Posted on 09/02/2003 3:07:22 PM PDT by quidnunc
A couple of months ago, columnist Doug Patton penned an article titled, “If You Like Canada, You’ll Love Howard Dean.” His point was that the far left Democratic Presidential candidate’s collectivist leanings on issues such as healthcare and taxes bear a strong resemblance to the near-socialist government setup in nearby Canada. Indeed, Dean’s surprising popularity is a good indicator of the trend amongst many left-libs in the U.S. to openly envy, admire, and aspire to Canada’s big government, model with its extensive social safety net and universal health care system. They marvel at Canada where people are free and taken care of.
Well, as a born and raised Canadian who has returned to her native land after a decade in the States, I’m here to pose an important question to these liberal Democrats: How free can a people be if they’re not allowed to choose what they watch on TV?
You see, what Canadians really want to watch is American television. The professors and stuffed shirts who make up Canada’s cultural elite do not like to admit this fact (CBC-loving Canadian nationalists will be the last people on the planet to notice that every remotely amusing Canadian ends up in Hollywood), but it’s true. Canadians thirst for timely episodes of Ozzie cursing a blue streak on “The Osbournes.” They crave the ability to flip on ESPN and catch a ballgame no one else is carrying. They long for the novel pleasure of watching current events discussed by right-wing pundits on a conservative-slanted network like Fox News. (Well, okay, maybe that last one applies mostly to members of my immediate family, but you get the picture.) Yet, in all of these cases, Canadian viewers are denied.
Why? It all boils down to the disturbingly powerful Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC), a quasi government agency that regulates what can be shown on Canadian airwaves and decides which TV channels Canadians may access.
The CRTC has decided, in its infinite cultural wisdom, that American stations such as HBO and MTV are simply not healthy for Canadians because they would steal viewers away from Canadian television offerings. Music videos? There’s no excuse for a healthy Canadian teenage girl drooling over imperialist MTV VJ Carson Daly when she could just as easily be drooling over an equally young, attractive, vacuous Canadian VJ on Canada’s Much Music network. Funny stuff? The CRTC is not going to let Canadians watch America’s Comedy Central because they’d probably realize what absolute crud is shown on the Canadian Comedy Network (man cannot live by SCTV reruns alone) and they’d never tune in again.
It’s not that the CRTC is opposed to everything foreign, of course. The Commission is currently considering an application by Canadian cable companies to add Arabic language news network al-Jazeera to the selection of television channels available for Canadian consumption. It’s just the American stuff the cultural puritans at the CRTC can’t stomach.
-snip-
(Excerpt) Read more at theamericanenterprise.org ...
well, i'm originally from Canada. as i read this, i see that not many of you know what you're talking about. Thing is, its not the fact that we arent allowed to see Fox news or anything else from the states for that matter, we can watch whatever we want when we want. The problem is that most americans think the world revolves around them. Most of you are right thinking that we've become too passive, uninterested, bored..the reason for that is you , the United States of America, you act like you own us, and expect Canadians to want to be like you, while over the past half century we have become lulled by American TV and Canadian *whateverness*...we are just to the point of not caring anymore, only because we see that we have no voice either way , might as well be swallowed up...why do you think kids dont join the armed forces like we should be doing? its because we know we are protected by the Americans, because the Americans made it so...
as for Canadian content on our radio waves, and the quotas implimented, its necessary for those quotas, because , honestly, you can only listen to so much of Rush, gordon lightfoot, Neil young and the 2 other bands we have. If that is one way for us to keep pretending we have our own identity in the eyes of the world other than hockey.
we do have good Canadian content though, are any of you familiar with the tv show * This hour has 22 minutes *? That program is funded totally by our Government, but they have all the rights to say and do as they please, and are quite conservative in action and thought. Most Canadians are free thinkers, you guys might call us Libertarians . The reason that we dont sound like it is because of numbers...too many hippy spenders still alive...the 20-40 somethings of today see it different though, and its slowly changing. Now, if can only wake the whole country up and start selling our oil and water and wood to the States, and the Americans start fabricating, building and open up their mills and mines , we could have one kickass , self-sufficient continent, ...no need for the gawdforsaken UN
South Park said it best - "blame canada!! Blame canada!!"
This is interesting. I met a couple of Canadians recently and asked them about FNC and they both said they get it on their cable system (whatever it is)...were they lying?
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