Canadian TV – an analogy

Imagine if you will that most of our food came from the United States.  This reality is made possible by a combination of factors, the least of which includes a bigger market, and a better financial and environmental situation.  Canada makes some of its food, but not enough to supply every person with every kind of food.  In order to satisfy our culinary egos, the government has decided to mandate that a certain minimum amount of food be produced in Canada.  Your tax dollars are being used to subsidize the production of Canadian food, even though it might not be otherwise financially feasible to do so.

Here comes the kicker.  Imagine that when you go to buy your food at the store, you can't just buy tomatoes.  If you want tomatoes, you have to get celery and beets too.  In this reality if you want tomatoes you have to get the celery and beets as well, no matter if you don't want them.  The worst part is that you have no say over this and that Canadian celery and beets only exist thanks to your tax dollars.

It gets worse.  You can't have tomatoes whenever you want them.  You can only have them when the tomato producers feel like putting them in the store.  This happens on their schedule of course,  not yours.  So if you feel like making spaghetti sauce with tomatoes tonight for supper, that's just too bad.  You'll have to wait until the tomatoes are in the store.  There is one exception.  You can pay someone to buy some tomatoes for you on the day they're available and keep them for you until you need them.  If you try to go to the farm where the tomatoes are grown and buy them on the day you want them, you'll be turned away.  If you ask the grocery store to make tomatoes available every day, they'll tell you they can't afford to do that.  They'll also make it clear that if you want tomatoes, you need to get celery and beets as well because the celery and beets industry won't survive on their own.  You might be inclined to suggest that maybe we don't need celery and beets if the market can't support them.  But your suggestion would fall on deaf ears.

This is how the television industry works in Canada.  Is it any wonder people steal tomatoes from the farm?