from www.montrealgazette.com – Christians are appalled Ottawa is giving the green light to a Canadian pay TV pornography channel that will encourage and sustain a homegrown adult entertainment industry.

The pornography channel, called Vanessa, will begin airing Oct. 28. Montreal-based Sex-Shop Television licensed the channel in 2007 as a national pay TV service.

But it’s only now launching the French-language adult subscription channel in Quebec for $14.95 a month, with an English-language counterpart promised for the rest of Canada in late 2011.

The licence requires Vanessa to air 20 per cent of Canadian programming.

Don Hutchinson, director of law and public policy for the Evangelical Fellowship of Canada, is outraged the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) is in effect, supporting a pornography industry that will lure young Canadians.

“We have an official government body saying that a pornography industry must exist in Canada,” Hutchinson said.

The group opposed in 2008 the approval of Northern Peaks, a pornography cable channel based in Alberta.

“Studies have shown that there are various levels of corruption, from organized crime to engagement in human trafficking and prostitution that are all affiliated directly with the pornography industry. The types of violent and explicitly sexual portrayals that are displayed in pornography reduce people to objects,” Hutchinson said.

The CRTC, Canada’s TV watchdog, said the pornography channel must follow industry codes on violence and “equitable portrayals” of the sexes.

The new service, billed as “Canada’s Playboy Channel,” promises a range of erotic-themed dramas, reality shows, documentaries and variety and magazine shows.

The Quebec broadcaster also will broadcast its soft-core pornographic content in HD.

Canadian cable and satellite TV services already feature a host of XXX-rated pay TV adult content, but they source the programming from U.S. suppliers.

Hutchinson said the Canadian pornography station will be given some form of preference, likely a lower channel number that will result in higher viewership.

He also lamented that while the CRTC has approved new pornography channels, it also recently rejected two applications for Christian radio stations in the Ottawa area.

Sex-Shop Television must now convince cable and satellite TV services to carry the French-language pornography channel and to market it to potential subscribers.

For its part, the Evangelical Fellowship of Canada will try to convince Canadians not to subscribe to the Vanessa channel.

“If it goes on air and it doesn’t have enough subscribers, then the channel will die of a natural death,” Hutchinson added.