against the backdrop of heated discussion in the u.s. Congress, the tv violence debate is guaranteed to pick up steam in Canada next month as Shaw Communications begins round two of v-chip testing and the crtc holds court on the issues in regional panels from St. John’s to Vancouver.

Production is underway for a modified v-chip, minus the scene-by-scene classification component that was trashed in phase one of v-chip testing after proving to be more annoying than serviceable. In tandem, anti-violence advocates, free speech proponents, broadcasters, and producers already feeling the chill of political correctness creeping into scripts are expected to take the stand and speak for or against the v-chip through October, leaving the crtc to come up with a set of comprehensive guidelines by the end of the year.

New policies will arguably have to be more productive than the processes put in place after the Power Rangers melee last November.

Public awareness initiatives over the past year by the Canadian Cable Television Association, the Canadian Association of Broadcasters and the National Film Board have done much to raise the issues. But the 1-900 number, established by the Coalition for Responsible Television in January as a means of registering complaints with broadcasters about television violence, is limping along, plagued by what organizers say is a flawed process, and has all but stopped its services while procedure issues are worked out.

With a continuation of the six-year-long debate on the horizon, producers of children’s programming aren’t convinced the proceedings are focused on a long-term solution to the problem.

Ronald Weinberg, president of Montreal’s Cinar Films, says it would be a mistake for Canada to move in the same direction as its American counterparts – towards legislation that dictates a classification system for children’s programming.

U.S. bill expected

A telecommunications bill is expected to pass through Congress before the end of the summer, and after last month’s public endorsement of the v-chip by President Clinton, a clause specific to the v-chip is anticipated.

‘It’s not a solution. It’s a legislative Band-Aid. The onus should be on creating quality children’s programming and giving more responsibility to program suppliers instead of passing it on to groups and gadgets. There’s a degree of consciousness in Canada already. There’s some sense of direction here,’ says Weinberg.

At this point, the groups and gadgets in part responsible for monitoring and controlling the children’s programming environment have bugs to work out before there is either a streamlined complaints process in place or an ideal v-chip technology on the market.

Tim Collings, professor of electrical engineering at Simon Fraser University and inventor of the v-chip, says it became clear in the first test phase, which targeted 80 homes in Edmonton and wrapped this summer, that parents wanted an easier interface and a system that more effectively stopped kids from reprogramming the menu.

As a result, the next test incorporates a control card adapted for the set-top box, programmable by a pint-sized remote control, versus the old way of programming the tv using the main remote and an easily accessible on-screen programming system that worked similar to setting the vcr.

Also officially scrapped in this test is a scene-by-scene classification system. In the last test, individual scenes could be coded for violence, language, nudity/sex. Each time a scene leapt over the level, the screen would black out. ‘Viewers found it too disruptive,’ says Collings.

Astral Communications, cfcf-tv, the TVA Television Network, Radio-Canada, and Television Quatre Saisons have signed on to participate in phase two, which will target a minimum of 200 homes in the Montreal area. Should Rogers Communications decide to participate, the test market could expand to include Toronto and Vancouver.

The cost to the broadcaster is minimal, says Collings. The standard closed-captioning coder is all that’s necessary to insert additional information on the program and can be done hourly, daily, or weekly.

Collings and the sfu’s electrical engineering department are on overdrive to manufacture enough v-chips to stock the test group. Collings won’t detail manufacturing costs, but says the costs are prohibitive built 200 at a time and bulk production would be necessary to make the costs manageable. Lead time for mass production would be about three months.

While many are looking to the v-chip as the remedy for all that ails children’s tv, others find the filter is a little too Big Brother-like for comfort and take issue with the effect the whole television violence debate is having on creators of children’s programming.

This summer, Cinar was forced to remove the word ‘heaven’ from the script of a program because the broadcaster took issue with its religious overtones.

Cassandra Schafhausen, vp animation production and development at Cinar, says the event ‘speaks to the whole issue of what’s going to be left over when we weed out what’s not okay with `them’ and therefore should not be okay with the rest of the world. When I was growing up, it was the Communist scare. To me this is just as insidious and just as dangerous.’

But while an increased degree of self-consciousness may be present at the production and development level, tangible changes to programs like those forced on the Power Rangers series haven’t happened since then.

Although broadcasters have been notified of complaints as they come in, other than Power Rangers, ‘I can’t give you an example where a program was actually changed because of a complaint,’ says Ronald Cohen, national chair of the Canadian Broadcast Standards Council, an independent organization established by private radio and television broadcasters, which fields complaints from the public related to programming from private broadcasters.

The cbsc receives complaints either directly from the public or through advocacy agencies, and is dealing now with procedure problems between it and the Coalition for Responsible Television.

In January, a 1-900 number was set up through the coalition, which takes complaints from the public to the cbsc. However, complaints the coalition has passed to the cbsc have met with less than satisfactory response on the coalition’s part, says Patricia Herdman, co-president of the crt.

The number received more than 400 phone calls in the first three months, says Herdman, although the pace has slowed considerably since then. The bulk of calls have been in support of the coalition’s cause or to complain about American programs over which Canadian regulatory bodies have no authority.

Over eight months, 23 complaints have been sent on to the cbsc, and little has been done to counter the problems, Herdman says.

The few number of complaints actually filed with the cbsc reflects problems with the process, which include the breadth of information required from the complainant, that the complaint must be about a program on a private broadcasting service only, and time restrictions on when that complaint must be filed by, says Herdman. ‘The process is ludicrous. It should be easy to file a complaint.’

Cohen says the process is less the problem than the time factor. The crtc stipulates that broadcasters must keep logger tapes for 28 days and there is little the council can do when complaints are received after logger tapes are no longer available, he says.

Of the 14 complaints the cbsc has received from the coalition, concerned with private broadcasters, seven related to Power Rangers and five to three children’s series that Cohen will not identify. Broadcasters were informed of the complaints but logger tapes were not available for any of the shows in question.

Herdman says the flow of complaints from the coalition to the cbsc has been deliberately slowed until the procedure issues are resolved. ‘We need to find out how the process will work before we readvertise our service.’