Council of Canadians blasts Alta. gov’t (over possible censorship of film productions)
By CAROL CHRISTIAN
Fort McMurray Today staff
The Council of Canadians is asking Albertans to say no to censorship after the province recently suggested rethinking the funding of productions critical of the oilsands.
According to the council, Minister of Culture and Community Spirit Lindsay Blackett said during a recent media interview he may have withheld funding for a recent documentary if he’d known how critical it would be of the industry. It is the Minister of Culture and Community that signs off on funding for films.
“We think this amounts to a suggestion of political censorship or the need for political censorship of arts funding, which is absoltuely not what is needed,” says Andrea Harden-Donahue of the Council of Canadians. “What is needed is an open and frank discussion about what’s happening in the tarsands.”
She told Today this morning what’s happening is being downplayed by both the provincial and federal governments.
“It’s something that Canadians need to know about, and films that can help bring this discussion to a broader audience are needed and necessary.”
The council is calling on artists and allies to tell Blackett it’s unacceptable that he considers denying funding to artists critical of the oilsands.
“It stifles freedom of information and marginalizes real concerns of health and human rights,” said Harden-Donahue.
As of this morning, Blackett’s legislature office had received two calls while his Calgary constituency office hadn’t received any.
Producer Leslie Iwerks’s documentary Downstream has been mentioned in the province’s talk of censorship of arts funding. Downstream, nominated for an Academy Award, includes interviews with a number of people about the industry, and its health and environmental impacts on Fort Chipewyan, Alberta’s oldest settlement which is downstream from the billion-dollar oilsands. It offers a look into the lesser known side of the oilsands for American consumers. Though Greg Stringham, vice-president of the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers, was interviewed for the documentary, no other industry insider agreed to appear. A central figure in Downstream is Fort Chipewyan advocate Dr. John O’Connor, who first blew the whistle on elevated cancer rates in the aboriginal community.
In providing a venue for people to tell their own stories about the oilsands and its impacts, Iwerks earlier told Today, “We let the audience make their own choice.”
Meanwhile, local doctor Michel Sauvé has written to Blackett denouncing any perception of censorship, and defending Iwerks’s production.
“Mrs. Iwerks painted a balanced and factual picture of a physician advocating for his patients, in tough, tough working conditions,” wrote Sauvé. “From a taxpayer’s point a view, it seems our government was very wise to invest in a documentary like this, helping over a thousand rural Fort Chipewyans.
“From a public health point of view, drawing attention to the oilsands development debate and the plight of our First Nations trying to preserve their way of living is more than honourable”
He added he was “deeply offended” the minister is publicly questioning Iwerks’s integrity by “raising questions of a duplicitous sparsity in a film funding application.”
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