morons

Tomorrow is Tax Freedom Day! Celebrate by pledging not to call the police or the fire department or drive on a public highway for the rest of the year. Or just watch this video, which lists the various things you have to pay tax on. It also reminds Canadians that their tax dollars go for such horrors as CPP and EI.

Al Jazeera English TV’s Avi Lewis is the latest PromArt recipient to crawl out from under the PMO’s Panderbus and explain himself: he got some money to promote a Canadian independent film in Australia and New Zealand, and helped get it a distribution deal. “It was a no-brainer,” he writes in the Toronto Star. “The proceeds of the sale went straight to the National Film Board, defraying the public money that had helped to make the film in the first place.”

The National Post‘s Kelly McParland believes Tal Bachman “has a pretty successful career going, and can’t possibly need Ottawa to pay his air fare.” But he wasn’t too busy, famous or rich to set the record straight on his blog about his turn at the PromArt trough, expanding on and clarifying a few points he and Eye‘s Marc Weisblott discussed yesterday. The basic story—musician asked to play guitar for South African orphans; Canada’s New Government appalled—hasn’t changed, but he makes his political leanings quite clear.

Another triumph for the government pandermeisters! (See vol. I, Tal Bachman.) It seems Gwynne Dyer, the pundit deemed too left-wing and too wealthy to receive funding to promulgate Canadian values in Cuba (a) asked for no funding, (b) had never heard of PromArt until his name cropped up in the government’s talking panderpoints and (c) was asked to go to Cuba, in 2007, by the Department of Foreign Affairs!

Tal Bachman, singled out by the government as one of the “wealthy rock stars” unworthy of public funding to take their acts abroad, says he never applied for any funding and explains to Eye‘s Marc Weisblott just how the trip went down: