The Income Tax Club

This column is not an opportunity for you to join a club that supports the Income Tax Act, although that might be a very elitist organization. Nor is it a fan club for those who love to hate the Income Tax Act. It is about our elected parliamentarians and appointed Senate who are using the Income Tax Act as a club. Bill C10 is the club which proposes in part to remove income tax credits afforded other Canadian film and television projects from selected film and TV productions that do not meet the criteria set by the government.

Ever since the US authorities used their Income Tax Act to put the notorious Al Capone behind bars when they could not jail him on Prohibition counts, the Income Tax Acts have become handy tools to do what governments do not want to put into clear policy. Rather than come right out and say that they want to institute censorship of film and TV, our government of the day is going to use the leverage of income tax to deny funding for programs and films that have content which ‘they’ find offensive.

Many of us had suspicions that the old Reform party was little more than the Canadian version of the Religious Right in the States, but it seems that the New Conservatives, now supported by the other parties in parliament, are showing their true colours. Knowing that some, if not many, Canadians would rebel at open censorship of the arts, the Harperites are going to use the Income Tax Act to censor film and TV. Just exactly who these new thought police will be we do not know, but they will be masked behind some ‘Board’ of the right-wing evangelic establishment.

It seems we have not yet reached a level of education in this country where people are allowed to think for themselves. We are not sophisticated enough to turn off a television program that offends us and be satisfied that we are our own thought police. We, the government, now want to turn off everyone’s TV set so they cannot watch these morally inappropriate entertainments. Not enough that we rate the movies for content, but now we must insist that we do not even make such films in Canada less they corrupt people unable to make educated judgements.

Who are these moral police? Have they infiltrated our country from the religious right in the US? From the Middle East? From Beijing? From Alberta? Certainly there are boundaries that any reputable film producer would not cross, but it is up to the open-minded and educated critics to review and report to the public about the film. You may not like the run of the mill horror films, and you would certainly not attend a showing of those films, or if you did, you would vacate your seat. Similarly, people who do not want to watch pornography do not rent XXX videos. The problem arises when critics, or worse, censors, tell us what is horror or pornography and when they become tools of the politically correct or religious evangelists.

Maclean’s film critic Brian Johnson lost a lot of my respect, when in his review of the movie Lars and the Real Girl, he incorrectly described Bianca as a blow-up sex toy in one of the most uplifting, positive and thoughtful movies of 2008. Either Brian fell asleep for most of the film and gave us some rehash of another, less-thoughtful writer’s review or he has fallen victim of the over-zealous political correctness police.

We might have suspected that the political correctness that now runs rampant in the country would lead to censorship. Hiding behind the cloak of Charter of Rights or the Income Tax Act, people will use whatever means they can to supplant their view over your own. Already they are attacking writers and will soon be ‘burning’ books. The sad thing is that in a country that had formerly embraced liberal thinking, we now seem to be slipping backwards.

University students, who used to be at the forefront of any fight for rights and freedoms, seem to have been co-opted into silence on Bill C10 by the ‘get-a-job’ not a ‘get-an- education’ philosophy now espoused by our higher education institutions. Or is it because they owe the government for their Student Loans and fear the repercussions of the Income Act on their debt that they hold their tongues?

Perhaps most of us are content to let others do our thinking for us. We let others raise and educate our children; we sit fascinated in front of TV shows that promote themselves as ‘reality’ and ‘idol’ shows and accept their delusions, when they are nothing more than tools for advertisers; we believe in political promises just as we believed in the bearded man who came down the chimney on December 25th. For those would like to think for themselves, it may be time to give your member of parliament a call. Let’s not open the door to censorship by this change to the Income Tax Act.