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House Hansard - 173

44th Parl. 1st Sess.
March 27, 2023 11:00AM
Context: House Hansard - 173 - Mar/27/23
Ms. Elizabeth May (Saanich—Gulf Islands, GP)
  • Mar/27/23 10:07:26 p.m.
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  • Re: Bill C-11 
Madam Speaker, The Handmaid's Tale has come up a great deal in this debate, and there is time to actually dig into why. The Handmaid's Tale, written by Margaret Atwood, once adapted to the screen, did not count as Canadian. It is fairly easy to look it up. It is described on Wikipedia as “an American dystopian television series created by Bruce Miller”, an American. For the film, the screenwriter was Harold Pinter, who is British; the director, Volker Schlöndorff, is German; and the score was by a Japanese artist. They are all very talented people, but Canadian artistic enterprises are trying to find work for Canadians. The wonderful and chilling dystopian novel by the brilliant Margaret Atwood had many other hands bringing it to the screen, and those hands were not Canadian. If we tried to enter it into any kind of Canadian artistic prize category, we would not get it in as a Canadian piece of work, because it is American or international with American producers and Americans own it. That is why it is not Canadian content. We need to protect Canadian content or our writers and our screenwriters—
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