bart wisecrack, after a glance at the machine: “Nah, what she said was, ‘Turn off that damn Raffi tape.’” Cue laugh track.

THERE’S NO DEFENSIVENESS in Raffi’s chortle as he merrily points out that The Simpsons also devoted an entire episode to a parody of him and his music. It’s not like he doesn’t have a sense of humour.

But spend a few minutes with the children’s troubadour and you’ll soon get the message that Raffi is utterly immune to any force, even an iconic TV show, that would negate the importance of his music to his constituency of the very young. And that, laughs aside, he’s deadly serious about what he sees as a pervasive assault on their tiny psyches, bodies, and souls by a consumer culture gone mad.

The marketing of a baby-mind-reading gadget as a cartoon plot twist takes on an eerie irony when held up against the real-life Raffi, with his steadfast devotion to child-honouring principles, including his abhorrence of a tot-targeted consumerism he calls a “hostile takeover of childhood”.

Decades of Raffi’s personal commitment and self-study of everything from early childhood education to ecology, socially responsible commerce, and the inherent evil of marketing directly to children came to a head with one recent galvanizing event.

Hollywood came calling with a whale of an offer.

The producers of movie blockbusters Shrek and Shrek 2 called Raffi’s company, Troubadour Music, to talk about making Baby Beluga into an animated film. Raffi’s partner at Troubadour, Bert Simpson (the irony abounds), took the call.

As Raffi recalls, “Bert called me. We were both entirely flattered and kind of tingling, you know, before the fairly quick realization that this was likely not going to go anywhere, given our principles.” His eyes blink with peaceful detachment.

Say again?

HELLO Raffi? We’re talking H-O-L-L-Y-W-O-O-D here. You know, where Jed Clampett went to live when he struck the bubblin’ crude. Swimmin’ pools… mooovie stahs.

Yeah, he knows it could have been a big deal and he’s used to encountering looks of exasperation. He’s had years of practice watching befuddlement on the faces of potential business partners, people who think he should be on his knees, thanking them for the offer: well-meaning business people, not crooks and schemers, just folks who don’t run their every move through an ethical sieve, like krill through a whale’s baleen, as he does.

Although it might have been the most intoxicating, it was hardly the first tempting offer that Raffi and Troubadour have politely, but firmly, declined in almost 30 years of being in business. Since before the height of Baby Beluga ’s popularity in the ’80s, Troubadour’s guiding principle was respect for the child as a whole person, as opposed to a sales target. “Back then, I turned down a number of offers for commercial endorsements of products, from soup to fast foods to diapers,” Raffi says. “I just kept saying, ‘Well, that’s not what the work’s about. Why would I do that?’”

AFTER THE RECENT COLD CALL from Hollywood, six months of not quite negotiations but, at least, investigations into the potential of a Baby Beluga film deal went back and forth between the Los Angeles offices of Dreamworks’ cartoon arm, Vanguard Animation, Troubadour’s Toronto office, and Raffi’s home on Mayne Island.

It finally collapsed over Troubadour’s unblinking refusal to allow direct-to-child advertising of the film, although Raffi’s other conditions, including insistence on plot-approval rights and the nixing of spinoff products of the “tiny toy belugas with every burger meal” type, had slowly but inexorably made the deal increasingly unpalatable to the once-hungry Hollywood honchos.

“They’d never heard anyone say this to them,” Raffi muses.

He’s never lost a night’s sleep over his decision to walk away, nor was he surprised that a major Hollywood film company would want to make his 25-year-old children’s song into a motion picture, or at least a direct-to-DVD mass-marketing sensation. It never occurred to him to ask: Why Baby Beluga ? “Like, duh,” he says, with a grin.

Raffi’s philosophical demeanour about the deal’s bellyflop belies the fact that it made a big impact on him and his fellow founders of Troubadour Music. The idea of a Baby Beluga film, coming as it did on the 25th anniversary of the song, was more than mere coincidence, Raffi felt intuitively. “In a way, we figured it was the universe calling us with the opportunity.”

So at the next meeting of the Social Ventures Institute, a network of socially responsible businesses and innovative non-profit organizations, of which Troubadour is a member, Raffi decided to canvass the universe, or at least an ethical corner of it.

“They have this great thing at SVI; it’s a two-minute idea market, so I got up, I had two minutes, and I said, ‘Is there any such thing as an ethically marketed family film?’ I told them about the offer we’d just turned down, and the opportunity, and I said, ‘I’d love to talk to more of you.’ I got a number of people afterward saying, ‘Yeah, that really made me think, and here are a couple of thoughts and people you could call.’”

I ask him if he’s formally putting out a call for proposals. He laughs and says, “Sure,” then leans into my microphone, and with his best radio-announcer voice, booms, “I’M PUTTING OUT A CALL FOR PROPOSALS.” More laughter.

His insouciance about how or if this deal comes together is underpinned with a determination not to let the story of how he walked away from Hollywood steal the stage from the issues behind his decision. “In fact, sometimes it’s by saying no to something because you have said yes to a principle that you have the opportunity to spread the importance of the principle.”

STILL, BACK IN THE MID ’90S, Raffi got tired of saying no to distributors and advertisers. To counter a perception of Troubadour’s position as negative to business ideas, he says, “We decided to formulate a plan of what we’re for because what we’re for is what every family would want. The way they would want their children treated.”

That plan galvanized a few years later, on New Year’s Eve of 1998, when Raffi was staying at the Jefferson campus of the University of West Virginia and got the idea to pen a Covenant for Children. “Just before retiring for the night, I pulled out from a bookcase the Declaration of Independence, and I was looking at it. I was looking for a mention of children. Of course, you can’t find any children in that 200-year-old writing, so I thought, ‘What would a similar piece have to say about children?’”

Raffi’s Covenant is a poetic statement setting forth the principles of honouring children and affirming their human rights along with the responsibilities of adults to protect their fragile social, spiritual, and physical ecology.

It has touched a chord with child-advocacy and environmental groups around the world and forms the basis for his upcoming book, an anthology of essays by some of the planet’s leading thinkers and advocates for children and the environment from the fields of religion, psychology, eco-commerce, arts, education, and politics. They include filmmaker Joel Bakan, who wrote The Corporation, child-development guru Penelope Leach, and theologian Matthew Fox. The book, which Raffi co-edited with psychologist Sharna Olfman, is titled: Child Honouring: How to Turn This World Around, and is due to be released in May by Praeger. Raffi is quick to lavish praise on the publisher for agreeing to print it on chlorine-free paper. Getting publishers to care about chlorine in paper is a hard sell, so Raffi makes it personal.

A beautiful photo of a baby on the cover of a back issue of Shared Vision sits between us. He points to it, urgently. “The cost of inaction on behalf of the young child who’s the most vulnerable person to these toxic habits of ours is, I think, inestimable. We know that if paper was bleached without chlorine it would be one way we could take the deadly dioxin out of our air, water, soil, our flesh, our blood, and women’s breast milk. It’s a great opportunity to say to people, ‘For the love of the young child, there’s another way we can do this.’ And I live for that. I love it. For that little one, my boss, who is society’s MVP—the most valuable player and the most vulnerable player.”

RAFFI HAS A MESSAGE for the cellphone companies, too. He recently fired off a letter to a CEO whose company is marketing cellphones to children eight to 12 years old, outlining his two main objections. First, “If you’re going to have a product for children, don’t advertise it to those who are too young to assess the pitch. That’s unethical. Second, I object to the kids’ cellphones being marketed as a ‘safety tool’. I mean, it’s fear being used to sell a product to families that don’t need to spend more money on gadgets. Can you imagine an eight-year-old with a cellphone at school, playing soccer, and losing it? The well-being of children is a concern, but marketing an electronic leash for children technologizes and trivializes the solution, and I think it’s ridiculous.”

He’s also on a campaign to “de-screen” the early years of children, from DVD players in the backseat of the minivan to the use of TV and computer screens as electronic babysitters. “You can’t go anywhere without a screen. That’s an assault of sorts on a young child’s life. A young child has a developmental need to be in the three-dimensional world. Not 10 inches away from the flat electronic world, for hours on end. That’s a serious offence against the child, and growing numbers of parents don’t know that. And the culture, of course, keeps selling them stuff to make money. The corporate culture, they don’t care about these issues.”

BUT RAFFI CARES. So much that even as he makes his call for proposals on an ethically marketed Baby Beluga film, he’s conflicted about whether it’s right to take any one child’s image of the beloved whale out of the realm of their imagination and put it into a moving picture on a screen, however artfully done.

If the brown eyes of this man who is, almost unbelievably, not a parent, darken at the thought of so much assault on children in this world, they brighten when he mentions that the B.C. government has taken one good step. He praises a new program to encourage parents to read to newborns. Each new parent in B.C. will receive a free child’s book and accompanying CD of songs, filled with education on reading to the very young. Raffi’s Baby Beluga is the first offering to the 41,000 babies born in this province each year.

In spite of his campaign against unethical uses of technology and commerce, Raffi is adamant that he is neither a Luddite nor against profit. An ethical version of the Hollywood offer continues to beguile him. “I just have a quiet confidence about where this might all go,” he says.

SO, IF THERE ARE ANY SOCIALLY responsible investors or filmmakers out there who want to do lunch to discuss making a Baby Beluga film, he says, eyes sparkling, “Talk to us. If you’re excited about the idea of bringing something like this to the market in a whole new way, a different way, and you value the educational opportunity in doing so, yeah—let’s dance.

“Let’s at least talk and see where it goes.”

Raffi was inducted into the B.C. Entertainment Hall of Fame on November 11.

Pamela Post is a CBC News reporter and winner of the 2005 Jack Webster Award for Best Radio News Reporting.