The Canadian Alliance Party has been making political hay over government grants to smutty art shows, movies and novels. Among the fine art the party complains about in its platform section on government waste is a $5,000 award to a play by acclaimed aboriginal playwright Tomson Highway and $20,000 for the play The Exstasy of Bedridden Riding Hood (about an elderly woman locked away in a retirement home).

If that's got Doris's knickers in a knot, do you think Day has any idea what the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade is up to in Paris this month? How about grotesquely mutilated human bodies and other unknown lifeforms. Kinky sex and lots of drugs. Perversions and twins, porn stars and creepy-crawlies, auto-eroticism with spectacular violence and more mutilations. All that plus exploding heads.

Yes, it's a tribute to Canadian film director David Cronenberg, the auteur behind such classics as Crash, eXistenZ, Naked Lunch and Dead Ringers. This six-week festival, running until Dec. 16, features screenings, interviews, panel discussions and a display of objects from his gruesomely avant-garde films.

Cronenberg's films elicit strong reactions, and I'm a little surprised the Canadian Alliance hasn't latched onto this one. Cronenberg's been generating political outrage since his debut in 1975 with Shivers, a Telefilm financed horror show. Robert Fulford's wrote an article in Saturday Night magazine entitled: "You Should Know How Bad This Film Is. After All, You Paid For It."

But maybe the politicians are afraid to tangle with the cultural icon, now that he's universally admired -- if not loved. And what the heck .. Cronenberg made our money back with Shivers, and has been paying Canadian taxes ever since. (He still lives in Toronto and makes all of his movies here.)

The Paris series is certainly an important undertaking for Canada's government. In film-nerd circles, Cronenberg is considered by many to be an American director ("He is the intellectual poet of the American cinema at the end of the twentieth century," on film nerd states.) Yet his worldview and aesthetic are very much influenced by his Canadian experience.

Meanwhile, Cronenberg has a couple of things in the works: he's taken on an acting role in the 10th installment of Friday The 13th, and is rumoured to be in heavy negotiations with Sharon Stone to direct the sequel to Basic Instinct. And the Canadian Consul in Paris is busy promoting a number of other Canadian artists with a steady stream of important shows. Also running this month are tributes to Robin Collyer, Michael Snow and Arnaud Maggs.

Western Front:
The avante-garde gallery Western Front has been keeping ahead of the times for 20 years on the Vancouver Art scene, and doing it with a healthy sense of humour. The latest exhibit is Robert Arndt's Proposals for Exhibitions, a witty series of photographs of the gallery space on which eight 'proposed' artworks have been digitally superimposed, re-photographed from the computer screen and enlarged to hang on the gallery wall.

Western Front describes the work: "Arndt's work plays with that sometimes awkward dialogue between idea and object. Our media saturated culture - in which art is more readily available through pages of books and art magazines than in museums or galleries - promotes a subordinate role of the object to its documentation. While Arndt's photographs employ certain 'verite' trappings, such as the enlarged pixels of the computer screen, revealing the method of production, they carry an irony in their beautiful and meticulous rendering."

Arndt is a recent graduate of Emily Carr Institute of Art & Design and now lives in Saskatchewan, and this is his first big show, an auspicious beginning and I suspect we'll be hearing a lot more of him in the years to come.

Fine Tuning:Peter Mansbridge is in Vancouver for another of CBC's pre-election Town Halls (last week's was in Halifax). Different coast, new panelists and an audience, all answering the same question: "What do you want from your federal government?" At least it's a more open-ended question than one usually gets from telephone pollsters. (9 p.m. on CBC-TV). And speaking of pollsters, there are about 10 different companies out there working this election, and they must have contacted half of us Canadians by now. You can get behind the scenes of the polling biz with a Passionate Eye re-broadcast of Ask a Silly Question, film-maker John Kastner's tribute to opinion polls. "How easy is it to skew the results? Just watch Kastner and his crew." (10 p.m. ET on CBC Newsworld.)