Most provinces in Canada have their own film and video censorship boards. Even if a work is not obscene under the Criminal Code, a provincial board has the jurisdiction to censor it. Alternatively, if a film or video passes a provincial board, it may still be found obscene by the criminal code. The most notorious of these boards is the Ontario Film and Video Review Board.

* The Board is appointed by Ontario government, but since the NDP came to power the board has taken to "briefing" new appointees before they begin their jobs to ensure that new OFVRB members are following the Ministry's censorship agenda.*

The most notorious figure in OFVRB history is Mary Brown, the former chair of the board who made this statement in the early 1980s:

I have seen...women's naked and mutilated bodies suspended upside down on barbed wire fences, a woman spread-eagled and forced to have relations with a dog, brutal and sadistic gang rapes...spikes hammered into vaginas, nipples hacked from the breasts of women pinioned with a leather bit in her mouth.*
It is hard not to sympathize with her concern, indeed I do. But at the same time the justified revulsion of Canadians over such portrayals has given the power of legal suppression new respectability. Mary Brown started to demand that all distributors in Ontario, including artist-run distribution centres such as the CFMDC, must submit their work to the Censor Board (as it was then called). She also made it clear that any screenings open to the public, including screenings such as those at the Funnel, were subject to Censor Board authority.

Susan Ditta, then head of Media Arts at the Canada Council, spoke at the two day Refusing Censorship Conference held at the CBC auditorium in Toronto in November 1992. The following is an amusing anecdote which was later published in LIFT Magazine:

Let me tell you one story - a quick story - about, I don't know whether it was disclosure, discovery or something - but we were in this office being interviewed by the police and the guy from Project P says, "There are sixty-seven seconds of this film which the Censor Board objects to and twenty of those seconds are an oral sex scene. Don't you think the artist could have made his message clear with ten seconds of oral sex? Don't you think it was gratuitous? Don't you think it was self indulgent?" And I wouldn't - I just thought, I am not going to answer this fucker, I am not going to answer this question and fortunately one of the lawyers piped up and said, "Look, everybody knows a ten second blow job's no good." So we eased out of that one. In the end it was no big deal. We were fined.*

After intensive anti-censorship lobbying by the Toronto arts community and a good deal of flack from Now Magazine and the Globe & Mail Newspaper, the Board now publicly claims that the days of cutting and banning films/videos has been replaced with a more enlightened era of providing greater information with which audiences can make their own informed choices about what they want to watch. Despite these claims, a startling number or films & videos (approx. 1 in 7 reviewed) are still being cut or banned.* Little has therefore actually changed, the original legislation is still in place and the board's hypocrisy is only more entrenched.

 
The Motion Picture Act of British Columbia

Films and videotapes Bill 30-1986, The Motion Picture Act, proscribes guidelines for the distribution and screening of films, videotapes, video discs and "any other object or device on or within which there is recorded, by photographic, electronic, or other means, the contents of a motion picture... " in British Columbia. The Act includes an approval process by the Director of Film Classification for the province.

Section 5: "The Director shall, before approving a motion picture... remove or require the removal of, by erasure or otherwise, any portion of it that depicts:

(a) the coercing, through the use of threat of physical force or by other means, of a person to engage in a sexual act, where the sexual act that was coerced is depicted in explicit sexual scenes;

(b) incest or necrophilia;

(c) bondage in a sexual context;

(d) persons who are or who appear to be under the age of 14 involved in sexually suggestive scenes, whether or not they appear nude or partially nude;

(e) persons who are or appear to be under the age of 18 involved in explicit sexual scenes;

(f) explicit sexual scenes involving violence;

(g) scenes of brutality to or torture, maiming or dismemberment of persons or animals that are portrayed with such a degree of reality and explicitness that the scenes would, in the Director's opinion, be intolerable to the community;

(h) sexual conduct between a human being and an animal."

Section 12 "The Director, a peace officer, or a person authorized by the Director may enter a theatre or the premises of a motion picture distributor, an adult film distributor, a video distributor, or an adult film retailer or a video retailer at any time during regular business hours for the purpose of viewing or inspecting a film or an adult film, and may use any equipment located at the theatre or on those premises for that purpose. This individual may seize:

(a) any film that he believes will be exhibited in a theatre, or

(b) any adult film that he believes will be distributed by an adult film distributor or adult film retailer, that has not been approved, or that does not carry an authorized certificate of approval for exhibition in a theatre or for distribution by an adult film distributor or adult film retailer. The Director may destroy a film seized under subsection (2) 60 days after it was seized, unless an appeal has been commenced... "

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