Replies

OK, time to set a few things straight.

The US digital sattelite services will not knowingly sell their equipment and service to someone in Canada. They don't have the broadcast rights for Canada. Same for Canadian sattelite services in the US. If you have or want to get an old-style big sattelite dish, you're free to tune in and watch anything you can legally get the equipment to tune in.

The Canadian gov't has been clamping down on US digital sattelite dishes in Canada to protect the Canadian sattelite services, and also because almost all the people using US sattelite dishes here are stealing the signal with "cracked" equipment, which is a violation of our equivalent of the DMCA. I'm not saying I agree with it, but it's more about cultural protectionism than it is censorship.

As to Fox news, the CCTA made an application to bring in it, along with HBO and some other services (ie in a single application). Again, in protectionist mode, HBO and the others are being kept out of Canada because they would cut into the viewership of Canadian cable channels that buy programming from HBO and others for broadcast in Canada. That was last year. Here's a link to a news article about this: Toronto Star

The CCTA has just (a couple of weeks ago) made application to bring in FOX News again, this time by itself in an application. It remains to be seen how quickly this will be dealt with, and what the outcome will be.

I'm not saying that I'm too happy about this stuff, and that I wouldn't rather that we had free access to all the US cable channels, but this is more about protecting Canadian cable channels than it is about censorship. Prove me wrong if you can, but otherwise this thread is mostly half-truths, supposition, and Canada-bashing.

The latest proposed legislation makes it clear that the government is not just interested in piracy. They would concentrate mostly on piracy of canadian signals if this were true.

They want to control access to choice. That is censorship by any other name. It is not legal to have Directtv even if you subscribe to all the canadian cable and satellite suppliers, thereby eliminating the financial argument.

I wrote an article about this myself on my conservative-oriented Canadian web site (yes, we conservatives exist in Canada -- or at least we will if I have anything to do with it).

I will agree that the use of the word "banned" when referring to Fox news in Canada is inflated, and I can't prove it's official government policy to ban right-wing views, but the fact remains that liberal Canadian government bureaucrats (appointed by Liberal Party politicians) decide what will and won't be allowed in Canada, and for what reason. It's open to speculation as to why they don't allow Fox News channel despite Canadians demanding it (the "official" reasons aside -- since they're suspect, being government). But "banned" is a legitimate use of the word.

I've decided that the only rationale for not allowing Fox News channel when the less popular (in the U.S.) BBC and CNN and CNBC and all U.S. networks are allowed, is that the liberal dominated government bureaucracy feels threatened by so-called right-wing views, especially when it would compete with the state-run media giant CBC and their 24-hour news channel, which is decidedly left-wing (and terrible).

Just why it is that government would think that forcing, by law, "Canadian culture" on Canadians by restricting Canadians and what they watch on TV when they know full-well what is available, is hideous. You can't force somewone to love something, especially by law.

Link to my article at www.ProudToBeCanadian.ca:
http://www.proudtobecanadian.ca/threads/showflat.php?Cat=&Number=285

Joel Johannesen