Throughout September and October, a road show of sorts has been crossing the country. Though it offered up less flash than a U2 tour (and probably sold fewer T-shirts), the Canadian Television Fund’s 18-date Canada Media Fund Industry Consultation tour nevertheless drew crowds of stakeholders in stops from Halifax to Whitehorse and parts between.

The tour concentrated on explaining 13 key policy issues (everything from funding allocations to ROI, documentary programming to regional production), and opened the floor for local industry players, giving them an opportunity to ask questions.

Here’s how things panned out in three regional centers.

IN TORONTO

In Toronto, a nervous industry continues to look for the devil in the emerging policy details.

‘We will do this as practically as we can,’ Canadian Television Fund president Valerie Creighton promised as she explained how public/private funding for primetime TV and interactive digital content will be fused into the CMF.

That’s no small promise as industry players wrestle over definitions as the CMF evolves into two streams. The first ‘convergent stream’ will aim to fund projects distributed on at least two platforms, including TV, and based on the existing Broadcaster Performance Envelope system. The second stream, the successor to the Canada New Media Fund as it merges with the CTF, will be for ‘experimental’ product, or interactive digital content created for a host of platforms.

Here’s where Creighton conceded complexity and confusion.

The CTF initially saw convergent product as one work on two platforms, with TV not required as the first platform. But Canadian Heritage in recent directives aims to ‘encourage’ original content on the second platform. Suddenly, the convergent stream will mean creating two works on two platforms.

Likewise, CMF policy makers are fumbling for a better word than ‘experimental’ to describe the second stream. After all, the CMF aims to promote four traditional TV genres – drama, docs, kids and performing arts – not easily served by a digital stream directed more at creating websites, interactive games and mobile apps.

The Heritage directive to CMF policy makers also stresses funding for ‘original, first-run television programming in prime time,’ with what constitutes original, first-run and primetime still to be defined. (For example, primetime for kids programming is different than that for adult fare.)

Kevin Wright, senior vice-president of programming at Astral Television Networks, also urged CMF policy makers in Toronto to recognize increasing viewership across multiple platforms, including video-on-demand, beyond primetime TV audiences measured by BBM Canada.

‘It’s a careful balance of an established formula, while evaluating new forms of measurement,’ Wright said.

But perhaps the biggest bugbear in the evolving CMF rules is allowing first-time eligibility for broadcaster-affiliated projects. Indie producers in Toronto see their possible demise if broadcasters are allowed to deal directly with showrunners to develop a project, and enlist an executive producer to control the finances.

‘There is concern about broadcaster in-house productions,’ Creighton conceded, while cautioning Heritage wants a ‘majority of funds’ remaining in the production sector. That means producers and broadcasters will now fight over the size of the CMF allocation for broadcaster-affiliated and in-house production, and whether it will be capped.

Another sticking point is regional production. Toronto-based producers urged the CMF framers to recognize their city’s superior infrastructure to create the high-quality, high-impact TV shows Heritage wants from the restructured fund. Conversely, regional producers want assurances they will get their fair cut of CMF financing.

‘It’s extremely important that this new fund maintains its commitment to the regions,’ Floyd Kane, vice-president of creative and business affairs at Nova Scotia-based Halifax Films, urged.

~Etan Vlessing

IN VANCOUVER

As might be expected, hot-button topics at the CMF consultations in Vancouver included the thorny issues of regional incentives and in-house broadcaster production.

The B.C. production community is clearly uneasy about the plans for the new fund, and has lots of questions. The CMF road show, however, provided relatively few answers, although the CTF’s Creighton attempted to ease concerns.

‘We’re not throwing out the baby with the bathwater,’ she stressed. ‘Surprises shouldn’t be wide and vast… We have an eye on not destabilizing the industry.’

Creighton asked the community to be patient, noting that it will likely take three years for full integration of the new CMF.

‘You won’t get everything you want in the guidelines, but we will keep the dialogue going,’ she said.

Heritage says one of the new fund’s mandates is to ‘level the playing field.’

‘Ontario producers thought leveling the playing field meant the end of the regional incentive,’ said Creighton, noting particular pressure from the center that Vancouver should be ineligible for regional status.

Understandably, that doesn’t sit well with the Vancouver community. Paperny Films president David Paperny stressed that particularly in these difficult financial times, B.C. producers’ distance from broadcasters puts them at a disadvantage.

‘The decisions are made in Toronto and we aren’t there,’ says Paperny. ‘My friends in Toronto take broadcasters out to dinner and are in their face all the time. They are getting more of an increasingly smaller pie.

‘We don’t want a handout,’ he stressed. ‘But we have a harder time getting in the face of broadcasters. We spend thousands of dollars on travel. We have to spend so much more money just to stay in the game and don’t get the same number of green lights.’

Vancouver producers pointed out that any incentive for regional production in the new CMF should require that program originators be based in the region where a production is shot. Concern was noted over a recent trend where broadcasters ‘parachute in’ a Toronto project to a region and use a local company as essentially a service producer.

CMF rules allowing in-house broadcaster production have also rung warning bells across the country, and this sentiment was echoed strongly in Vancouver. Broadcasters’ access to the fund will be capped and phased in, stressed Creighton, but that didn’t alleviate the concern.

Some suggested drama should be excluded from eligibility. Others warned that docs should not qualify as broadcaster-affiliated projects.

‘The indie sector is on the ropes and in dire financial straits,’ said CFTPA president and CEO Norm Bolen. ‘If we give one-third of the fund to in-house broadcasters, that’s dollars taken from independents, and it won’t take long for this to cause the destruction of the entire independent production community.’

Access to the CMF for broadcaster-affiliated projects in the experimental stream will also be a thorny issue, since broadcasters will be eligible to apply for in-house projects in the convergent stream, as will Internet service providers, mobile operators and BDUs.

‘There is fear that the cable companies will come in and wipe [all the fund money] out,’ noted Creighton. ‘I can tell you that won’t happen. I just don’t know how yet. It comes down to the criteria.’

She stressed that the experimental system is a selective one (not automated like the convergent side) so administrators have leeway on making decisions. Creighton also noted that the same caps on in-house broadcaster production in the convergent stream will apply to the BDUs and ISPs.

B.C. has a strong documentary and factual programming sector, so the status of nonfiction in the CMF was a hot topic. But factual and reality-based programming are just as hard to fund and need support from the CMF, according to Paperny.

Creighton admitted that the status of documentaries in the fund is a problem.

‘It’s not working, that is the view we have heard, but I don’t have an answer,’ Creighton said, indicating it’s an issue that needs to be addressed.

And it’s not just the traditional TV sector that has concerns with the CMF. Digital media producers are also wary of suddenly becoming bedfellows with the television community. New media artists told Creighton that the experimental fund shouldn’t be relegated to a small piece of the overall fund financing pie because their work represents the future of media in Canada.

New media representatives emphasized that the CMF has to be flexible and fast in making its funding decisions because the sector has quick time lines, the digital models are changing constantly, and the financial structures and budgets are never the same.

~Cheryl Binning

IN MONTREAL

A cross between group therapy and kindergarten.

That’s how a prominent industry observer describes the atmosphere at the Quebec round of the consultations into the new CMF in Montreal.

‘It was a bit baby la la,’ says Claire Samson, head of the Quebec producers association the APFTQ – using a French expression that basically means silly. ‘I think their intentions are good. And we will participate in good faith. But it feels like a big PR exercise.’

Indeed. There was a concerted effort to keep things light and cheery at the gathering of roughly 200 Quebec industry stakeholders. Professional moderator/motivator Pierre-Claude Élie of Emergence Solutions was on hand to focus the discussion and drive home the point that individual opinions and negative thoughts were not welcome.

‘We know what the problems are,’ Élie told the group. ‘We don’t want the helicopter vision. We want you to go a little higher.’

While the CTF’s moderator-for-hire encouraged participants to reach for the stars, many stakeholders tried to bring the debate down to earth with questions about how the new CMF will change their lives. They didn’t get many concrete answers.

As we know, Heritage wants the new CMF to support popular, innovative, cross-platform shows with the highest earning potential. But what’s the agenda behind these vague goals, queried veteran producer André Provencher, president of Montreal’s La Presse Télé. ‘Is it an industry fund or a cultural fund, or a mix of both?’ asked Provencher. ‘I get the impression that it’s moving towards an industry fund.’

What Provencher and others in the room kept trying to find out is: Will the new CMF be designed to support the creators of content or the distributors of it?

CTF/CMF VP for policy and stakeholder relations Stéphane Cardin’s response was opaque: ‘I don’t know. I’m not ready to say we are going clearly towards an industrialization of the fund.’

In their brief presentations, stakeholders also pointed out how radically different the Quebec and English-Canadian TV industries are.

‘Success in terms of audience isn’t an issue for us,’ said Samson. ‘Unless we start cloning people, I’m not sure how we can get more Quebecers to watch their homegrown TV.’

It’s worth repeating that unlike English Canada, where most of the top 30 programs are American, Quebec watches its own programs. And TV isn’t just entertainment in the province, it’s a key part of the modern Quebec identity. Since the 1950s, Quebecers have produced nearly 1,000 original dramas that have drawn millions of viewers and have played an extraordinary role in social cohesion.

Changing how TV gets financed, therefore, is a hot-button issue for culture makers in the province. ‘TV is for us a place to develop creativity,’ veteran children’s TV producer Carmen Bourassa said. ‘We don’t want the fund to simply support shows that are purely commercial and popular. That leads to repetition because we just reproduce what’s already working. In order to keep the industry alive, it has to take risks – that’s how it progresses.’

The changes to funding criteria come at a time when drama creators here are fighting for their share of the market like never before. Over the last five years, and including this fall, the top ratings grabbers in la belle province are not téléromans (serialized TV dramas) but Quebec knockoffs of foreign reality, game and talk shows.

Bourassa and Samson fear the CMF will favor commercial hits at the expense of innovative drama – an approach they believe will have a detrimental impact on the Quebec industry and will favor the interests of Quebecor, which owns cable company Videotron as well as the province’s top private network, TVA. (TVA draws millions of viewers with its versions of well-worn reality and game show formats.)

‘We don’t just want to make money. We want to create,’ Bourassa told the CTF/CMF staff, a comment which drew much applause.

The CTF’s Cardin admitted that the Quebec and English-Canadian industries are very different. ‘It might be a question of developing an asymmetrical structure,’ he said, but the discussion didn’t get much clearer than that.

For her part, Bourassa is pleased that she had a chance to express herself: ‘We could talk quite freely. I would say that they listened to us and understood what we wanted to say. Will they hear us? That’s something we will have to keep an eye on.’

Provencher found the process laborious and limited. ‘It was quite heavy on information and thin in terms of the items we could discuss… It’s like we are trying to find a solution to a problem that’s badly defined,’ says the producer.

Adds Samson: ‘People want results. We want to know what the minister’s intentions are. What’s frustrating is that we are still in the dark. And we don’t have a great deal of time. April isn’t far away.’

~Patricia Bailey