Cable campaign falls silent during CRTC hearings

Coincidental or not, the repetitious messages urging Canadians to "Stop the TV Tax" have ceased with the beginning of the CRTC hearings on the subject. In fact, the CRTC chair complained about the fevered campaigning by both sides as the hearings opened. The messages, which have run many times a day for months on U.S. cable channels carried by the cable companies, feature an actor, posing as a man-on-the-street reporter. He earnestly tells of a "$10 tax" and questions ordinary people, presumably also actors, about the tax. "Unbelievable" and "kind of greedy" are among the scripted responses he gets. His closing exhortation of "Come on Canada, enough is enough" has caused more than one cable viewer, as it apparently did the CRTC chair, to conclude that it is, indeed, more than enough. TPG