Questioning McVety's Money Trail...

I don't have much time for Charles McVety on good days. I think he is an unpleasant little man who will stoop to anything to turn Canada into a Theocracy - but that's just my opinion.

Fortunately, the keepers of the Shuffl blog are a little more patient than I about the man and have done an outstanding job of tracing through McVety's little lobbying empire and revealing quite a bit about how money apparently moves around his world. (There's much that we can't see without access to McVety's books, but I imagine a forensic accountant would have a grand old time with them.)

The upshot of it all is that an awful lot of the contact pages from various organizations affiliated with McVety (CFAC, Word.ca, Institute for Canadian Values and Canadians United for Israel) all ultimately point back to telephone numbers and an address that mysteriously corresponds to Canada Christian College.

Of particular interest are observations such as how the "donations" page from Word.ca mysteriously links to the "donations" page for the "Institute for Canadian Values".

All of this doesn't actually prove that McVety is engaging in a shell game with donor's money, but one does have to wonder about how "arm's length" the relationship between known political lobby organizations (such as CVI) and McVety's college (which is a registered charity) really are. CFAC is a bit of an oddity here, since its offices are in Calgary, and I believe that Rushfeldt founded CFAC locally - although McVety is the titular President. The details of the relationship between Rushfeldt and McVety are unknown to me, but their names keep popping up together on various organizations McVety runs.

I can only imagine what would turn up if Revenue Canada actually did an audit of the books for the various organizations that McVety is affiliated with - and the financial shell-games that are being played to fund the various political lobby organizations.

In any case, the donation pages along with the suspicious collision of offices makes me wonder aloud about whether or not donations actually go where people think they are going in the first place.

Ministerial Censorship Versus Legislated Process

The sexuality-obsessed and deeply repressed Michael Coren has been on a real tear this past week.

First, he managed to persuade the editors over at National Post to publish another of his anti-gay screeds. His reasoning on SGM is so pathetically poor it's not even worth my time to dissect it.

Second, he opened his yap on the Bill C-484 issues, and he makes the most amazing leap of illogic, claiming that there is some equivalency between C-10 and various human rights commission complaints.

I can't pretend to be a regular viewer of the television show Kink. ... There also are some quality products that are given a tax credit, but the point about the government's proposed C-10 legislation is that it doesn't threaten anything that's any good. Only cheap trash watched by a handful of people who should really fund their pornography through their own pockets.

Screech. Halt. All Stop.

I don't like the example Coren puts forth any more than he does. But then again, what I've seen of "evangelical television" doesn't exactly grab my interest either - in fact I find it just about as offensive for different reasons. But then, that plays into my point. Coren's whining about his right not to be offended, and demanding that his morality be imposed by ministerial fiat with NO review process, no process whatsoever other than the opinion of the minister of the day and whoever happens to have the minister's ear.

Really? They should, then, be campaigning for magazines such as Maclean's and Catholic Insight, websites like Free Dominion and Five Feet of Fury and a whole bunch of journalists who are currently under attack by numerous federal and provincial Human Rights Commissions for indulging in genuine freedom of speech without any fatties in latex or government handouts.

"Genuine freedom of speech"? Just what is that really, Michael? Your right to spout anti-GLBT lies with impunity? Your right to marginalize others for offending your moral code?

Of course, he's whining about HRC's underneath it all. However, the HRC's - even Alberta's - have a process that is clear, documented and publicly visible. (In spite of what Coren, Levant and others may claim) More to the point, only a small percentage of complaints actually go much beyond initial investigation. For the most part, the opinions of the minister responsible seldom come into the picture - any more than they do in other matters of law.

Second, there's a massive difference between someone's art being offensive to others, and a discrete attempt to marginalize members of society for offending Mr. Coren's particular sensibilities.

Allow me to illustrate by example. I do not like evangelical television - for a variety of reasons I find it deeply off-putting. The solution is simple - I don't watch it. I am not asking that it have whatever government funding it receives pulled, nor do I care if it does receive some funding. I don't partake in it, and frankly I have no interest in doing so.

The other side of the coin comes when people like Coren open their fatuous mouths and demand that GLBT people be treated as second class citizens (with the full burden of paying all of the taxes anyhow, I might add). The difference is that GLBT people offend Mr. Coren's sensibilities, and therefore he demands marginalization - not merely socially (which happens already), but in law. Making it harder for someone to get a job or to live their lives in peace is quite different from funding for the arts.

Step back from this for a minute or ten, and it becomes quite clear what the difference is. In one case, there is a process that is public and known to weigh the balance of competing rights; in the other we grant to the political minister of the day the arbitrary right to change the rules on a whim - largely on the basis of whether or not they are "offended" by something.

It always fascinates me how the first people to cry censorship when conservatives merely suggest a level playing field are just the sort of people who write letters to newspapers calling for people like, well, like me, to be fired.

That's a level playing field, Michael? No it isn't - in fact, there's no equivalence. I have a right to ignore art that offends my sensibilities - which I exercise on a daily basis; on the other hand, I have no right to demand that (for example) evangelical art be denied funding because it offends me.

Granting ministerial fiat rights in matters of "public morality" is extremely dangerous, especially if there is no process for review, input or otherwise besides the lobby system. Even the quasi-judicial HRC model works better than that.

So, Charles, Just How Do You Define "Public Interest"?

Since Charles McVety is so hot to trot about the film credits censorship clauses in Bill C-10, I thought I'd like to consider McVety's arguments as recorded by the Globe and Mail.

Mr. Rushfelt said the Conservative government proposal to refuse tax credits to productions that are "contrary to public policy" would limit only one avenue of federal funding for objectionable films and television shows.

So "this bill, in our opinion, may not go far enough," he said. "It deals with tax credits more than grants and subsidies as incentives, as we understand it. But it is a start."

(BTW - Rushfeldt is one of McVety's verbal puppets, put forth to make it look like McVety actually has the backing of people who don't think he's a complete loon)

Is anyone else here a little freaked out by the use of the phrase "contrary to public policy" here? "Public Policy" is a phrase that politicians pull out of their ass on a regular basis, and it changes almost as rapidly as the weather in Calgary.

The accusations of censorship are clearly out of line, said Mr. Rushfeldt. "And I would like to suggest to the committee here that maybe there be some investigation of the films that we've paid for over the last - now I don't expect you to go back 40 years - but certainly over the last three or four years, possibly. We need to look at what films did get funding and did they meet standards, if there were any."

Dr. McVety repeatedly pointed to a movie called Young People Fucking - which he referred to as "Young People F-ing" - and another called The Masturbators as examples of pornography that have qualified for the tax credits.

Okay, so there's some movies that McVety and Rushfeldt don't like. Big deal. Who the heck appointed them as the arbiters of "public policy"? They happen to believe that those shows are "bad" or "against the public interest". But, just what does that mean? How would that be decided?

While I certainly have little desire to watch the movies cited as examples, I don't profess to sit in judgment over whether they have any particular merit, either.

However, it really has more to do with McVety's overbearing desire to ram his particular sense of morality down the throats of Canadians:

Breakfast with Scot, released last fall, is about a gay ex-hockey player and his partner caring for a young orphan who displays less-than-masculine tendencies.

"(It) is about an 11-year-old boy who is being raised by a homosexual Toronto Maple Leaf to be a homosexual," said McVety. "... This is not something that the government should be (funding)."

So, the problem here is not that 'Breakfast With Scot' is some kind of "adult movie", but rather the fact that one of the characters happens to be gay?

Toronto-based filmmaker Laurie Lynd said he was "appalled" by McVety's description of his movie.

"The film is a gentle family comedy about self-acceptance and loving your child for whoever he or she is," Lynd said in an interview. He added that losing public financing just before production "could have killed the film completely."

Returning briefly to the IMDB entry on the show, and the plot synopsis in particular:

When 11 year old Scot arrives and they open his duffle bag, inside they find... one pink musical hairbrush, two plastic containers of beads and faux-gold chains, a pink poodle belt, and four pairs of white sock-ettes with lacy fringe at the top... they realize Scot is more out of the closet then they are even though he does not know it yet. A unique boy in an even more unusual situation, Scot throws Ed and Sam's life into complete disarray.

Okay, I get it. With the exception of having GLBT themes, this is a pretty classic style of comedy plot line. Hardly any more offensive than hundreds of other movies out there. So what's McVety's issue here? Nothing more than his ever burgeoning desire to declare anything to do with GLBT folk "off limits" - after all, if you can't see it, it's not there - right?


Of course, when pushed on defining things, McVety can't define what should be suppressed in his ideal world:

McVety would not say how he would define entertainment that is "against public policy," instead listing titles such as The Masturbators and Young People F------.

Perhaps even more amusing is the blatant dishonesty of McVety and his cohorts. Not so long ago, he was bragging about how influential he had been in getting the HarperCon$ to slide this bunch of garbage into Bill C-10. Now that the implications are becoming public knowledge, we find the following:

Dr. McVety backed away from that yesterday.

"We had no discussions about this legislation period. We didn't even know it existed. We didn't know it until The Globe and Mail called us the day after they had put this provision on the front page of their newspaper. We had zero knowledge of it. We had no specific meetings on this," Dr. McVety said.

"All we did, over the years, is we brought this to light: that our government is funding objectionable films."

So, what is it McVety? You either were directly involved in this little charade, or not. (I'm putting money on the former rather than the latter) McVety has bragged before about his connections to Harper's government, and by inference his influence.

The hypocrisy of these loons is astounding at times. Not only do they whine, bitch and bellyache about bodies like the CHRC - which have an actual process wrapped around them, but they then want to hand an astonishing amount of direct control to the whims of whatever politician happens to be sitting in a particular chair. Considering how much they supposedly value "freedom", it seems to me that McVety, and his allies within the HarperCon$, seek to exercise a greater degree of arbitrary control over the rest of us, with even less accountability than the HRC's they campaign against so vocally.

The line between art and obscenity is a fine one indeed - what I don't want to look at, another person might find to be the finest of art. McVety doesn't have a lock on "what's right" here, and without some kind of clear definition, I cannot imagine how the clauses of C-10 can possibly be implemented in a consistent and meaningful way. At best, it places the entire subject at the whim of the minister of the day - a situation that would make it nearly impossible for most media productions to ever qualify. In his zeal to control what we see and hear, McVety would have us become the dull, grey monochrome of Orwell's 1984 - our entertainments limited to the imagination of whatever the minister of the day happened to approve of.