...Of Parliament, that is. The heat is on. On the street, even. The heat from the coruscating flames of Canada's Liberal Party leadership race! The race that will determine who will be Canada's next Prime Minister. The astute reader will recall that HogBlog recently began a series of blogging bits of bloggish bloggery devoted to the leadership race, to profiling the candidates, and to finding every reference possible to marijuana in Canadian politics. Let us now go one step further. We present to you the Official HogBlog Guarantee[TM]:
'So that we can bring you total all-consuming coverage of this campaign, we of HogBlog will not eat, sleep, oxygenate our blood, or engage in any bodily functions whatsoever, placing ourselves in complete metabolic stasis, until the race is over.'*
First, marijuana. Manitoba's provincial elections in 1999 brought the New Democratic Party under Gary Doer to power. In this election, the Communist Party won only 0.09% of the vote. The Marijuana Party, however, rocketed into fourth place, winning more votes than the Greens, Libertarians, and Communists combined, with 0.58%.
And now for something completely different: issues!
III. Canadian Culture
Canada is a nation of some 30 million people, roughly equal in population to the state of California. It occupys the second-greatest land area of any nation on the face of this Earth, and contains world-class cities like Toronto and Vancouver. It should come as no surprise to non-Canadians, therefore, that Canada actually does have a domestic television industry. And I'm not just talking about Red Green. Recently, John Manley stirred a veritable hornet's nest, all of whose occupants then flew up his rectum, when he announced the government was cutting $25 million, a substantial fraction of the total funding, from the Canadian Television Fund, imperilling quite a few popular programmes. Among the shows this threatened with cancellation was This Hour Has 22 Minutes, which is a bit good indeed, clips of which are well worth investigating. This cut was just silly. As Jeffrey Simpson noted in his piece in the Globe and Mail on 25 April,
Not only is $25-million a pittance for Ottawa, but cutting that amount from the last budget ran against that document's grain. Total program spending this year jumps $4-billion from last year.And yet, it remains a mystery why, amidst the cornucopia of new spending, with money being splashed in all directions, Finance Minister John Manley targeted one program for the axe: the Canadian Television Fund.
The CTF, begun in 1996 to assist the production of Canadian TV programs, had been receiving $100-million a year. At its inception, the government said the CTF would eventually be reduced as production companies found private-sector money to replace the government's.
Former finance minister Paul Martin, a booster of Canadian culture, never acted on the implicit assumption that the CTF would be reduced. But Mr. Manley did act in the weeks before his budget. He sliced $25-million a year from a program his very own budget document described as having "met with considerable success in providing new quality Canadian programming."
In the slash-the-deficit era, programs everywhere got the chop. In today's era of large surpluses, programs everywhere got new money. Thus the CTF cut was not a random decision, or a mistake, or an oversight. It was a deliberate act, for reasons nobody in Ottawa can fathom.
Mr. Manley has said he was merely acting on the old implicit assumption of an eventual reduction in the CTF's budget. But this explanation is awfully lame, given the praise heaped on the program in the budget, the new spending everywhere else and the huge government surplus.
No, it is widely assumed that Mr. Manley has little sympathy for subsidizing Canadian cultural production, unlike Mr. Martin, let alone Heritage Minister Sheila Copps. If Mr. Manley believes that subsidizing Canadian TV is a waste of money, that argument should be made now, as the Canadian Alliance does, because it certainly wasn't put forward in the budget.
Ms. Copps is said by friends to have been blind-sided by the cut. She is, after all, Mr. Manley's leadership rival, and the two have exchanged public barbs in recent weeks that mirror their testy private relationship. Cutting the CTF might have struck Mr. Manley as a clever little dig at the heart of Ms. Copps's political support in the cultural community.
Fortunately, after some days of confusion in which Manley attempted to use the fund as a political weapon against oppenent Heritage Minister Sheila Copps, Copps has emerged triumphant, securing the money to undo Manley's cuts and even boost the Fund's funds. Which means that Canada will continue to enjoy current-events satires such as this 'Apology to America', which is the source of much merriment here in the halls of HogBlog.
'I'm sorry we burnt down your White House during the War of 1812. I see you've rebuilt it. It's very nice...
'I sincerely hope that you're not upset over this. Because we've seen what you do to countries you get upset with.'
Which segues nicely into the next issue: America.
For those keeping count, with Manley's hostility towards Canada's cultural industries contrasted with Martin's and Copps' staunch support, and Martin's personal qualms about gay marriage--although keep in mind he wouldn't seek to block it, and it seems to have gained wonderful momentum--against his opponents' outspoken support, the score now stands at:
They all love pot.
Posted by aloysius at May 03, 2003 02:16 PM |