OTTAWA – The federal government has followed through on its commitment to top up the Canada Media Fund in the face of declining contributions from broadcast distribution undertakings (BDUs). Minister of Canadian Heritage Melanie Joly first made the announcement last September when she unveiled Creative Canada.
Budget 2018 has committed $172 million more dollars over five years, starting this year, to maintain the CMF’s funding” at 2016-2017 levels. CMF will receive $15 million this year, $29 million in 2019-20 and then $42.5 million in the following three years.
The Liberals noted that the actual amount of money will vary each year…
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FOR MANY DECADES, THE Canadian TV market had the luxury of being a walled garden protected by the limits of technology. We even carved out a national production industry and nurtured significant cultural achievements next door to the world’s largest content market.
Now, however, digitalized content has climbed over the garden’s walls and caused content markets to globalize and flatten.
We responded to this change with the defensive strategy of vertical integration. We tried to create barriers, concentrating our domestic market, but the problem was this just deepened our dependence on our domestic market and made us less competitive globally. We’ve…
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OTTAWA – According to the latest figures released today by the Canadian Media Producers Association, overall production volume in Canada soared to an all-time high of $8.38 billion in 2016/17.
This is a 24% rise in volume over the previous year, helped generate 171,000 full-time jobs and added $12 billion to the country’s GDP, says the association’s annual report Profile 2017: An Economic Report on the Screen-Based Media Production Industry in Canada.
“With record growth across much of Canada’s production sector, there is much to celebrate this year, including the creation of jobs and a significant contribution to the country’s economy,”…
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TORONTO – Jesse Wente has been appointed director of Canada’s Indigenous Screen Office, a role he will assume starting February 1, 2018, it was announced today.
The ISO is an initiative first announced by the Honourable Mélanie Joly, Minister of Canadian Heritage, at the Banff World Media Festival in June.
A film expert, broadcaster and cultural industries leader, Wente (pictured) has spent two decades working in the creative community and advocating for Indigenous rights. He has been director of film programmes at the TIFF Bell Lightbox for the past seven years, and has contributed to CBC Radio as a critic,…
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IT’S BEEN MORE THAN 25 years since legislation guiding the communications sector came into force. There have some minor changes, but both the Telecommunications Act and the Broadcasting Act have remained largely the same – their objectives essentially left untouched. They have stood the test of time, some say. Others, however, point to the enormous impact of the Internet in arguing for big changes to these laws.
“The Internet has really become the central communication mode in our life now, and yet we have legislation that makes a distinction between telecom and broadcasting and also between wireless and wireline. It…
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EDMONTON – Edmonton’s new French-language community FM radio station is one step closer to fruition after receiving over $600,000 in federal funding.
The Société radio communautaire du grand Edmonton Society said Monday that it received $400,000 from Western Economic Diversification Canada and almost $296,000 from Canadian Heritage for the new station Radio Cité.
The station aims to serve 38,000 potential listeners with local community programming plus offer advertising options to help promote the 325 businesses and community organizations delivering programs and services in French within the greater Edmonton area. It received CRTC approval in January 2017 to operate at 97.9 MHz.
“All…
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Reunites art and technology for a brighter future
SEPTEMBER 28 WAS ONE of the most important days in Canadian history and we missed it. On that day, Canadian Heritage Minister Mélanie Joly launched our new cultural policy, Creative Canada.
In Canada, artists need our support. We made the decision to support them in the middle of the last century when we realized our historical connection to England and France, and physical proximity to the United States, meant Canadian culture might get lost amid louder voices.
Now our artists need help transitioning to the digital world. More importantly, the digital world, our…
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OTTAWA – A letter signed by Heritage Minister Mélanie Joly, ISED Minister Navdeep Bains and Finance Minister Bill Morneau confirms there will be no tax applied to Canadian ISPs in order to support Canadian content and journalism.
The October 16th letter – sent in response to the Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage report entitled “Disruption: Change and Churning in Canada's Media Landscape” – actually seems to kibosh a lot of the committee’s wish list.
(Ed note: The letter reads more like a detailed defense of the current Liberal policies , prior announcements [Creative Canada – within which echoes of…
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IN QUEBEC, THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT’S cultural policy announcement has landed with a decisive thud. The province’s governing Liberals were as scathing in their denunciation of the “Creative Canada” policy as the sovereigntist Parti Québécois and the left-wing party Québec Solidaire. Highbrow left-wing daily Le Devoir accused the federal government of nothing less than “excusing injustice,” while right-wing sovereigntist columnist Mathieu Bock-Côté, writing in the Journal de Montréal, accused Canadian Heritage Minister Mélanie Joly of “dereliction of duty.”
The opinion pages of the centre-right tabloids Le Journal de Montréal and Le Journal de Québec, usually skeptical of all things Trudeau, lit…
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MONTREAL – Construction on CBC/Radio-Canada’s new home in Montreal is officially underway after a ground breaking ceremony held Sunday.
Canadian Heritage Minister Mélanie Joly, CBC/Radio-Canada president and CEO Hubert Lacroix, Broccolini Real Estate Group president Roger Plamondon, and Montreal Mayor Denis Coderre (all pictured) took part in the ceremony which also featured the release of dozens of butterflies in a symbolic guesture of transformation and innovation.
The new Maison de Radio-Canada (MRC) will have a total footprint of over 418,000 square feet and consist of a seven-storey tower and a four-storey tower connected by an atrium that is open to the…
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