Mr. Speaker, in order to assess whether the bill was really ill-conceived, as was suggested by the Liberal member, we must ask ourselves who conceived it. In fact, it was the former Liberal deputy prime minister, Sheila Copps, who wrote the bill when she served in the previous Chrétien cabinet.
The reason she wrote the bill and the reason the Liberal Party unanimously supported it was that it was aimed at preventing murderers, like Karla Homolka, from profiting from their crimes. It was rumoured at that time that Karla Homolka and Paul Bernardo would create films to glorify what they had done and that they would be entitled to public funds to finance those films. That was the concern of the previous Liberal government.
At that time, the Liberals introduced the bill and for many years it has circulated throughout the House with unanimous support in all parties. When the current government put together Bill C-10, which is, by and large, a housekeeping bill on tax law, it was natural for us to include in the bill a piece of draft legislation that had already been written and had broad support but had just never made it through the House of Commons and Senate for procedural reasons and because of elections and other interruptions.
When we introduced the bill in the House of Commons, we had unanimous support. Indeed, the member for Davenport, wisely, was a strong supporter of Bill C-10, as was the entire Liberal caucus. Today he has changed his position and now opposes the bill that he supported, and I am not quite sure why. The bill simply states that taxpayer dollars should not be used to fund pornography, extreme violence or hatred against identifiable groups.
Most Canadians would agree that there should be an unlimited freedom of expression for artists who want to create any kind of film they want but, given that there are scarce resources in the public treasury, we should direct those resources to non-pornographic films and to films that do not glorify violence for its own sake.
I would like to distinguish for a moment between incidental nudity and pornography. I take a movie like Shindler's List, which had both violence and nudity incidental to the story of the Holocaust. In other words, one could not have the movie without both of those elements included. It is a very challenging and difficult movie to watch but one of the most important we have seen in decades.
That kind of film, though it is not Canadian nor is it applying for this tax credit, would not be made ineligible by the contents of Bill C-10. However, movies that are made explicitly for pornographic reasons, where the nudity exists for its own sake and not for the sake of telling a broader story, need not be financed by the public. Censorship would be to ban them but they are still legal but they cannot rely on public funds to finance them.
I will close by saying that one man's freedom of expression does not entitle him to stick his hand in the pocket of another.