The red, white and blue ticker tape had scarcely touched the ground at Arnold Schwarzenegger’s feet, his champagne had not yet lost its fizz, before the Canadian press was making much of how his Oct. 7 win in California is a threat to our service industry. Der Ahnold had, as he so often reminded voting below-the-line workers in Hollywood, pulled strings to keep the shoot for his latest punch-up, Terminator 3, out of Vancouver and he had pledged to do the same, industry-wide, as Conan the Governor.

Stories ran in the dailies and on air Oct. 8 about the risk to Canadian film jobs, but, in the diplomatic words of Colin Robertson, our consul general in Los Angeles, the reports were ‘not very well founded.’ As he and other stakeholders explain on p. 33, the Golden State’s governor-elect faces too many political and financial roadblocks to do any real damage north of the 49th.

Even Brent Swift, the tough-talking head of the Film and Television Action Committee, L.A.’s anti-runaway activist group, doubts the Schwarzenegger win will have much effect on his group’s efforts. ‘He’s a cohort, he’s a filmmaker, so we hope he’ll be with us,’ says Swift, ‘but all we can expect right now from the state is an endorsement, because they’ve got no money.’

Maybe – if he really wanted to stop runaways, and didn’t care at all about his state’s multibillion-dollar deficit – Schwarzenegger could make headway with a tax credit, perhaps by convincing Democrats that it would bring them even greater support among left-leaning studio heads.

But he won’t, because his anti-runaway sabre-rattling, arriving as it did in lockstep with his run for office, was just talk. No one seems to have heard Schwarzenegger complaining when, just three years ago, The Sixth Day shot in Vancouver and Toronto, nor when Collateral Damage was shot in Mexico. True Lies also shot scenes in Toronto, and Eraser was out in New Brunswick.

He has also spent the better part of the past decade watching his box-office draw at home fade and his salaries become increasingly reliant on the pesos, lira and rupees of the overseas markets, and said as much to a crowd of Mexican-American voters earlier this fall. He knows better than most that moviemaking is a global business.

No one should completely dismiss this man or his abilities. True, it is easy and fun to make fun of Schwarzenegger – just start with Hercules in New York and work forward through the 1980s and ’90s. But he has surprised us all more than once by excelling at some exceedingly challenging careers and he will most likely run California better than many people expect. In the meantime, we get to keep our service industry, Californians will supposedly get lower taxes, and moviegoers have been spared, for now, from Terminator 4.