Add Ontario’s minister of citizenship, culture and recreation to the list of those opposing a recommendation to eliminate the federal production services tax credit.

Isabel Bassett says the Ontario government will fight to protect the vitality of the film and television production industry and that eliminating the federal tax credit for foreign companies would have a negative impact.

Bassett has sent a letter to Sheila Copps urging the Heritage minister to reject the advisory committee’s foreign tax credit elimination proposal.

While Bassett says she supports federal initiatives to boost the domestic feature industry, she says that eliminating the credit could cost Ontario $100 million in foreign production activity as well as significant job losses.

‘I’m for anything the federal government will do to boost domestic films, but I’m not advocating and I’ll criticize severely anything that will reduce and drive away the foreign film industry,’ says Bassett.

Foreign production accounted for half of the $743-million worth of production in Ontario last year.

In Quebec too, opposition is mounting. Commenting on the production service issue, Montreal film commissioner Andre Lafond says ‘disturbing the highly sensitive mosaic of incentives’ will have a serious negative impact on location production in Canada.

In 1998, Montreal recorded $197.4 million in foreign production spending – mainly from Hollywood, but also out of New York, up from $130 million a year earlier.

For too long a time, he says, Canadian feature film producers have been willing to make ‘a poor, second-rank type of product’ even if ‘this has nothing to do at all with the tremendous creative power that exists here, nor the passion of the people in the business,’ he says.

Lafond says he fully supports the producers’ current efforts, but withdrawing the federal foreign service credit will destabilize the industry.

He says the level of the credit, about $55 million, is a direct consequence of real dollars spent on production, and as such is ‘not really a fund.’

‘The Americans will not come to a country where we play games,’ says Lafond. ‘They don’t like unfriendly or hostile attitudes and Canadian producers are starting to be hostile. I think it’s totally inappropriate and unfair. The Americans spent more than $1 billion in Canada last year and at least half of that went to salaries for Canadians. And we’re going to place those people on unemployment because we want to play games?

‘If the program is canceled after only 18 months at the federal level, they won’t feel they have a secured investment in Canada when they make a movie because they’ll never know what games the provincial or federal governments will play. It’s a small issue by itself but it’s very sensitive, and it could really blow up in people’s faces, and that’s why b.c. reacted so strongly,’ he says.

‘It’s just too simplistic to say, `We need $150 million so let’s get our hands on money from the cbc/src, the nfb and the tax credit,’ ‘ says Lafond. ‘There’s a problem with the concept here, and I think they [feature producers] have picked up on the wrong tools.’