Despite outpacing the overall growth of Canadian content produced in the last six years and reaching $420 million in production in 2001/02, the Canadian documentary industry is faced with filling more commissioned TV hours on lower budgets. This is the ultimate theme of a report obtained by Playback titled ‘Getting Real,’ to be released at the Banff Television Festival by the Documentary Organization of Canada.

According to the report, doc production in Canada increased annually at a rate of 18%, while overall Canadian-content production grew at an average of 8% per year over the last six years. Over that time, the documentary segment of overall Canadian production rose from 8% to 13%. During the same period, the dollars attributable to independently produced, CAVCO-certified documentaries grew from $112 million to $316 million in 2001/02, while in-house documentaries from the National Film Board and Canadian broadcasters rose in value from $53 million to $56 million (5%). Independent docs produced without the participation of CAVCO represented $47 million of the ’01/02 production revenue. The report, compiled by Nordicity Group, also says that overall doc production grew again by 24% in 2001/02, while the rest of the production industry ‘was flat.’

Television documentary viewership has steadily risen with the advent of Canadian specialty and digital channels. The annual average number of hours of viewing Canadian documentaries was up 67% from the 1999 to 2001 period over the 1995 to 1998 period.

However, with the increased exposure the specialty and diginets bring to the documentary market, the report states they too have ‘driven down the average budget.’ With money spread too thin over too many projects, the report says the average doc budget is 30% lower than it was in the 1990s.

Since specialty channels can pay only a small licence fee, and the ‘budget-licence fee’ ratio is a key factor in whether or not the CTF will help to fund independently produced docs, this creates a problem for producers.

‘This dynamic has put downward pressure on budgets, since broadcasters stipulate how much in licence fees they can afford, the producers then need to minimize their budgets in order to maximize this ‘budget-licence fee’ ratio, determining whether they will be successful in receiving CTF financing,’ states the report.

The CTF has contributed more than $216 million over the last six years, with $56 million in 2001/02, contributing to $191 million worth of documentary budgets, representing more than half of the independent doc production within that fiscal.

Pressure is being put on financing of the one-off doc and contributing factors include a ‘withdrawal of support’ from key Ontario and B.C. provincial funding agencies, and the decline in demand from the international marketplace for foreign production.

‘Canadian producers have been successful in creating documentaries and Canadian audiences consistently demonstrate that they want to watch documentaries,’ says the DOC report. ‘Yet, the industry faces a number of challenges which threaten to reduce documentary production to low-budget lifestyle-type programming that lacks the power to make a cultural, social and political impact on Canadians.’