Debbie Does Moncton

There are stories that just beg for bad jokes and lousy puns.  There are moments when the Canadian regulatory state goes beyond satire.  This is but one example.

A Canadian pay-television pornography channel — which is pledging to show least 50 per cent domestic content at night — has been approved by federal regulators this week, but it must now try to convince cable and satellite companies to carry the service.

So many questions:  Is it the girls or the silicon that have to be at least 50% Canadian? Can we make a distinction?  If the man is an American and the woman Canadian, does that satisfy Canadian content requirements?  Naturally in such a "coupling" the missionary position would be entirely inappropriate according to CRTC guidelines - too suggestive of American imperialism.  This obviously wouldn't apply to girl on girl action.  Can the girls dress up as Mounties, or is this an infringement on copyright?  Do the orgies have to meet affirmative action guidelines?  If a black "actress" is called a bitch and slapped during a mud wrestling match, is this a hate crime?  What if a Muslim "actress" were involved?  Jewish?  Are the Canadian girls required to "perform" in a manner different from their American colleagues?  How will the CRTC insure that all this fucking remains true to our basic values as Canadians?  Perhaps one of the girls can lecture an American counterpart about the superiority of one tier over two tier.  How many of these pornos will be set in a log cabin in winter?  And last, consider the possibilities:   Anne of Green Gables meets the Black Stallion. 

While we pride ourselves here at the Gods of the Copybook Headings as being contrarians, and everyone in the blogsphere has had a crack at this one, there's mine.  Yet, seriously, how on earth is it the proper function of the Canadian government to tell us what type of smut we can see?  How, using even the most elastic definitions, is the public interest served by ensuring that the boys and men of the Dominion off themselves while viewing only Canadian tail?  It smacks of a kind of bizarre totalitarianism, and quite literally perverse sense of nationalism, that insists on these types of "content" requirements.  Whenever I think of the CRTC, I think of Can-Con, which immediately brings to mind the King of Kensington.  No doubt the pornsters are thinking along similar lines.

We now return to our regularly scheduled blogging about Milton Friedman, Edmund Burke and Sir John A Macdonald....