Time Immortal

I have to say, I think today might have set some kind of record for the number of Reader Mails I have received and answered. Not that I’m really complaining, mind.

At any rate, Erf writes in some follow-up thoughts to my response to a few questions he had about the Facebook group opposed to Bill C-10, and my dismissal of said group’s members as “whiny little liberals.”

Interesting. A couple of thoughts.

There’s a big difference between not getting around to answering your question about HRCs and actually liking HRCs. You may be right, but I wouldn’t take that as evidence. I do hope they respond, though! That sort of hypocrisy wouldn’t surprise me, sadly.

This is obviously subjective, but their charter doesn’t sound particularly whiny to me. Erroneous in places, yes — burying the text of a bill like this in a long and complicated piece of legislation (probably tied to some unrelated stuff) is unfortunately standard democratic procedure. But I don’t see the whining.

As for “imposing a conservative cultural agenda”, whether you’re a conservative or not the praise the bill is getting from a lot of conservatives does sound like that’s what’s going on. Whether this is bad or not depends on whether you’re a conservative, I suppose.

As for whether this bill will have negative effects, my answer is a resounding yes. My understanding of the bill is that the government doesn’t have to say whether they’ll fund a work until after the work is completed. Now, I’m not arguing that the government shouldn’t use discretion (sp?) about which works to fund. However, there should be clear, well-defined guidelines as to what gets funded and what doesn’t, and it should be possible to find out in advance whether a given work will qualify for funding or not. If filmmakers can’t know whether they’re going to get funds for something until after they’ve spent all the money producing it, they’re going to be extremely cautious as to what they try to do — and their other financial backers even more so.

In other words, this bill has the same kind of chilling effect that the HRC abuse has: people being very careful what they create, for fear the government will punish them for creating it.

Actually, this bill is rather different than what the HRCs do, because the government is not “punishing” anyone or exacting from any one person or group a financial penalty that is then awarded to another person.

I think the first error that is being made in how many people look at this bill and its implications is that there is an underlying assumption that Canadian productions are entitled to government handouts, which isn’t — or shouldn’t be — the case. No producer, no director, and no screenwriter is entitled, by virtue of being involved in the Canadian film and television industry, to access public funds to continue a project past a certain point in its development. And I, for one, think that the government should have every right to decide whether it wants to fund certain productions or not. That’s not the same as Censorship, any more than I am personally engaging in censorship when I…say…refuse to donate to charities that funnel some of their collected dollars into the abortion lobby. It’s simply saying that in the view of the government of Canada, which ostensibly represents the will of the people of Canada, certain productions aren’t of sufficient merit to spend public funds on.

Is it necessarily censorship when a university decides not to fund a new branch of research because, in the view of the university administration, the merits of the theory to be tested and the evidence collected for it thus far are insufficient? If not, then why is it censorship when the government proposes to act in a similar manner?

Obviously, there should be an established set of criteria that detail how one can and cannot qualify for public funding as a film producer or director. I would completely agree that if the government is going to be more restrictive in terms of how it doles out public funds, it should make clear the criteria it uses when considering whether to open its coffers. At the same time, there’s no point for the government to draft such guidelines at this point in time, when the bill that would make them necessary hasn’t even been made into law yet. If Bill C-10 passes, I imagine we will see exactly the sort of criteria that Erf is asking for drafted and put in place. But until and unless C-10 passes into law, there’s no need for the government to waste time drafting the criteria in question. So, they haven’t.

Now, admittedly, the bill does stipulate that the government doesn’t have to commit to funding a work until after it is completed. But then, as the leader of the Facebook group makes clear, most productions don’t apply for funding until the later stages of development anyhow. So I don’t get the sense that this bill will really put any kind of meaningful chill onto film and television production in Canada. I imagine that the criteria that the government will put forth will be fairly broad (’s government is not particularly socially conservative), so most producers won’t be adversely affected at all. Yes, there is a risk that some “art house” (read: soft-core porn films re-labeled as “avant garde”) productions may lose their funding…but by the same token, that will just mean that those productions will have to rely more on private investment, which I don’t think will dry up in the wake of this bill passing into law — if anything, the bill will increase the amount Canadian productions rely on private funds for their production, which I think is a good thing.

One would think that Canadian liberals and progressives, especially, would be happy to be free of government funding, because they’re all about “freedom” in what they produce, and decry any kind of “censorship” — even the “censorship” of negative press, at times. But the nature of government is to regulate that which it spends money on (be it healthcare, education, or film production), so one would think that the average filmmaker would be happy to be rid of government funding, and thus freed from government oversight. And yet, the exact opposite seems to be the case, and I admit I can’t quite wrap my head around this. But there it is: people demand that the government continue to fund Canadian film and television, without asking too many questions about the content being produced. We wouldn’t dream of telling a private citizen to fork over money without asking questions about what it will be used for (again, abortion is the one exception to this)…but apparently it is a sign of the coming chill winds of censorship when we start to say that governments are similarly entitled to be picky about what they fund and do not fund.

As for whether this bill reflects a right-wing social agenda…well, in a sense that’s not even the question. Did this bill emerge from a party that is, at least nominally, conservative? Yes, it did. But is the bill itself necessarily conservative in its stipulations and outlook? It doesn’t seem to be, no — if anything, a lot of it seems like common sense. And that shouldn’t be the exclusive domain of the Right (although at times it seems to be). Yes, it enjoys a lot of support from conservative elements in society, but the bill itself is not overly biased in one political direction or the other. To me, at least, it seems to be a bit of common sense thinking about the state of government funding of Canadian film and television production (which, we must admit, has churned out some pretty tasteless and questionable material over the years).

Update: Welcome, Steynians!