LAST WEEK, CARTT.CA's Greg O’Brien published an edited version of a presentation he gave as a “provocateur” at a roundtable session about the future of Canadian television production at Ryerson University. The Writers Guild of Canada (WGC) was, in the best spirit of intellectual engagement and discussion, indeed provoked!
To begin with, the WGC wholeheartedly agrees with O’Brien’s acknowledgement that Canadian film and television production is an important driver of economic activity in Canada. We also agree that the Canadian creative industries need and deserve government support in order to survive and thrive. And we particularly agree that the government support which the Canadian creative sector now receives is not only not excessive, but in fact pales in comparison to that provided elsewhere.
O’Brien points out that the Canadian creative industries employ 27 times more people than Bombardier, a manufacturer of planes and trains, but has received less in federal government assistance than that one company alone over the past two years. In 2016, the WGC did its own analysis comparing Canada with other international jurisdictions, and calculated that “direct support” to English-Canadian film and television amounted to roughly $1.78 billion CAD per year, yet the United Kingdom provided around $7.3 billion.
This was greater than Canada on both an absolute-dollar and a per-capita basis. And Denmark did yet more per capita, spending more than double English-Canada’s per-capita amount. Even the U.S. industry received over $3.2 billion CAD in government support annually. When you consider what these other countries spend, our own current government supports for Canadian film and television are far from extravagant.
But the WGC parts ways with O’Brien on the question of “industrial” policy versus “cultural.” Canada currently has a robust service production sector that engages industrial policy goals. But cultural products are not like cars. We may not care where a car was made, only how it functions, because cars are largely functional machines meant primarily to get us from A to B. But film and television productions are not primarily functional. A car produced in Ontario or Kentucky functions the same way whether it’s being driven in Canada, the U.S., Europe, or South America, or by a driver from those places.
By contrast, a highly specific political joke from Canada may make no sense just across the border in America where Canadian politicians are largely unknown. The social context that characters and/or narratives operate in may be vastly different across cultures, and the cultural impacts of art is wide-ranging and distinct in each one. Former WGC Council member and dearly missed friend Denis McGrath put it beautifully two years ago in a piece for Cartt.ca called “When Your Moral Compass Doesn’t Point True North,” and it’s well worth re-reading.
“Just because some people may roll their eyes at cultural arguments, there’s no reason to claim they are a ‘failed brand’.”
And just because some people may roll their eyes at cultural arguments, there’s no reason to claim they are a “failed brand.” In fact, public opinion research prepared for the Privy Council in 2016 found that supporting Canadian content “was deemed as ensuring a greater level of diversity” by Canadians, and that among those same Canadians, strong Cancon, “was viewed as raising the country’s profile abroad, educating Canadians on its history and heritage, and inspiring Canadians to get involved in the industry.” Many Canadians, it seems, do support the “cultural” component of “cultural policy.” We see no reason to ignore that, while at the same time recognizing the jobs that Canadian content production also generates.
The WGC also has serious concerns with any proposal to scrap policy tools like the 5% contribution to Canadian programming made by broadcasting distribution undertakings (BDUs) to places like the Canada Media Fund (CMF). Of course the government can reorient funding so that all or most of it is delivered directly from general revenues. But regulatory tools like the 5% BDU contribution have played an important stabilizing role in the sector.
Unlike funding for the CBC, the BDU contributions have not become a political football every few years, or a convenient place to cut when budgetary pressures, real or perceived, arise. It’s very arguable that the licence fee model used to fund the BBC has helped make it the preeminent public broadcaster in the world, and that funding stability—in addition to the sheer amount of funding—has been no small part of its success.
We also disagree that expanding the BDU contribution model to ISPs falls under the heading of “Never going to fly.” On the contrary, the CRTC recently flew this very notion, although they included the condition that overall communications costs for consumers would not increase. The WGC doesn’t want to raise costs for consumers either. We’ve pointed out before that if Internet and wireless prices in Canada are high, that can’t have anything to do with cultural policy tools which don’t apply to those services. So, if affordability is not a cultural policy issue now, why seek to address it through eroding our cultural policy?
Telecom affordability issues should not and will not be solved on the backs of Canadian creators. As for the Supreme Court, its decision was based on whether the current Broadcasting Act gave the CRTC the jurisdiction to impose such a levy on ISPs, not whether such an approach would be in the best interest of Canadians. The government is free to amend the Broadcasting Act to address the former issue, rendering the Supreme Court decision moot.
The WGC of course agrees with O’Brien that OTT providers should contribute to Cancon, just as Canadian broadcasters now do. But as we reflect on the fact that Canadian cultural industries are, if anything, under-supported by government, we should look for sensible ways to expand those supports, and not pursue a course that 
could narrow their mandate, destabilize them, and/or undervalue their unique, cultural contribution to our country and its talent pool. As a nation, we cannot become what we aspire to be without knowing who we are, and it is in large part through our art and culture that we come to better understand ourselves. The best “branding” starts with what is true.
Neal McDougall, pictured, is director of policy for the Writers Guild of Canada.
