From: flick harrison (email suppressed)
Date: Wed Mar 05 2008 - 13:57:01 PST
Hey frameworkers,
Thought some of y'all might be interested in this emerging issue.
Last week, it was discovered that a 100-page tax amendment, halfway
through the Canadian Senate, had 13 words in it which were there to
give the Heritage Minister a political veto on government tax-
credits. The guidelines for nixing the credits were not listed,
though a family-values christian-crusader, Charles McVety, publicly
took credit for their creation. He was also a leader of the anti-gay-
marriage forces in Canada.
The Ministry promised to table the new tax-credit content guidelines
in Parliament, but it was later announced that they didn't exist
yet. Instead, the Minister pointed to similar language in provincial
tax-credit legislation and denied any intention to censor, and
suggested the new powers were to prevent any government support for
productions that violated the criminal code for hate speech, violence
or pornography.
This is quite similar to the Ann Arbor film-fest case, politically:
conservatives are arguing that free-speech doesn't include the right
to produce pornography on a government dime.
At the Genies (Canadian film / tv awards), bill C-10 was protested
from the podium by Sarah Polley, Sandra Oh, Atom Egoyan, and Robert
Lantos. The Heritage Minister had cancelled her appearance at the Gala.
The rules, apparently, have been on the legislative merry-go-round
since the Liberal Heritage Minister, Sheila Copps, proposed them in
2003, largely to sink a single movie-of-the-week about serial-
murderer/rapists Karla Homolka and Paul Bernardo.
Of course, there's a facebook group, with 22,000 members after a few
days,
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=9036150977
* FLICK's WEBSITE:
http://www.flickharrison.com
* FACEBOOK
http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=860700553
* BLOG / NEWS:
http://zeroforconduct.blogspot.com
* MYSPACE:
http://myspace.com/flickharrison
__________________________________________________________________
For info on FrameWorks, contact Pip Chodorov at <email suppressed>.