Censorship by stealth..

No doubt some right wingers offended by some of the materials that get tax breaks will be happy with this move but as Toronto lawyer David Zitzerman of Goodmans LLP says the government's plans smack of "closet censorship", and as the Globe and Mail article notes the legislation could violate the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
Toronto lawyer David Zitzerman of Goodmans LLP says the government's plans smack of "closet censorship."

"The proposed new initiative, if not properly crafted, could potentially violate the Charter [of Rights and Freedoms] and lead to possible legal challenges against the Minister of Canadian Heritage," Mr. Zitzerman said yesterday. "Such a provision could potentially lead to the government acting as 'morality police.' The existing definitions of pornography and obscenity in the Criminal Code should be sufficient for the government's purposes.

"Would this committee put money into Juno? It might not want to encourage teen pregnancy. Would the government put money into a film with a dirty title, like Young People Fucking? Would they invest in something like Brokeback Mountain? They might not want to encourage gay cowboys to have sex together in Alberta."

David Cronenberg an acclaimed director also lambasted the Harper goverment plan.
Of course Harper censorship is good clean censorship not bad dirty censorship of the type common in commie China! From the CBC.

David Cronenberg, the Canadian director behind the critically acclaimed Eastern Promises, said the proposed plan doesn't belong in Canada.

"It sounds like something they do in Beijing," he told CBC News.



"You have a panel of people working behind closed doors who are not monitored and they form their own layer of censorship."

Cronenberg says Canadians have a reputation for making edgy dark movies that go places other filmmakers wouldn't venture.

This new panel could quash that kind of creativity, he said.

Producer Steven Hoban is concerned that the provision will stop money from flowing into the Canadian film industry.

Filmmakers depend on the tax credit to help secure additional funding, said Hoban, who produced the film Young People F**ing, which is scheduled for commercial release in April.

"I think a movie like Young People F**ing would not have been made if Bill C-10 had been in effect when we were going for financing the film," he said.

"Just the optics you get with that kind of title, I think we wouldn't have gotten the tax credit and, again, if we didn't have that tax credit, it wouldn't have been possible to make that film here in Canada."

Plan amounts to morality policing