On summary executions

CBC reports on the latest developments surrounding the Canadian Television Fund, as the much-ballyhooed meeting between Bev Oda and the cable industry seems to have led to predictably one-sided results:

The heritage committee in the House of Commons approved hearings beginning next week into the future of the beleaguered Canadian Television Fund.

New Democrat heritage critic Charlie Angus made a motion in the House on Thursday calling for the hearings after reading a cable industry website that boasted the CTF is "dead, done, gone."

Heritage Minister Bev Oda met with Canada's five largest cable companies on Tuesday to talk about the CTF, which funds Canadian television programs such as DeGrassi Next Generation, Da Vinci's City Hall and Trailer Park Boys.

A cable industry website published an analysis of the meeting on Thursday that quotes Ken Stein, the senior vice-president of Shaw Communications in Calgary, saying: "The fund can't be fixed. It's dead, done, gone. The fund has failed."

The cable companies believe the minister supports their position that the CTF should be shut down, Angus said.

It should be noted that the CTF's current funding was received partly from the cable companies and partly from the federal government - which claimed last week that it planned on keeping up its part of the funding for another two years. So there's no apparent reason why even a complete capitulation to the cable companies' concerns would ever lead to the outright elimination of the Fund.

But then, reason seldom seems to win out over the Cons' hatred of effective government. And with Oda herself speaking only in vague platitudes in response to Angus' questions rather than even making reference to the supposed government commitment to the Television Fund, it looks all too certain that Canadian television production has joined so many other important priorities on the chopping block.