Rebecca Schechter is a screenwriter and the president of the Writers Guild of Canada, the national association representing 1,800 screenwriters working in English-language film, television, radio and multimedia production. The WGC negotiates collective agreements with independent producers and broadcasters and serves as the voice for screenwriters, pursuing policy initiatives that bolster Canadian production.

We’ve been talking about the drama crisis since production took a downturn in 1999, several years before it became an industry-wide bandwagon. As writers, we get to be the canaries in the coal mine. As soon as production slows down, writers stop getting work. So… we’re five years into this worsening crisis, and we have to keep stating the obvious.

It’s obvious that the Canadian voice speaks clearest through dramatic and comedic TV programming. We need it to survive as a culture and a nation.

It’s obvious that Canada’s broadcasters are thinking more about their bottom lines than anything else.

It’s obvious that the CRTC’s 1999 Television Policy, which redefined ‘priority programming’ and removed the obligation to air drama, triggered a precipitous decline in this sector and that the result is a threat to both our industry and our cultural sovereignty.

Most of the criticism in the last few years has been leveled at the private broadcasters – and they’ve deserved it. While their profits have been soaring, drama has fallen off the map. Global’s quality dramatic programming has pretty much disappeared. While CTV currently has more drama on its schedule, it’s unlikely that this level of commitment will continue beyond the expiration of its benefits package, mandated by CRTC regulation after BCE’s acquisition of the network.

In all of this, nobody has paid much attention to CBC or what the CRTC requires of it. Well here it is: just as it doesn’t require private broadcasters to air drama, the CRTC also doesn’t require the CBC to air drama. CBC has volunteered a commitment to air 5.5 hours of drama a week – 286 hours a year – all of which could be repeats. This year, most of it probably will be repeats since they’re only producing about 60 hours of drama. So much for voluntary commitments.

We all know that drama is expensive to produce. The CBC cries poor, and it’s true that the government has cut back its funding significantly over the last 10 years. But CBC still gets a billion dollars a year. How it spends that money is a question of priorities. If it wanted to focus on drama, it could.

The crisis has made one thing incredibly obvious: without regulation supporting it, the creative voice of this country will not survive – even on our public broadcaster.

The CRTC says it wants to help revive Canadian drama, but not by changing the 1999 Television Policy. Instead, it has proposed incentives. If broadcasters air high-quality Canadian drama, they get the right to air more commercials in top-rated U.S. shows. These incentives may work, or they may not. The only sure way to get drama on our airwaves is regulation.

What should the CRTC do? It should require all broadcasters – public and private – to air drama that is written, directed and performed by Canadians. It should require a specific number of hours of original, high-quality Canadian drama per week, not just endless reruns. This would mean broadcasters would spend more of their profits on Canadian drama. And so they should. As it is, they pay less for indigenous programming than any other English-language broadcasters in the world.

Finally, the CRTC should require broadcasters to promote Canadian drama as vigorously as they do their U.S. shows and to schedule it when viewers are actually watching TV. Contrary to the popular belief that nobody wants to watch Canadian drama anymore – when we get it right (witness Corner Gas) they watch it in droves.

The CRTC could change its TV Policy today, if it chose to. But doing this would be an admission that the 1999 policy was a disaster, and the CRTC doesn’t want to go there. Not on its own, anyway.

We have to look to our politicians to make this happen. We have a new minister of heritage, Liza Frulla. She was a member of the committee that wrote the Lincoln Report, a thorough look at the current state of broadcasting. In recent meetings, Minister Frulla said that she stands behind the Lincoln Report. It calls for the Department of Canadian Heritage to take the lead in setting broadcasting policy, not the CRTC. It also calls for an immediate revision of the 1999 Television Policy.

It’s time for the CRTC to get back in the business of protecting Canadian audiences, instead of protecting Canadian broadcasters. We hope Minister Frulla will lead the charge, so that we can stop beating this drum and start telling stories again.

-www.wgc.ca