Christians are 'appalled' that Ottawa is giving the green light to a Canadian pay TV pornography channel that will encourage and sustain a homegrown adult entertainment industry.
The channel, called Vanessa, will begin airing Oct. 28.
Montreal-based Sex-Shop Television licensed the channel in 2007 as a national pay TV service. The licence requires Vanessa to air 20% of Canadian programming. But it's only now launching the French-language adult subscription channel in Quebec for $14.95
a month, with an English-language counterpart promised for the rest of Canada in late 2011.
Don Hutchinson, director of law and public policy for the Evangelical Fellowship of Canada, is 'outraged' that the Canadian Radio-television and
Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) is in effect, supporting a pornography industry that will lure young Canadians.
We have an official government body saying that a pornography industry must exist in Canada, Hutchinson said: Studies
have shown that there are various levels of corruption, from organized crime to engagement in human trafficking and prostitution that are all affiliated directly with the pornography industry. The types of violent and explicitly sexual portrayals that
are displayed in pornography reduce people to objects, Hutchinson said. [perhaps better to turn people into objects rather than turning them into paedophiles, which seems to be where church sexual repression often leads].
The CRTC, Canada's TV watchdog, said the pornography channel must follow industry codes on violence and equitable portrayals of the sexes.
The new service, billed as Canada's Playboy Channel, promises a range of
erotic-themed dramas, reality shows, documentaries and variety and magazine shows. The Quebec broadcaster also will broadcast its soft-core pornographic content in HD.
Canadian cable and satellite TV services already feature a host of XXX-rated
pay TV adult content, but they source the programming from U.S. suppliers.
Hutchinson said the Canadian pornography station will be given some form of preference, likely a lower channel number that will result in higher viewership.
He also
lamented that while the CRTC has approved new pornography channels, it also recently rejected two applications for Christian radio stations in the Ottawa area.
The Evangelical Fellowship of Canada will now try to convince Canadians not to
subscribe to the Vanessa channel: If it goes on air and it doesn't have enough subscribers, then the channel will die of a natural death .