At the end of The Cable Guy, Jim Carrey's disturbed character is sped off to hospital in an ambulance. When real-life cable guy Dave Dawson's saga ends, he could be in a U.S. jail.

Dawson's Discount Satellite store sells access cards over the Internet which, plugged into a decoder box, enable couch potatoes in Canada, the U.S. and the Caribbean to pick up satellite channels like HBO, Showtime and Cinemax.

Until Tuesday, that is, when RCMP officers and a U.S. Customs official raided Discount Satellite, Dawson's home and the home of a co-worker. Dawson has been charged with five breaches of U.S. law including mail and wire fraud, money laundering and smuggling, says the RCMP.

Police also raided ASAP Printing in St. Albert.

Cops say they seized $69,500 in U.S. and Canadian money orders and cash as well as numerous illegal satellite access cards and computer equipment used in the production of the cards.

Now facing extradition to the U.S. and the possibility of years in prison, Dawson feels like playing the blues. But he can't, because the police seized his guitar. They also seized his computer equipment, his card inventory and his Harley-Davidson Fat Boy motorcycle.

"My children's piggy bank money is gone," he lamented yesterday. "This is a malicious persecution. I'll be launching several lawsuits against the RCMP and the federal Justice Department for what they've done to us."

RCMP Sgt. Dave Edwards isn't sweating. "We conducted the search for U.S. authorities," he said. "It's their file.

"And we didn't seize any piggy banks. We try and keep it professional."

Canadian authorities have to decide whether to grant a request from the U.S. to extradite Dawson so he can be tried. "It's a normal occurrence," said Edwards. "For drug dealers, it's pretty common. But it's not a quick process."

If Canada grants the extradition request, Dawson can fight it in court, which could take up to three years.

The access cards fall into a legal grey area in Canada, says Edwards. Since many U.S. satellite channels aren't sold in Canada and dish owners are picking up signals which drift over the border, courts here have ruled Canadians aren't stealing the programs.

"I'm not aware of the laws in the States," said Dawson, who posts an Internet notice urging e-mail customers to learn and abide by their state's laws. "We're not here to deal with American problems."

By: Fred Cleverly, Sept. 30, 1997

Are the Mounties sincere when they say they intend to crack down on so-called "illegal" small satellite dishes only to protect Canadians, or are they really interested in protecting the federal government's failed broadcast regulation policy? Was it coincidental that the same newspaper which told of the police crackdown carried a full page advertisement for equipment from ExpressVu, the company expected to become Canada's major small dish television distributor? The price, incidentally. was three times what U.S. dishes sell for.

If the RCMP really want to protect Canadians who have bought U.S. services only to have them discontinued, why did Cpl. David Struck, one of the commercial crime section, mention that eventually the owners of the dishes (presumably the Canadians who had been defrauded) could be charged as well as the dealers. He said that people (presumably the same victims) who decode an encrypted signal can be charged under the Radio Communication Act, and could face a maximum fine of $10,000, or six months in jail, or both.

Let's get this perfectly straight. Our federal police force, under orders from the federal government, is talking about putting Canadians in jail for watching the wrong television. How times have changed. During the Second World War it was the Germans who put their citizens in fail for listening to the wrong radio, and later it was the Communists in Russia who jailed people for the same 'crime'. We never jailed, or even threatened jail for people who wanted to listen to the German propagandist Lard Haw Haw, or his Japanese counterpart, Tokyo Rose. We never threatened our citizens with fines or jail if they wanted to keep their radios tuned to Moscow during the Cold War.

Now we are threatening to jail anyone who watches Home Box Office. It is perfectly all right to watch the same movies if they are broadcast by super Channel, or at your neighborhood theatre, but watch them on HBO and the police will get you.

Surely we have more important work for our federal police than to crack down on television that our bureaucracy has not approved. That we are employing them to enforce TV regulations should surprise no one. Recently we had them busy rounding up health foods, not because the foods were dangerous, but simply because our Health Department bureaucrats had not gotten around to approving them.

Most Canadians would be more interested in having every available policeman concentrating on real crime, and not looking for people watching HBO. the police claim they are only acting on behalf of ordinary Canadians who did not get what they paid for when they bought a U.S. satellite service. They point out that U.S. companies would be perfectly happy to provide service to Canadians if the federal government wasn't in the way with it's outdated regulations. You can subscribe to Time magazine not to Direct TV.

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