Some years back, at a dinner at the Banff TV festival, a commissioning editor friend introduced me to a production executive at Global. I remember trying to come up with a polite way of asking him what the heck it was that he did all day. This was during the bad old days when Train 48 seemed to be Global’s only answer to Cancon.

I don’t bring this up as a shot at Canwest. In television as in politics, our memories do tend to be rather short. My point, rather, is that in a few short years Canwest has come quite some distance.

‘The company has grown in leaps in bounds since then,’ concurs my friend, who works for another broadcaster. ‘They’ve all worked their butts off and they deserve a lot of the credit,’ she adds, singling out Christine Shipton, whose new title is SVP drama and factual content.

There has been enormous upheaval during a year spent on tenterhooks awaiting the CRTC’s consent for Canwest’s takeover of Alliance Atlantis’ 13 cable channels. There have been cries of foul over Canwest’s debt level, its U.S. backer Goldman Sachs, and the generous dispensation of pink slips during the changeover, but on the content side at least, that’s all done. According to Shipton, the two entities are now merged, and the folks that remain represent the best of both worlds.

I recently sat down with Shipton and Karen Gelbart, SVP lifestyle, to talk shop in the former Alliance Atlantis offices on Toronto’s Bloor Street East. This being a small industry, everyone in the management team seems to have worked for all of the other broadcasters at some point. Though the Canwest content executives only moved offices a few weeks earlier, Shipton knows the place well. She worked here as head of television at Alliance, one floor below Robert Lantos’ office.

Shipton, Gelbart, broadcasting president Kathy Dore and EVP content Barb Williams form the top echelon of what they term ‘the new normal’ for content at Canwest. There’s money to spend and a mandate to make a whack of Canadian television, and they want the world – or Canadian producers, anyway – to know about it.

‘We have a group of people that just wants to get to work,’ says Shipton.

But given that the takeover of Alliance Atlantis makes for one less door for producers to knock on, at first blush this takeover didn’t look good for business.

As Shaftesbury Films CEO Christine Jennings says, ‘Obviously as a producer you’re somewhat sad to see a situation where you had five commissioning broadcasters go down to three,’ referring also to the recent breakup of CHUM. But fresh from a meeting with Shipton and VP Showcase and drama content Tara Ellis in which they talked one-hour series, Jennings’ concern has waned. ‘I came away with a good feeling about the future,’ she says.

Waving a fat wad of cash under producers’ noses is a great start, and Canwest has it. The takeover has triggered a benefits package of $151 million to be spent over the next seven years – $90 million of which is earmarked specifically for independently produced drama and comedy for Showcase.

‘Showcase has had fairly limited budgets in the past,’ Shipton says. ‘By that I mean half-hours. They haven’t had the resources to go into the ‘event’ Canadian dramas, which they now can. We’re going to be looking for the one-hour series, whether they are limited series or long-running.’

In addition to the cash, other new initiatives dictated by the CRTC include a completion financing fund for independent documentaries, a pilot project fund, a scripted drama initiative and $15 million in social benefits. You may have heard something about these at the CFTPA’s Prime Time in Ottawa, and they will be further ballyhooed at Hot Docs and Banff, as Shipton and co. encourage producers to get in line.

Shipton points out, by the way, that these are ‘triggering dollars. Most people who have worked with me before know how I like to leverage dollars.’

Indeed. Even as Global has in recent years demonstrated a newfound commitment to indigenous scripted and documentary programming that has bred the likes of Global Currents, Pretty Dangerous, Till Death Do Us Part, The Best Years, ‘da Kink in My Hair and The Guard, it has also demonstrated a certain ingenuity for licensing partnerships and deal-making. (Its rebranding of CH as E! is a prime example). And with the U.S. network sales of CTV series The Listener (Shaftesbury) and Flashpoint (Pink Sky Entertainment/Avamar Entertainment), Jennings believes that Canwest similarly plans to continue thinking further afield.

While CTV and the CBC have long been able to utilize the franchising, cross-play and cross-promotion opportunities that having both conventional and specialty divisions offers – whether they do or not is for another time – this is all new to Canwest, and Shipton and Gelbart enthuse about how both current and potential production partners will benefit from this new setup.

‘To us it’s an expansion of the number of opportunities for our partners, whether they’re stars or producers or anybody else,’ says Gelbart.

She points to Debbie Travis, who wound up Painted House and exited Alliance Atlantis’ HGTV for the more ambitious Global series From the Ground Up. ‘If we’d been all the time the same company, she wouldn’t have had to leave one and go to the other,’ says Shipton. ‘She could have done it all within the same family of channels.’

Existing Showcase programming is also being considered for migration to conventional, with Billable Hours as one potential candidate. ‘I think it stands a big chance to break out…in the same way that other comedies, like Sophie on CBC, or Corner Gas [on CTV] did,’ Shipton says.

‘It’s the first time that all the stars have aligned so that every broadcaster is getting on the drama bandwagon, and in a good way, in the right way,’ says Shipton. ‘I think that’s what you’re going to see over the next two to five years. And it kind of feels to me like if we don’t do it now, we’re never going to do it.’