If You Like Fox News, You'll Hate Canada
By Marni Soupcoff

 A couple of months ago, columnist Doug Patton penned an article titled, “If You Like Canada, You’ll Love Howard Dean.” His point was that the far left Democratic Presidential candidate’s collectivist leanings on issues such as healthcare and taxes bear a strong resemblance to the near-socialist government setup in nearby Canada. Indeed, Dean’s surprising popularity is a good indicator of the trend amongst many left-libs in the U.S. to openly envy, admire, and aspire to Canada’s big government, model with its extensive social safety net and universal health care system. They marvel at Canada where people are free and taken care of.

 

Well, as a born and raised Canadian who has returned to her native land after a decade in the States, I’m here to pose an important question to these liberal Democrats: How free can a people be if they’re not allowed to choose what they watch on TV?

 

You see, what Canadians really want to watch is American television. The professors and stuffed shirts who make up Canada’s cultural elite do not like to admit this fact (CBC-loving Canadian nationalists will be the last people on the planet to notice that every remotely amusing Canadian ends up in Hollywood), but it’s true. Canadians thirst for timely episodes of Ozzie cursing a blue streak on “The Osbournes.” They crave the ability to flip on ESPN and catch a ballgame no one else is carrying. They long for the novel pleasure of watching current events discussed by right-wing pundits on a conservative-slanted network like Fox News. (Well, okay, maybe that last one applies mostly to members of my immediate family, but you get the picture.) Yet, in all of these cases, Canadian viewers are denied.

 

Why? It all boils down to the disturbingly powerful Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC), a quasi government agency that regulates what can be shown on Canadian airwaves and decides which TV channels Canadians may access.

 

The CRTC has decided, in its infinite cultural wisdom, that American stations such as HBO and MTV are simply not healthy for Canadians because they would steal viewers away from Canadian television offerings. Music videos? There’s no excuse for a healthy Canadian teenage girl drooling over imperialist MTV VJ Carson Daly when she could just as easily be drooling over an equally young, attractive, vacuous Canadian VJ on Canada’s Much Music network. Funny stuff? The CRTC is not going to let Canadians watch America’s Comedy Central because they’d probably realize what absolute crud is shown on the Canadian Comedy Network (man cannot live by SCTV reruns alone) and they’d never tune in again.

 

It’s not that the CRTC is opposed to everything foreign, of course. The Commission is currently considering an application by Canadian cable companies to add Arabic language news network al-Jazeera to the selection of television channels available for Canadian consumption. It’s just the American stuff the cultural puritans at the CRTC can’t stomach.

 

Video of Osama bin Laden covertly cuing his sleeper cells to take terrorist action in North America? No problem. Tony Soprano talking about whacking someone at the Bada Bing? No way.

 

So, we Canadians find ourselves in the absurd position of potentially being able to tune into the latest news on the jihad against the imperialist, murderous, blood-sucking Jewish Zionist conspiracy, but unable to catch an episode of “Hannity and Colmes” because a bureaucrat at the CRTC has decided the former is more culturally acceptable than the latter. The Canadian government just doesn’t trust its citizens to make their own decisions about what content—be it fluff or high art—they want to grace their own personal boob tubes.

 

Of course, if Canadians don’t like their current cable television offerings, they might be tempted to shell out some bucks for a foreign satellite dish (read an American DirecTV satellite system) and pick up some of the juicy American signals (Look, there’s Carson Daly showing Angelina Jolie his tattoo!) drifting across the border. But the CRTC tells us that this—as Richard Nixon once put it—would be wrong. It would also be illegal.

 

Last year, the Canadian Supreme Court ruled that unscrambling foreign satellite signals (read transmissions of “Rugrats” reruns on American Nickelodeon or “The O’Reilly Factor” on Fox News) is against the law. And I don’t mean against the law in the way that littering is against the law, with violations punished by sternly disapproving looks from elderly fellow citizens. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) are actually actively engaged in raiding satellite television shops, seizing DirecTV satellite equipment, and hanging onto it for months before finally levying charges of “conspiracy to sell and distribute American satellite systems.”

 

It’s a scenario that would impress 1984’s Big Brother, but it does little for the cultural freedom and independence of Canadian citizens, 83 percent of whom say they want good quality programming available regardless of where it comes from, and 64 percent of whom say they think there should be no restrictions on access to non-Canadian channels.

 

So, the next time you’re thinking about emigrating to Canada to take advantage of all those cheap government-capped prices on prescription drugs or the cradle-to-grave universal health care system, just remember this: No regime of extensive government regulation comes without its price: a tax on personal choice and freedom.

 

And the Canadian government doesn’t care if you want your MTV.

 

—Marni Soupcoff sneaks in some Fox News viewing during her trips to the U.S. Her column appears Mondays on TAEmag.com.