If Bill C-10 Goes, What the Hell is CityTV Supposed to Program?

I know this blog tends to skew south of the border, but this is well worth paying attention to for anyone who likes boobs, neck punching or freedom of expression: the Canadian government is set to pass a bill that would allow a panel of Heritage and Justice department bureaucrats to withdraw tax credits (read: essential funding resource) from film productions it deems "inappropriate" or "not in the public interest." It's hard to say what's more disturbing -- that the policy is being driven by lobbying from Charles McVety's fundamentalist Canada Family Action Coalition, or that the amendment was sneaked past the House of Commons without so much as a second look, and now lies in the hands of the Senate. 

The arguments about whether this is censorship are semantic. Technically, it's probably closer to repression; the argument goes that they're not stopping anyone from making films, only from spending public tax dollars on them -- but once you have a system that makes artists question, from the get-go, the likelihood of their projects getting squashed by religious-driven policy, you have an arts community that's going to be afraid of taking risks, which, really, defeats the purpose. Think on how many past Canadian films might have qualified as too risque -- in an instant, pretty much everything David Cronenberg, Guy Maddin and Bruce McDonald ever produced goes down the shitter. 

So write to a Senator now -- for the record, Sens. Sharon Carstairs and Elaine McCoy wrote me back to express their support -- lest we be subjected to a whole era of Air Bud sequels. 

More in-depth info (and from an enlightened Christian perspective, no less) here.