‘The stakes have never been higher,’ says Sandra Cunningham, just weeks before she chairs the CFTPA Prime Time in Ottawa conference for the first time.

‘The landscape is changing,’ she tells Playback. ‘What we decide today will determine what the industry looks like for the next 10 years.’

The Strada Films president and cofounder is an evenly spoken producer with a solid reputation for brilliant negotiating tactics and getting results. She has recently worked with two of Canada’s toughest entrepreneurs, coproducing five features for Robert Lantos (including the forthcoming Fugitive Pieces), and CBC reality TV series Triple Sensation with impresario Garth Drabinsky.

Cunningham began her career in marketing with Montreal’s Festival du Nouveau Cinéma in the 1980s, then spent five years training and working at the legendary Cinecittà in Italy. In the early to mid-’90s, she was part of the Canadian programming team at the Toronto International Film Festival, and the first feature she produced was John L’Ecuyer’s 1995 addiction tale Curtis’s Charm.

Currently ‘camped out’ in her retro office space on Toronto’s trendy King Street West, Cunningham knows she has her work cut out for her as the CFTPA’s voluntary chair. She’s spent six months strategizing with association president Guy Mayson and her board of directors to address what Canadian producers will need from the CFTPA to survive the morphing media ‘landscape,’ as she repeatedly calls it.

Cunningham makes comments such as ‘big is not always better’ when referring to mega-mergers, and she openly applauds the CRTC for ‘ruling on diversity and limiting size,’ with regards to its recent ruling on the matter.

What follows are some select quotes from an exclusive Q&A where Cunningham addresses timely topics that will be discussed at the producers conference.

You speak about the ‘new landscape’ – do you see it a bit like a blank canvas?

We’ve always been a small market with a huge competitor. Now we’re looking at the possibility of reaching the world in different ways. Our broadcasters are looking at it that way, too. The question is: how can we be a small marketplace without selling ourselves short? Now is the time to define that.

Does that specifically mean defining Canada’s role in the global marketplace?

There’s a trend towards thinking that we’re in a global marketplace, so does it really matter anymore who owns the rights? I personally think it does matter. I think as Canadians we need to own the rights of our exploits to have a healthy domestic industry. You need all players to be healthy. You need healthy broadcasters and healthy distributors, and you need healthy producers. You need diversity, and we’ll let the CRTC know that.

From the producers’ point of view, I think we’ve gone on long enough as a cog in the wheel without taking the leadership role.

What are some top priorities for the CFTPA to underline at Prime Time?

We’d like to see a financing model promoted that means films and television programs and new media can be fully funded, to a certain extent in Canada – which is not to exclude international financing for certain types of projects – but we have to make it work here.

The focus going forward in the next year is about how we leverage what we have here and attract investment from outside, whether it’s enhancing how we do coproductions to make us more attractive and competitive. It’s important that we’re competitive internationally. We also need to think about our audience and how we’re getting to them.

How do the upcoming broadcaster licence renewals figure in the new CFTPA pro-active strategy?

We need to be thinking now in terms of that transformed landscape. What does it mean in terms of Canadian stories on primetime on all the various platforms? Rights that used to get separated out are perhaps now all occupied by one broadcaster, so how is that going to operate? These are the questions we want to discuss with the broadcasters and with the CRTC.

Ideally, what we are working toward is a terms-of-trade agreement between the CFTPA and each of the major broadcasters as a means of articulating those individual relationships, although they will be very similar in terms of the principles.

We’d like to establish between us the basic principles on which the business is run between these players. We want to discuss the value of certain programming in certain timeslots and create a template that spells it out and makes it easier and healthier. That’s going to be a very important discussion that will be going on over the next year.