In a move claimed to be a ‘passive investment,’ CanWest Global Communications has scooped up a chunk of Alliance Atlantis Communications (aac) voting shares, giving the broadcaster an increasing share of control, but a small piece of the pie.

CanWest Entertainment, a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Winnipeg-based broadcaster, has purchased 925,000 class a voting shares of aac, at $21.00 per share on the Toronto Stock Exchange, bringing its total holdings in the company to 1,038,250 class a voting shares, or approximately 20.6% of those outstanding.

All of this, coupled with 0.1% of aac’s class b non-voting shares, amounts to 3% ownership by CanWest of the most vertically integrated prodco in the country.

‘It’s not a formal partnership, since it’s not something we initially planned,’ says president and ceo of CanWest Global Communications, Leonard Asper. ‘It was just a question of some equity becoming available and us thinking it was a good investment.’

So far, CanWest is not taking a seat on the aac board, but Asper says he does not foreclose that possibility in the future. Either way, he assures that aac’s relations with other broadcasters will not be affected.

Likewise, he says, ‘we’ve always told ctv that if they owned a production company, we wouldn’t look any less favorably on the production company.’

Furthermore, CanWest has a formal production partnership with Jay Firestone of Toronto-based Fireworks Entertainment, which is owned by CanWest Entertainment. ‘That’s our CanWest Entertainment vehicle, and anything we do on the content side of things is going to continue to be through Jay.’

And to put minds further at ease, Asper points out that Firestone sells programming across the board, including Nikita to ctv and Relic Hunter and Hylander to Citytv.

‘At this point, we know [aac], we know the people who run it and we don’t see that there’s any downside in owning the shares in the company,’ says Asper. ‘It’s an investment. Period.’

Because the recent investment gives the broadcaster less than a 30% share, CanWest did not need to seek approval from the crtc, but since its share amounts to more than 20%, the crtc requires notification.

In the crtc’s latest content decision this past June, the commission, as a policy, set out to encourage producers and broadcasters to work together to achieve better Canadian content. Asper believes this suggests that the line between broadcaster-owned producers and producer-owned broadcasters is becoming more and more blurred.

But, crtc spokesman Denis Carmel says, ‘it was not a commercial message. We were just saying that [we want] the dialogue [between producers and broadcasters to be] more open, so there would be less confrontation.’

Although CanWest has no immediate plans to increase its investment in aac, the broadcaster will be actively pushing to enhance the entertainment side of the company, which includes continuing to invest in prodcos, acquiring new properties and moving into the u.s. market.