The Canada Media Fund (CMF) last week announced a new chair and the appointment of a new director to its board.
Michael Schmalz has been elected as chair of the board, succeeding outgoing chair Alain Cousineau, who left the board of directors after an 11-year tenure.
Appointed as a CMF board director by the Department of Canadian Heritage in 2017, Schmalz resides in London, Ont., is fully bilingual, and brings more than 17 years of experience in the digital media industry, with a focus on gaming innovation.
René Guimond has been appointed…
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The National Film Board of Canada (NFB) has entered into a new collective agreement with the Professional Institute of the Public Service of Canada (PIPSC), having received approval last week from the Governor General in Council on the recommendation of the Minister of Canadian Heritage.
The new NFB-PIPSC agreement is retroactive to July 1, 2022 and will expire June 30, 2026. The previous four-year agreement expired June 30, 2022.
The agreement covers all employees of the NFB in the Administrative and Foreign Service Category and the Scientific and Professional Category.
The terms of the new agreement include wage increases…
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Canadian Heritage has announced the appointment of Marc Beaudet to the board of directors of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, as well as the re-appointment of Marie Wilson and Guillaume Aniorté, all for five-year terms expiring May 23, 2029.
Beaudet is being appointed in place of François R. Roy, whose term expired recently.
Currently senior vice president of studio operations at Montreal-based Cloud Imperium Games (CIG), Beaudet is the former co-founder and CEO of digital platform developer Turbulent, which was acquired by CIG in July 2023.
Beaudet was one of nine appointees to an independent advisory committee created in June…
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Canada and the government of Quebec announced Monday they are co-organizing the inaugural meeting of the UNESCO Group of Experts on the diversity of cultural expressions in the digital environment, which is being held in Québec City from May 28 to 30.
Composed of 18 independent experts from around the world, the group has a mandate to reflect on the implementation of the UNESCO Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions (known as the 2005 Convention) in the digital age and make recommendations to parties who ratified…
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Canadian Heritage has announced the appointment of Sylvain Lafrance as chairperson of Telefilm Canada. In addition, Deborah MacPherson and Claude Doucet have been appointed as members of Telefilm’s board of directors.
The five-year terms of all three appointees began May 9.
An expert in the fields of media management and communications, Lafrance worked at CBC/Radio-Canada for more than three decades. Before leaving the national public broadcaster in 2011, he held the position of executive vice president of French services, where he led the integration of the Crown corporation’s radio,…
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Canadian Heritage announced via X on Thursday that Claire Anderson has been reappointed as CRTC commissioner for British Columbia and Yukon for a second five-year term.
The official order in council dated May 3 says her reappointment is effective Aug. 26, 2024.
A citizen of the Taku River Tlingit First Nation and based in Whitehorse, Anderson is the first Indigenous woman and first Yukon resident to be appointed as a CRTC commissioner. Her original appointment started in August 2019.
Called to the Yukon bar in 2014, Anderson started…
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By Christopher Guly
OTTAWA – The head of CBC came to the House of Commons Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage on Tuesday proudly declaring that the public broadcaster’s “financial outlook has improved” since last December when it announced plans to cut 600 jobs to offset an estimated shortfall of $125 million, and had been reduced to about $20 million, resulting in no need for further payroll cuts to balance the books at CBC/Radio Canada.
But several members of the committee, which has been scrutinizing the employment reduction at the English-French broadcaster, were more focused on…
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This is part two of a three-part feature. Please read part one here.
By Doug Barrett, adjunct professor in the Arts, Media & Entertainment MBA program at the Schulich School of Business
In my last piece, I suggested that the critical definition of Canadian Content was that set out in the Income Tax Act and Regulations and administered by the Canadian Audio-Visual Certification Office (CAVCO) and asked why the ongoing debate focused instead on the definition used by the CRTC.
In this piece, I’d like to look a little closer at the CAVCO role. In my…
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By Ahmad Hathout
Google is asking the Federal Court of Appeal to allow it to argue that the CRTC should have included in its new broadcasting fee regulations an explicit exemption for advertisements that are placed on user-generated content.
The CRTC ordered in March a new way it was going to calculate revenues and collect fees for its operations, lowering traditional broadcasting obligations with the transfer of some of that collection to online platforms in line with the new Online Streaming Act that will bring the latter services under its ambit.
During the intervention phase of that 2023 proceeding,…
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By Connie Thiessen
The 2024 federal budget includes support for media and the cultural industries, with a focus on bolstering publicly-funded broadcasting, fortifying the Local Journalism Initiative (LJI), and championing diverse storytelling in film and television.
Budget 2024, released Tuesday, proposes to provide an additional $42 million in 2024-25 for CBC/Radio-Canada news and entertainment programming, on top of its $1.4-billion public funding allocation.
CBC President and CEO Catherine Tait said in a statement that the one-time funding would help the corporation “manage its financial challenges in a more stable manner.”
“This is welcome news. This investment, together with the steps we have taken…
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