Earlier this week, Canadians were treated to the spectacle of a minister of the crown engaging a Hollywood film director in a public relations debate about policy.

Chinese director Ang Lee — who has made beautiful and nuanced films exploring subjects such as sex, violence and social morality, including The Ice Storm, Brokeback Mountain and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon — joined a legion of Canadian filmmakers in condemning Bill C-10, which has passed in the house of commons and is now awaiting confirmation in the senate. The proposed law would deny funding to films whose content is deemed contrary to public policy, such as those containing sex and violence. Lee warned that this was uncomfortably close to censorship and said that the government had no business regulating artistic decisions.

To which Josée Verner, the minister of Canadian heritage, status of women and official languages replied, essentially, no, no, no, this is not censorship at all, silly foreigner. Or, more precisely, she said, “His statement is completely erroneous,” since the tax credits in question would not apply to foreign films shooting in Canada. She went on to say, “Our government is determined to ensure freedom of expression and will continue to support the production of entertaining and high-quality content. We are reaching out to industry to work with them on Bill C-10.”

The industry, of course, is uninterested in negotiating with bureaucrats and politicians on appropriate limits on their freedom of expression, because Ang Lee, outsider though he may be, has diagnosed the situation precisely. In a country where the film industry is entirely dependent on government funding and tax credits, a decision to deny funding to content perceived to be immoral is censorship, plain and simple, and in a particularly insidious form, since it relies on bureaucratic measurements of morality and the tax code rather than public proclamations of intolerance.

We seem to have a bit of a censorship problem emerging in Canada. If the drive to limit naughty movies comes from the moralizing of right-wing Christians, an equally disturbing push that we’ve written about before has emerged from the moralizing of left-wing activists. That is, the recent use of human rights tribunals to suppress speech deemed offensive to minority groups.

In both cases, there is a sense among the ban-happy parties that the tender moral sensibilities of Canadians are in desperate need of protection from the pollution of those who want to explore ideas, images and topics held to be “offensive.” In both cases, the urge is not to enter into a debate about right and wrong, but to shut down debate by shutting up opponents or limiting their ability to communicate. And in both cases, the moralists try to circumvent the spotlight and safeguards of the criminal courts (where obscenity and hate-speech laws already provide constitutionally appropriate limits to expression) to silence their opponents with bureaucracy.

It’s interesting that this elevated activity among the see-no-evil, hear-no-evil crowd comes as a particular era of free-speech activism comes to an end. A few years ago, the Glad Day Bookstore in Toronto announced that after decades of fighting book bans imposed on gay and lesbian material by customs officials, they were backing off from the fight out of poverty and exhaustion. This week, the remaining pillar of the customs-fighting queer-expression activists made a similar decision, when the owners of Vancouver’s Little Sisters bookstore announced they were selling their business. These two shops have been at the vanguard of free speech in Canada for generations, not just issuing platitudes but fighting in the courts at great expense, risk and frustration.

What those two bookstores showed over the years was that the price of freedom is eternal vigilance; that court decisions and public support are only one part of the struggle and that what happens in obscure government offices is equally important and dangerous.

Recently, the minister of heritage and the usually obscure human rights commissions are demonstrating that there are plenty of battles still to be fought. And it doesn’t take a constitutional scholar (or a Hollywood celebrity) to realize that.