6 thoughts on “Peggy Atwood pastes Stephen Harper one across the chops”

  1. She makes some good points, and I sure don’t want to be seen as supporting harper, but for me “support for the arts” is just another way of stealing money from me and shovelling it off the back of a truck in quebec.

  2. Or you could think of it as helping to employ Rob and myself and all our friends… The majority of what’s filmed in Vancouver would not happen without funding/tax incentives. And if that goes away, we’ll be trying to live in your basement…

  4. Lexi, i appreciate and understand your point. When i see some grotesque statue paid for with my money, or the cbc wasting tax money putting on programs that nobody watches it gets a little annoying.

  5. I absolutely agree with you, but the politics are even more disgusting. Canadian networks (CBC, CTV, etc) by law have to create a specified amount of Canadian shows, and happily take tax dollars to do so. They then bury these (often excellent shows) in their air schedule and absolutely REFUSE to do any promotion at all for them, particularly if they’re at all successful. (The creator of Intelligence, a show Rob worked on, was actually forbidden by the CBC to do any promotion himself. He defied them and did interviews and had posters printed etc on his own dime… and the show was canned, of course.) And I’m not talking stars making the rounds of talk shows etc, I’m talking simple “This week on Intelligence blah blah blah. Tuesday night at 9” during the commercial breaks, which costs nothing. They intentionally bury the shows so that they can make the argument that no one wants to watch Canadian content, building a case for eliminating their obligation to produce it, because it’s easier and cheaper to buy crap American shows and air them instead. And so you get the likes of Canadian Idol and its brethren.

    The CBC in particular is famous for messing with the air schedules of shows successful in their first season. Most of them die, despite having had sizable audiences. Rick Mercer Report is one of the only ones to survive this tactic…

  6. So it’s not even ‘what you subsidize you get more of”? Yeah, I’d say the politics of this suck a goat’s butt.

Leave a Reply