Christian leader Charles McVety writes that there’s currently no way to ensure federal tax money doesn’t go to pay for pornographic films.
Opponents of subsidies for pornography face the same arguments given generations ago by defenders of government assistance for tobacco production.
If you opposed tobacco subsidies, you were against farmers, against agriculture, and probably against any government assistance to weak sectors of the economy.
If you opposed tobacco subsidies then, you must have been religiously motivated (read “irrational,” “unscientific,” “medieval”) at best.
You were a closet killjoy at worst. After all, for many Canadians smoking three packs a day was the main pleasure and recreation that they could enjoy, insisted the subsidy defenders. If tobacco subsidies were stopped, where would it all end?
The domino theory that an end to tobacco subsidies would mean an end to joy and happiness is now being borrowed by the defenders of subsidies that could be used to create pornography. If we end subsidies for porn today, we will end subsidies for culture tomorrow, and perhaps bring an end to joy and happiness the day after.
These critics will ultimately lose for the same reason that the defenders of tobacco subsidies ultimately lost. Society got tired of paying the costs of subsidizing a habit that risked harm to human health, family cohesion, and even family survivability if the breadwinner(s) were smokers. Society got tired of paying to cause a problem and then paying a second time in a sometimes vain attempt to fix it. Not all lung cancer was curable.
As in the case of tobacco, defenders of porn subsidies use a kind of attempted character assassination in saying that only the religiously minded are against it. One doesn’t have to be religious to recognize inanity. A COMPAS poll released this week shows that three-quarters of Canadians oppose subsidies for porn films. They can’t all be religious and they can’t all be Christian. In fairness, it is possible that a high proportion of Sikhs, Muslims, Jews and people of no faith oppose such subsidies.
According to the poll, in practice, opposition to such subsidies is especially strong among women, 30 per cent of whom would ban porn films outright.
The overwhelming majority of Canadians oppose the idea of subsidizing pornography because they intuitively understand the wastefulness of spending taxpayers’ money in this way instead of on health care, caring for the poor, or in other productive ways. They understand that pornography has become especially destructive of human, sexual, and family happiness in the Internet era.
The overwhelming majority of Canadians do not want to see the precious resources that support the arts and culture industry of Canada diverted to a handful of films that feature an abundance of gratuitous sex and/or violence, including a few that I would describe as pornographic.
Since the inception of the film and television subsidy program, the Tax Credit Guidelines have deemed pornographic films not to be an “eligible genre” of production. Once a film is given a certificate of approval for production, however, the government currently has no avenue to enforce this or any other regulation after the film is completed.
Canada’s auditor general, Sheila Fraser, cites this process as one of the least accountable expenditures of government funds and recommends changes. In her audit of 2005, Ms. Fraser stated that the government cannot even be assured that it is funding real expenses.
