Who will make the next Little Criminals?

With the wealth of very accomplished tv product shining in the Gemini nominee spotlight, Canada’s broadcasters and producers merit widespread quality celebration time.

Too bad any wholesale glory-basking is tinged by the troubles gnawing away at the roots of Canada’s tv industry.

First there are the domestic troubles. It’s bittersweet to see the cbc rack up an impressive whack of nominations: sweet to see the well-deserved sweep in the news, current affairs and Canadian drama front; bitter when you consider the fate of Undercurrents and what this bodes for the future of news and drama as the fiscally beleaguered pubcaster struggles to do more with less.

CanWest, which had taken up the Canadian drama torch and licensed some topnotch shows, is now threatening to extinguish its support. Whether CanWest (while arguably justifiably miffed by the block to its national network plans) is playing nicely or not (putting into play the non-renewal of shows like Traders, Jake and The Kid and Ready or Not and its New Producers series) will no doubt provide continuous water-cooler drama.

The more pressing (and depressing) question is who would step in to make shows like these possible in Canada?

Now is not the time for private broadcasters behaving badly in the ‘Canadian stories’ field. On the acting and writing front, there’s no room for further provocation in an environment that seems doomed to push people south. Despite the evident talent-q, building a star system is a tough sell already in a nation which is allergic to hero-worship.

The writing side of the equation, which u.s. moguls have trekked to Canada to decry as Canada’s weakness in the not-too-distant past, is strong among the Gemini nominees. Ironically, the writing infrastructure on the print side is now in a weakened state. The challenges to book publishing in Canada in tandem with the new threat to periodicals have reverberations beyond print; in addition to fewer publishing avenues for works that could end up as objects of optioning desire (Coach House Press, which supplied many stories that spawned films, closed last summer due to grant cuts), many Canadian writers subsist by working in multiple mediums.

Which leads to the looming larger-picture troubles. The recent World Trade Organization decision deeming that u.s. magazines can do split runs in Canada is being presaged as a Pandora’s box that will contain tv and radio Cancon, specialty channel restrictions, and all manner of distribution regs among the items Americans would like to end-run around nafta’s cultural exemptions.

It’s tough to present a uniform and united front when the industry is vociferously defending the cultural protections, while attempting to beat/join/infiltrate the American market. It leaves too much exposed flank, and room for retaliatory maneuvers.

Given the stalwart moves by Minister Copps last year, the teeth of Canada’s cultural protection mechanisms didn’t seem particularly loose. But faced with constant wiggling (not to mention the wto’s string/door handle approach) eventually you either sink your teeth in or settle for whatever the tooth fairy leaves behind