Distributors may soon have fewer levels of red tape to deal with. Industry and government are working together in Ontario to develop a home video labeling standard that could be adopted by all the provinces. At the same time, film/video classifiers, distributors and retailers in the rest of the country are in the throes of simplifying systems and sorting out regional discrepancies. It is hoped a national system of classification for both video and theatrical in Canada may be one step closer to reality.

Daniel Lyon of Astral Entertainment Group, acting cochairman of the video industry voluntary label committee, says a new stickering system for video will be implemented by March 1, 1995 but the details can’t be announced yet. Lyon also says, ‘While it is starting in home video, it’s only logical that discussion will include theatrical in a few months.’

The Ontario Ministry of Consumer and Commercial Relations was invited to participate in the committee’s development of a labeling system. David Scriven, director of the Theatres Act in Ontario, is the Ontario government representative. Scriven says the focus is on Ontario, but if a national system can also be created out of these talks, it’s ‘a bonus.’

The group agreed from the outset that a standard Canadian classification rating, which would operate on a voluntary basis, should appear on each video box and that the Ontario Review Board standards would be the model. ‘Now industry and government reps are going over issues of cost, placement and regulations,’ says Lyon. It is hoped a plan for a joint recommendation will be ready by September.

Also in the works is a strategy to collect the Manitoba, Alberta and British Columbia classification offices into one Western regional board. Mary Louise McCausland, director of the B.C. Film Classification Office, says there is some discussion, but ‘it’s not firm yet and it hasn’t gone to the political level.’

Lyon says he’s been told the chances for a Western board ‘look very good.’

‘With fewer boards we hope that the provinces would recognize one another’s systems. Effectively, they have the same standards now, but there are discrepancies of about 1%,’ he says.

There is speculation in the industry that a Western classification board is one big step toward establishing a national review board. ‘At this stage,’ says Lyon, ‘the provincial classification boards are very close to an agreement on a color-coded labeling system which would be satisfactory to the country outside Quebec.’

Quebec is not at the table for these discussions right now, not for language or cultural reasons, but because their own classification system is beset with problems, namely, high costs to distributors, and is currently under a separate industry-initiated review.

A national system, according to recommendations made by distributors to the Maritime board in mid-June, is a way around the board’s recent proposal for screening fees (which Warner Bros. responded to by retracting its video titles from the region). The recently created Maritime board is still waiting for its proposal to pass legislation.

Says Lyon: ‘The problem there is that for a relatively low number of titles, it’s very prohibitive to pay the classification fees for the Maritimes. In general, the provinces are trying to work on a cost recovery basis, so we have suggested that if you regulate us less, it will cost you less.’

Scriven says the bottom line is to ‘find a system to represent all the (Canadian) boards. If we could make some small steps (i