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 ...
Last year, the Canadian Supreme Court ruled that unscrambling foreign satellite signals (read transmissions of “Rugrats” reruns on American Nickelodeon or “The O’Reilly Factor” on Fox News) is against the law. And I don’t mean against the law in the way that littering is against the law, with violations punished by sternly disapproving looks from elderly fellow citizens. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) are actually actively engaged in raiding satellite television shops, seizing DirecTV satellite equipment, and hanging onto it for months before finally levying charges of “conspiracy to sell and distribute American satellite systems.”
Wouldn't want anything subversive (read: American) to contaminate Canada's moral superiority, eh?
Canadian Broadcasting regs have a Domestic Content quota which I believe amounts to something like 30% of broadcast material must be Canadian. Got a vivid demonstration of this the last time I ventured North and the radio had a disproportionate amount of Neil Young, Avril Lavigne and others hailing from Canada. A lot of the stuff was, in all probability, NOT something you would hear unless they had that provision in place. Not all of it was bad, mind you, but I would guess that many acts wouldn't make it in a more free market system.
Most of our cable channels have to show hours and hours of The Littlest Hobo, Friday the 13th: The Series and Danger Bay to fill their quotent. Makes them almost completely unwatchable.
Yep. Illegal.
The Upper Peninsula of Michigan is a little like that too. Nice folks, but when they're not actually speaking a lot of them just sit with eyes glazed over like puppets with their strings cut.
Say, isn't Keanu Reeves Canadian?
But I gotta hurry home. Perfessional Rasslin's on tonight...
What happened to the nice quiet friendly neighbor to the north that we considered extended family? This sounds like some third world dictatorship. That's scary.
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