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Oh, Canada: Policymakers accused of censorship

I’m not going to pretend to understand the legalities here. I suspect that like most of us educated in the U.S., my knowledge of Canadian politics and history is sorely lacking, but I have that nostalgic liberal (and that’s not a four-letter word, Fox News!) American tendency to view Canada as a little more sane than the land of my birth. You know, health care, gun control, laws that occasionally recognize LGBT citizens as human beings.

But it looks like more than my delusions of utopia could be at risk. Working its way through the Canadian government right now is a bill that would give the Canadian Heritage minister the right to ax promised funding for any film project it deems “offensive.” This apparently includes

“gratuitous violence, significant sexual content that lacks an educational purpose, or denigration of an identifiable group.” That would seem to include films like these:  

I can’t say that I liked all of those films, but I support the world that makes them possible. And that may be under attack.

Back to the text of the bill – “Significant sexual content that lacks an educational purpose”? Now that’s chilling. Imagine an industry doomed to a future of Dear Diary. It’s true that this legal maneuvering is pulling the funding rug out from under filmmakers, rather than outright banning violence and sex, but the film industry is crying censorship. David Cronenberg calls the move an assault on the Charter of Rights and Freedoms:

“The irony is that it is the Canadian films that have given us an international reputation [that] would be most at risk because they are the edgy, relatively low-budget films made by people like me and others that will be targeted by this panel. The platform they’re suggesting is akin to a Communist Chinese panel of unknown people, who, behind closed doors, will make a second ruling after bodies like Telefilm Canada have already invested.”

There’s little doubt what kind of content will be under the cutting room knife. Conservative MP Dave Batters want to limit funding to films for “mainstream” society that “Canadians can sit down and watch with their families in living rooms.” Of course, there’s no living room for queer families. Pat Robertson’s Canadian clone Canada Family Action Coalition President Charles McVety, who claims his lobbying efforts are partially responsible for the proposed changes, says that his contacts in government agree that “films promoting homosexuality, graphic sex or violence should not receive tax dollars.”

Hey McVety, doesn’t a film “promoting homosexuality” count as educational? When I was coming out, these were my part of my manual: I can’t say I was going to be first in line for a ticket to Martin Gero‘s Young People F—ing. And if we’re talking films that don’t make the world a more pleasant place, I could live without Saw XXX: Another Return to a Pit of Gratuitous Violence. But when any government whittles away at an industry based on a vaguely defined notions of offensiveness, it’s a worry.

Canadian readers, is this getting media play? Think the changes will go through? What’s going on up there, anyway?

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