By Howard Schneider
Washington Post Foreign Service
Thursday, November 13, 1997; Page A25

It didn't take long on the morning of his first broadcast in Canada for Howard Stern to make his intentions clear regarding this kinder, gentler nation to the north.

Picked up by stations in Toronto and Montreal in an effort to boost ratings, the New York-based "shock jock" called French-speakers in Quebec "scumbags" and some even less charitable things in the first few minutes, scraping the sorest of Canada's cultural wounds.

He said he would pay no special attention to Canada. Wouldn't visit. Wouldn't discuss its issues. He would treat his new international audience no different from listeners in Ohio or Texas or anywhere else in the United States.

"You can judge a nation by the men it produces, and other than hockey players, whores and William Shatner, you people have not produced a lot," he said. "If you're thinking, 'Well, big deal, Canada is just the United States anyway,' well, I'm thinking the same thing."

Since then, there have been two responses to Stern's show -- evidence of the gulf that sometimes exists here between the Canada that the country's cultural laws and agencies aim to create and the Canada that Canadians choose when left to their own devices.

Audiences are lapping it up, tripling the ratings of a Toronto station, CILQ, and generating what an executive at Montreal's CHOM said are "huge" numbers for that market.

Officially, however, in a country ever protective of its culture and worried about U.S. dominance of it, Stern's presence has ignited a battle over broadcasting standards that highlights how even such fundamental ideas as freedom of speech can vary in significant ways between two quite similar societies.

The United States may have its list of proscribed dirty words and its decency standards -- and Stern certainly has violated them on occasion, accumulating record Federal Communications Commission fines in the process. But in Canada, where the protection of speech is less absolute, broadcasters must avoid wider categories of expression, including "abusive" language that targets people on the basis of race, sexual orientation and other attributes, and language that does not display "sensitivity to the problems related to sex-role stereotyping."

The occasional ethnic joke can pass muster, and nudity on shows like the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's daily "Fashion File" has been reviewed and found fitting. Blue language, in fact, is less of an issue here than in the United States: Even the CBC has put words on the air that would violate American sensibilities.

But when it comes to phrases like "fat cow" and "dyke" or Stern's panoply of ethnic jibes, this country draws a line. Though many Canadians have been listening to Stern -- far more, according to one local radio ad executive, than tune in to the CBC's morning radio show -- more than 1,000 have complained. In response, the Canadian Broadcast Standards Council concluded this week that virtually every episode of Stern's show ran afoul of either the local broadcast industry's Code of Ethics or the separate Sex-Role Portrayal Code.

Some days it was invective about the French; some days it was his incessant questioning of women about their breast sizes, figures and sexual practices. Some days it was both.

"Stop worrying about separatism and start worrying about your weight," he told one Canadian caller.

That may all be within the bounds of the First Amendment in the United States, the panel acknowledged, but not in Canada, where the Charter of Rights and Freedoms hedges every guarantee with the prospect of "reasonable limits."

"The globalization of the late twentieth century village does not mean the abdication of the maintenance of order within its Canadian borders," the commission, an industry-run group established in 1990 to police the conduct of its members, concluded in an 86-page report. "The existence of other standards in other parts of the global village cannot weaken the need to apply home-grown standards within the Canadian bailiwick. The bar should not be lowered in Canada just because it is set at a lesser height elsewhere."

Ron Cohen, national chairman of the commission, said today: "We respect freedom of speech, but we don't worship it. We have other values that we are prepared to weigh into the equation. [Stern] may intend to be funny, but it passes over the line. It may be he's funny. It may be funny in the U.S. . . . It doesn't work here."

Although the council's rulings are non-binding and could be ignored by the two stations, the panel's decision effectively sets a challenge for them since the show's syndicated content is outside their control: Drop Stern, or face a potentially more serious review by the government body that issues broadcasting licenses, the Canadian Radio-Television and Telecommunications Commission.

Neither station has responded to the commission's decision thus far. But the radio-TV panel's spokeswoman, Lise Plouffe, said the agency will monitor the situation closely and can intervene at any point if there is reason to believe the stations are violating the requirement that all programming in Canada be of a "high standard."

If they are sanctioned by the agency and choose to fight, it could provide a rare challenge to Canada's regulation of speech, Plouffe said. Usually, when the agency has cited a broadcaster for violating standards, fines have been paid without a court challenge to the underlying rules.

When the panel said in 1995 that the "Mighty Morphin Power Rangers" television show violated violence standards, for example, two Canadian networks voluntarily dropped the show even though it was one of the most highly rated in the history of Canadian children's programming.

In cases involving hate propaganda and other restricted speech that have gone to litigation, University of Toronto law professor Kent Roach said, the Canadian Supreme Court has upheld limits that would not withstand a First Amendment challenge in the United States.

"We accept reasonable limits on freedom of expression," Roach said, "and we have taken very seriously the feelings of groups that may feel they are targeted by distasteful forms of expression."