Federal Heritage Minister James Moore obviously has different community standards than the Internet audiences of tou.tv. He has taken umbrage to a program called Hard on the French language tou.tv website platform. The ‘made in France’ program is provided by Radio-Canada’s radio wing in cooperation with a group of French-language television channels. Mr. Moore says the program is pornographic. He also says, for some reason, that it is directed to children. All he will probably do by saying that is send a lot of youngsters to the website to find out what the fuss is about.
What the youngsters will find out is that the program can be quite boring. The actors deal with adult subjects. Sex is also an adult subject. Regrettably, Mr. Moore might not understand that. It is quite possible that somebody showed him an out-of-context clip from one of the episodes and he thought he was watching something that was pornographic.
But the Minister might not be aware of the considerable expertise and thought that the Supreme Court has given to the question of community standards. What it really boils down to is that there is nothing wrong with sex between consenting adults. Sex that includes brutality is wrong. The court also believes showing sex that degrades women is wrong. We expect that showing sex that degrades men would be equally wrong. The problem therefore is with the Minister. If Mr. Moore has a problem or did not understand a sex act that was shown or simulated, he should say so.
It hardly needs to be said that one couple’s pleasant dalliance can be a prurient person’s pornography.
What is also interesting about this business is that the Minister’s statement and a supporting release from the Prime Minister’s Office were distributed by Sun Media. Few people in the news business in Canada could be unaware that Pierre Karl Péladeau’s Sun Media wishes nothing more than to destroy Radio-Canada. Sun Media does not like the competition from the public network.
Sun Media’s owner also owns ATV the largest French-language television network in Canada as well as the struggling Sun TV. Sun TV is the network that recently wanted to show a citizenship ceremony and snapped its fingers and the Conservatives had a group of federal employees perform for the cameras. It should also be noted that M. Péladeau also owns newspapers across Canada including our Babel Examiner and the blatantly separatist Le Journal de Montréal. His English language media are very supportive of Prime Minister Harper’s Conservatives. He is a businessman. He covers all the angles.
The Heritage Minister is probably annoyed that he does not have control of the CBC. He would probably like the CBC to be as friendly to his government as the English-language Sun Media outlets. We can only hope that is never going to happen.
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Copyright 2012 © Peter Lowry
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