by PATRICK LEJTENYI

Mike Bullard. Ralph Benmergui. Ben Mulroney. The cast of the Royal Canadian Air Farce, The Eleventh Hour, Pit Pony, Nothing Too Good for a Cowboy, ad nauseum. The pantheon of English-Canadian prime time television talent is indeed breathtaking in its awfulness, not to mention lily-white and unilingual. So what is a member of a linguistic minority to do if he wants to watch decent, entertaining original programming from the old country?

Well, according to a new bill making its way through Parliament, he'll pay up to $25,000 and/or spend a year in jail. The government is moving to crack down on illegal satellite distributors but, according to Bill C-2, an amendment to 1988's Radiocommunications Act, anyone found in breach of the law - including subscribers to satellite TV distributed by an American company - can be prosecuted.

This is extremely worrying to many people, not least linguistic and ethnic minorites who feel ill-served by what's offered by Canadian providers (an online poll at Tandem, a Toronto-based Italian-Canadian community paper, found 60 per cent of respondents unhappy with Telelatino, Canada's Italian and Spanish programming provider). Thousands of Canadians are subscribing to U.S. satellite services to watch anything from Al-Jazeera to soap operas. Mohamed Elmasry, national president of the Canadian Islamic Congress (CIC), feels that the law will turn ordinary, hard-working immigrant Canadians into criminals simply for watching TV in their language. "This is a question of freedom of expression, and of freedom of religion," says the Waterloo, Ont.-based Elmasry. "It's a form of censorship."

Grey market grey areas

In response, Elmasry has taken to writing MPs and other linguistic minority groups, pointing out the Arabs aren't alone in their lack of access to programming in their native tongue. Spanish, Russian, Japanese, Polish, Hindi and just about any other non-English or French speakers are in the same boat.

Chief among Elmasry's allies is the Congreso Ibero-Americano de Canada, a Spanish-speaking lobby group. The Congreso's vice president, Paul Fitzgerald, gets incensed when talking about C-2, calling it "fundamentally flawed on so many levels." He believes that the 140,000 Canadians who speak Spanish at home have the basic right to watch the television shows they want to watch, provided, he stresses, they want to pay for it.

"The government has said repeatedly that it isn't going to go after individuals," Fitzgerald says over the phone from Ottawa. "And if you go into any Spanish store in Montreal, you'll find newspapers with front-page ads for grey-market satellites. No individuals have ever been prosecuted, so these satellites have what's called the pallor of respectability. But now the government is saying these people are thieves."

Opposition to the bill is spreading to Parliament as well. One former Chrétien cabinet member, Steven Mahoney, has written to the Prime Minister hoping the bill will be withdrawn. "I was shocked when I saw it," says the MP for ethnically-diverse Mississauga-West. "It was so repugnant, so undemocratic, it was censorship of the worst kind. Pretty soon you'll have neighbour telling on neighbour. And, I'm sorry, but we can't be demanding free trade on softwood lumber and demand protection on communications."

This week, NDP foreign affairs critic Alexa McDonough released a statement saying that the bill "fails to deal with the consumer aspect of the issue, dealing only with protection of investment interests. Ensuring a wider range of international and specialty programming would solve the problem."

Free to choose

Of course, this would cost money. And for the two big satellite providers in Canada, Bell Expressvu and StarChoice, the number of potential Canadian subscribers wouldn't be worth the cost of providing the channels, especially in smaller markets. But Fitzgerald says Spanish speakers don't want subsidies.

"Obviously, the two satellite companies and cable companies shouldn't be forced to carry channels that aren't profitable," he says. "We aren't asking for a dime. We're saying, ‘Okay, don't carry those channels.' We're willing to pay up to three or four times as much [to subscribe to American satellite channels], plus the hassle factor, to watch the channels we want to watch."

The feds, however, say the bill is a response to concerns raised by the industry and the police. "There were three areas where the act could improve, and that's what we're proposing," says Jan Skora, director general of the radiocommunications and broadcasting regulatory branch at Industry Canada. "Those were import controls, increasing penalties and statutory damages. We felt these issues should be addressed in order to put them into a better framework regarding companies that operate illegally. And one of the issues of significance is the loss the industry feels because of this kind of activity. They estimate that they lose $400-million a year due to illegal satellite signals, and these are Canadian companies and Canadian people who end up losing." He says they will target businesses that provide the technology to catch illegal feeds.

But that doesn't wash with Elmasry or Fitzgerald. They feel that Canadians should be able to watch American-distributed television the same way they can read American magazines. "An Individual who wants to buy encrypted service from a U.S. distributor is similar to me to subscribing to Foreign Affairs or The Economist or an Egyptian newspaper," says Elmasry. "All this will do is penalize grandpa and grandma who don't have the Internet and who want to watch a soap opera in Arabic or Polish or Russian. It's ridiculous."

Rights versus values

David Lametti, an intellectual property rights expert at McGill's Faculty of Law, isn't convinced that Canada's government or its cable companies should be required to provide linguistically diverse programming, but believes that C-2's opponents have a point.

"Their claim would be stronger if there was no legal or accessible way to get ahold of these channels," he says. "But the question remains, do we have a right to it simply because it exists? That's a pretty hard argument to make."

Elmasry and Fitzgerald both say that people who want the channels will pay for them, and happily. But as it stands now, they don't have the option, and face serious penalties if they try to get them. "Do we believe people are adults in this country?" says Fitzgerald. "If we do, let's start walking the walk."

Meanwhile, according to the Globe and Mail, Feb. 14 marked the one-year anniversary of Videotron's CRTC application to have Al-Jazeera and other "ethnic services" included on the government regulator's digital list of approved satellite services. A few weeks later, the Canadian Cable Television Association filed an application to carry Italian TV network RAI, which is feuding with Canada's Telelatino service. Over 100,000 Italian-Canadians signed a petition calling for unrestricted access to the Italian service. No word yet on either application, which usually take about nine months to decide, because, the Globe speculates, Paul Martin doesn't want them to become election issues.