Source : Toronto Star

Friday night at the movies, the hottest ticket was not Jennifer Aniston's latest attempt at big screen success (Along Came Polly) but the Canadian documentary The Corporation.

Enthusiasm for The Corporation could explain why a chunk of the Bloor Cinema's ceiling fell on the full house below. This visually compelling vivisection of corporate power not only premiered to sold-out crowds and rave reviews in Toronto last weekend but also earned standing ovations at last year's Toronto Film Festival, and is generating big buzz right now at the Sundance Film Festival.

It's been compared Michael Moore's Oscar-winning Bowling For Columbine - although it is far more unassailable when it comes to conveying the facts.

For all this, thank good old TVOntario, which will air The Corporation in three parts late next month. You can be sure that a private broadcaster would never risk offending its advertisers, corporate shareholders or board members by participating. In fact, when it was pitched at the Banff Television Festival a few years ago, it was met with hostility. So it figures that it takes a public broadcaster to fund and run a program such as this, or tomorrow's The World Stopped Watching, a documentary about Nicaragua, or the nightly flagship Studio 2, now marking its 10th year on air.

But now there's talk that Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty's government will sell off TVO to grapple with the $5.6 billion deficit left by the provincial Conservatives.

Needless to say, The National Post, which runs a regular CBC-bashing feature, jumped on the speculation with an editorial written by somebody who obviously never paid much attention to anything on the network beyond his or her own appearances on Studio 2 or Diplomatic Immunity panels.

The editorial contains the usual ignorant ideological statements about what commercial TV would likely do if TVO were to be sold off - while never once mentioning that the publisher (CanWest Global) owns a commercial network that would be the last on earth to run public affairs TV of this tone and calibre.

Give me a freaking break.

That said, the signs of a sell-off, probably for little more than the $50 million or so that TVO costs taxpayers per year, are troubling.

True, McGuinty hasn't actually come out and said he'd privatize TVO. In fact, last week he played down rumours that it was for sale and that chair and CEO Isabel Bassett, "life partner" of Tory leader Ernie Eves, would be demoted.

"That is not in the cards; that is premature," he said. "And we'll see what the people of Ontario have to say with respect to the future of TVO."

What's more, last week, Training, Colleges and Universities Minister Mary Anne Chambers told the Star's Robert Benzie that there "are absolutely no changes in the plan at this point."

Not exactly ringing denials.

Meanwhile, well-placed sources continue to insist that something major is in the works.

McGuinty and Alliance Atlantis chair and CEO Michael MacMillan are getting awfully cosy.

MacMillan has already been involved with Liberal fundraising but, on March 10, he will be chairing the Heritage Dinner, a $750-a-plate fundraiser expected to bring millions into the party's coffers.

Hmmm ...

Now that Alliance Atlantis has pared its production business, an over-the-air broadcaster would be a fine complement to its stable of cable channels that includes HGTV, National Geographic and Life. Many of those channels present programming that could be considered educational, which would fall nicely into TVO's mandate.

But they wouldn't be the same challenging documentaries, that's for sure.

These are, admittedly, slim threads upon which to base fears that TVO is about to dumped. But where there's smoke, there's often a fire sale.

BIG B.O.: The makers of The Corporation plead on their Web site www.thecorporation.tv) that people pay up at the box office: "In today's context, it's a political act to see this film in a commercial movie theatre."

No kidding. It's not only tough for indie films to get monsterplex play, it's tougher for documentaries, tougher still for Canadian indie documentaries and downright miraculous for a Canadian indie documentary that stabs deep into the heart of global capitalism.

Buying a movie ticket today is tantamount to submitting to extortion - and don't get me started on the price of popcorn.

Yet it's how the worth of a movie is measured, in dollars. It's also how commercial TV judges success - by how many eyeballs it sells to advertisers.

Some things, such as public broadcasting, should simply be considered priceless.

© The Toronto Star