ALTHOUGH WE NOW LIVE in a vast internet landscape with immense amounts of content, the diversity and quality of the news media we consume continues to be a concern. Large sites like Facebook, Twitter, and Google should not be trusted to solve these problems.
Internet news platforms have contributed to the closure of traditional news outlets that are the source of much of the quality news consumed online. The internet has facilitated the rise to dominance of…
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VANCOUVER – Heritage Minister Melanie Joly is seeking participants for Canada’s first creative industries trade mission to China.
Speaking Thursday at the Vancouver International Film Festival, Joly said that she will lead the trade mission, scheduled for April 2018, and is seeking representatives from the film/audio-visual (including animation and visual effects); video games and virtual reality/augmented reality (VR/AR); digital content for public/creative spaces/museums; and performing arts sectors looking to further new partnerships and build business-to-business relationships in China.
"Our government is committed to helping Canadian creators and creative entrepreneurs seize opportunities in key global markets, including China, where there is a…
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THE NINE MOST FRIGHTENING words in the English language are “I’m from the government and I’m here to help,” according to an old joke popularized by former U.S. president Ronald Reagan. It’s funny ’cause it’s true.
Heritage Minister Mélanie Joly and her communications team must have forgotten this as they prepared for the announcement last week of her new Creative Canada policy framework (which offers some vision but punts many details down the field) – and augmented it with a shiny headline – the announcement Netflix will invest $500 million in Canada over the next five years.
Beyond her speech and…
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Netflix has said it would, if asked
QUEBEC CITY – Both the Quebec Minister of Culture, Luc Fortin, and Finance Minister Carlos Leitao, told reporters Tuesday they want to force Netflix to collect sales tax from users in the province, according to several reports.
While one immediately wonders why, if they’re worried about fairness, they wouldn’t just allow competing Canadian services to drop the provincial sales taxes they are currently collecting, the issue has been a serious hot button since federal Heritage Minister Mélanie Joly announced her new vision for Canadian content –…
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WHEN HERITAGE MINISTER Mélanie Joly delivered her Creative Canada vision statement last Thursday in Ottawa I was extremely pleased on behalf of Canadian screenwriters — at last, a vision for Canada that puts creators at the centre.
While “creator” can mean many things, when it comes to screen-based entertainment, it means the showrunners and screenwriters that the Writers Guild of Canada represents. However, I wasn’t only pleased for WGC members because I also felt genuine hope — for the first time in a long time (remember the long, Canadian-arts-and-culture-dry years of the Harper government?) — for Canada. The direction 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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Looks like Netflix is chilling with Ottawa
OTTAWA – The Canadian TV biz held a three-hour, industry-wide affair in Ottawa on Wednesday evening, where the Canada Media Fund showcased internationally competitive primetime broadcast TV series to local bureaucrats and politicians (and juuust before Heritage Minister Mélanie Joly outlined her vision to change a bunch of things.)
Netflix and other foreign Internet players, and their impact on local producers and broadcasters, loomed large at the National Press Center event and Joly only sent along her Parliamentary Secretary, Sean Casey, to address the industry gathering and praise Canadian TV producers.
In stage-side comments to…
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OTTAWA – In a speech today at an Economic Club of Canada event, Minister of Canadian Heritage Melanie Joly officially unveiled the federal government’s long awaited digital content strategy. Dubbed 'Creative Canada', the plan has angered some and sated others and calls for increased investments to support both domestic production as well as the promotion of Canadian content abroad.
The release of the strategy comes a day after news leaked that the federal government had inked an agreement with Netflix that would see the online broadcaster and distributor invest a minimum of $500 million in Canadian productions over the next…
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GATINEAU – On Thursday, new CRTC chairman Ian Scott received his “welcome letter” from the two ministers who oversee the Commission, Heritage Minister Mélanie Joly and Innovation, Science and Economic Development Minister Navdeep Bains.
The former government called such letters “mandate letters” which sounded a lot more like directives so this welcoming letter is more visionary, even though it uses the word mandate in its opening paragraph. We’ve copied it below and highlighted what we think might be the most important parts.
However, this being Ottawa, where everything is infused with politics, we’ll leave the reading between the lines to…
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