Canadian TV: It’s porn-tastic!

A Gazette reader has this to say about the widespread availability of porn on Canadian TV:

Evidently, the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) is less rigorous in regulating Canadian viewers’ access to porn (Gazette, Jan. 4., “Canada leads world in TV porn”) than in allowing Canadians the opportunity to pay for Fox or NBC’s 24-hour news channels. I am not particularly concerned with how the CRTC regulates pornography, but I cannot help but observe Canadian identity is deemed to be more symbiotic with pornography than American cable news availability.

One can only hope that the CRTC is properly vigilant in assuring porn actors and productions are Canadian and reflect our diverse, multi-cultural mosaic.

The CRTC’s recent decisions to deny broadcasting licenses to several US channels including HBO, Showtime, Starz, Cinemax, TMN, Lifetime, Flix, Fox Sports, ESPN, Fox News, Nickelodeon, and WAM were taken on the premise that they would “compete with existing Canadian channels”, and presumably that would be bad:

Further, the Commission’s general policy with respect to such requests precludes the distribution of non-Canadian services that it determines to be either totally or partially competitive with existing Canadian specialty or pay services.

The Commission notes that, under its current policy, a range of foreign programming services is available for distribution in Canada. Moreover, a number of broadly-distributed Canadian programming services provide a wide variety of non-Canadian programming, including programming available within the services that CCTA requests be authorized for distribution.

[ . . . ]

Most significantly, the Commission is concerned that adoption of CCTA’s proposal would make it more difficult for Canadian services to obtain the Canadian rights to broadcast foreign productions. The loss of the revenues generated by such foreign programs could result in a decrease in the production and broadcast of Canadian programming.

So we can’t get HBO because CTV would lose money when it tried to broadcast episodes of the Sopranos that are three years old. But no worries: we can have all the porn we could possibly dream of! I guess there aren’t too many concerns about preserving Canadian culture and preventing American competition when hot naked chicks are involved. (So then why is Sex and the City still not permitted to air?)