Montreal: Quebec Finance Minister Bernard Landry has committed to a foreign film and tv production tax measure or rebate program, which is expected to be tabled formally in the next provincial budget early this spring.

The Quebec service rebate is calculated in addition to the Nov. 1 federal film or video production services tax credit, worth about 5.5% of total production costs, and is competitive with the 11% rebate program recently announced by the government of Ontario.

The Quebec production service rebate was announced in Los Angeles Feb. 18 prior to Locations ’98 by Pierre Lampron, president of sodec, the agency which will administer the new program. Representatives from the Initiative Quebec production and service promotion group, the Montreal and Quebec City film and tv commissions and some 150 u.s. industry guests were also on hand.

‘Seeing that we have placed ourselves in competitive territory, the [foreign location spending] objective varies between $100 million and $200 million a year,’ says Lampron.

While details won’t come out until the budget, Lampron says the rebate will have a value of ‘a minimum of 11%’ of all production and service-related manpower costs incurred by a foreign producer on location in Quebec.

By way of an example, Lampron says assuming 50% of $20 million in expenditure is tied directly to admissible manpower costs, the value of the rebate would then be $1.1 million.

At press time, it was not known whether the program would be retroactive, but normally, fiscal programs take effect the day they are tabled in the Quebec National Assembly.

Foreign location spending in Quebec, essentially American production, is currently pegged at $130 million in ’97, up from $86.5 million in ’96.

The new service rebate is the third fiscally based incentive aimed at boosting various categories of Quebec-based production.

sodec already manages a new 15% dubbing credit, expected to help French-language audiovisual export sales, and a domestic refundable production tax credit (in operation since 1990), representing 15% to 20.5% of production budgets.

In fiscal ’96/97, sodec certified $390 million in Quebec-content production for tax credit purposes. Andre Lafond of the City of Montreal Film and Television Commission pegs the calendar ’97 indie production total, all categories, at $565 million, up from $405 million in ’96.

Some of the major u.s. location shoots here last year were the Paramount Pictures blockbuster Snake Eyes, an investment estimated at $70 million, the Largo Entertainment (jvc) financed feature Affliction, the Lyric Studio (PolyGram) feature Barney’s Great Adventure and the Punch Productions feature The Blouse Man.