Canada Eats its Artists

Item: Artists Fight Tax Bill 'Censorship'

When Pierre Trudeau said the government has no business in the bedrooms of the nation, I don't think he was thinking specifically about film, but it's an apt response to the idea that the federal government could even presume to revoke tax credits from films deemed "offensive or not in the public interest". How is it fair that a film called "Young People Fucking" could potentially even have credits revoked retroactively? As decided by whom, exactly? Some federal bureaucrat with no stake whatsoever in the industry?

I understand the concern over public funds going to projects perceived as wacky, like the (so-called) porn-esque films produced in the nineties. Though I understand the hue and cry, I don't agree with it. Culture is incubated and then nurtured by those who take risks. It doesn't advance or evolve if it's hamstrung by "propriety". It just shrivels up and becomes dry and "safe". Both risky and safe are necessary for a healthy cultural landscape, but one cannot exist without the other.

Leaving that aside, the Canadian film and T.V. industry has a hard enough time as it is trying to eke out an existence in this nation. Sometimes it barely makes a blip. With little thanks to the government. The CBC is folding domestic productions left and right, film distributors are constantly assailed by competitors from other nations lobbying for protective rights. Those who normally work on the productions directly are facing huge reductions in income due to lack of work. Why is it a country like Australia or France can support films for its own people that are actually seen and heard round the world, and yet, in Canada, most filmmakers scrabble and claw to get the meager funding available?

Stepping even further back, why is this government so seemingly dismissive of home-grown culture?? Why was there nary a murmur regarding funding for the arts in the last budget? The status-quo is not enough. As someone wrote recently (sorry, can't remember who -- so I'm paraphrasing here), "The pervasive invasion of other cultures has exposed us to amazing international works of art, but what good is it if we can't produce our own works in kind?" Not only that, but study upon study shows creative industries benefit the economy as a whole, rather than siphoning money away. Isn't that a good and desirable thing?

At the very least, if we can't get any more money, can't we artists at least be allowed to save a little? Rather than having it taken away, robbing us of our reason for being, and kicking us in the heiney for being "offensive"? Bloody Conservatives. I wish they'd go eat some environmental polluters, instead...