Talk to enough people who have similar jobs in similar industries and inevitably, over time, you start to hear the same things over and over again. Hollywood actors always say they signed on to a particular movie ‘because of the script’ and rock bands, when propped in front of a reporter, tend to rattle on about ‘getting back to our old sound.’ Videogame makers promise ‘jaw-dropping’ graphics and ‘white-knuckle’ action with the same clocklike regularity that pro athletes ‘give 110%’ at games and plead ‘not guilty’ when on trial for assault.

But every now and then, the repetition becomes truly absurd. As if everyone in, say, the television industry, was reading off the exact same cue card when asked about the Canadian Television Fund.

Give it a try. Ask the co-worker to your immediate left what he or she thinks about the fund’s $25-million shortfall and the resulting chaos that has played out in the domestic TV biz over the past month. Odds are overwhelming you will hear the usual grumblings followed by:

‘I hope they can fix this.’

Or it might be ‘I hope the fund administrators can fix this’ or ‘the broadcasters’ or ‘the producers’ or ‘the Liberals.’ The point is that everyone seems to think that CTF – and, in a larger sense, the future of Canadian TV – is someone else’s problem to solve. Producers look to broadcasters for bigger licence fees and second-window deals, networks expect producers to cut budgets and seek out alternate financing. CTF administrators calmly deflect criticism towards Ottawa, where ministry officials toss the hot, underfunded potato back into the laps of producers and broadcasters.

Certainly a little finger-pointing is to be expected when anything as big as a $4-billion industry makes a sharp right-hand turn towards disaster. But over the past few weeks it has become just plain silly. It’s as if a bus (labeled ‘CTF’ for you editorial cartoonists) has broken down on an abandoned desert road and everyone inside can think of nothing to do except sit, sweat, and repeat in chorus ‘I hope they can fix this.’

People were just as repetitive at the many press conferences and actions that followed the first CTF decisions – hammering the point, to the exclusion of all others, that the only way to save Canadian TV is to reinvest that $25 million. At the CFTPA emergency powwow and the first ACTRA protest in Toronto I found it odd and alarming that so many of the brighter stars from our industry had so few other ideas. There must be something else that can be done, stopgap or long term, to keep people working, right? Apparently not. Only a cheque for $25 million will do.

It gets hard to believe that anyone parroting the same answer over and over is actually trying to think up a solution. Ottawa and the Ministry of Finance might actually restore the Great Missing Millions someday, but it seems unlikely. And if, as appears to be the case, no one else is qualified to overhaul the engine of this battered old clunker, maybe it’s time for everybody to get out and walk.