Ottawa, May 31, 2000 – The Canadian Broadcast Standards Council (CBSC) today released its decision concerning the broadcast by Télévision Quatre-Saisons (TQS, Montréal) of a dubbed version of the theatrical motion picture Strip Tease. Throughout the movie, although not excessively, scenes of strip tease performances were shown and bare breasts were in plain view. The movie was broadcast at 8:00 p.m. and contained a viewer advisory at the beginning of the film and before the end of the first hour. Two viewers complained that “The law does not permit children to gain access to strip clubs and yet ... TQS can bring movies of strip tease into our homes.”
The Quebec Regional Council considered the complaints under both the Canadian Association of Broadcasters’ (CAB) Sex-Role Portrayal Code and the Violence Code. The Council found no breach of either Code. Referring to previous decisions dealing with fashion, news reporting and drama, the Council noted that “[i]t is the consistent view of the CBSC’s Regional Councils that there is nothing which is per se offensive about the broadcasting of programming which includes the showing of bare breasts.” The Council decided that the mere exposure of women’s bare breasts in a dramatic film, in the absence of exploitation, was not in violation of the Codes:
While acknowledging that the showing of bare breasts on strip tease dancers was intended by the filmmaker to be sexual, the Council considers that the absence of sexual contact or lovemaking in the film rendered it, to all intents and purposes, sufficiently innocent that there would not even be a requirement that its broadcast occur only in a post-watershed time frame.
The Quebec Council also reiterated its position in an earlier decision that “the 9 p.m. watershed hour can be expected to apply to erotic scenes as well as violence.” It added, as noted above, that, in this case no watershed problems had been presented and that “by airing the film ... with appropriate advisories and the rating icon established by the Régie du Cinéma, the broadcaster had provided sufficient opportunity for those who might prefer not to see the film or not to have it available for their families to make that choice.”
Canada’s private broadcasters have themselves created industry standards in the form of Codes on ethics, gender portrayal and television violence by which they expect the members of their profession will abide. In 1990, they also created the CBSC, which is the self-regulatory body with the responsibility of administering those professional broadcast Codes, as well as the Code dealing with journalistic practices first created by the Radio Television News Directors Association of Canada (RTNDA) in 1970. More than 430 radio and television stations and specialty services from across Canada are members of the Council.
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All CBSC decisions, Codes, links to members’ and other web sites, and related information are available on the World Wide Web at www.cbsc.ca. For more information, please contact the National Chair of the CBSC, Ron Cohen, at (###) ###-####.