WGC tells CRTC domestic industry is ‘in a state of collapse’

The guild says its members are in "dire straits," with aggregate earnings declining by 22% over the last five years.

The Writers Guild of Canada (WGC) has issued a “wake-up call” to the federal government and the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) regarding the state of the domestic film and TV sector, based on the declining earnings of its members.

The guild said its Canadian citizen members’ aggregate earnings have decreased by nearly 22% in the last five years, based on internal data and adjusted for inflation, in its submission to the CRTC’s consultations on the modernization of the Broadcasting Act. The submission was made public on Tuesday (July 11).

“These numbers demonstrate the dire straits that Canadian screenwriters find themselves in,” said WGC president Alex Levine in a statement. “The 22% drop in Canadian screenwriter earnings has been devastating to our members. Out of work writers are switching careers. Others are leaving the country. Our domestic industry is dying.”

The figure includes earnings for various genres, including drama and documentary, and was calculated using the Bank of Canada’s inflation calculator, according to the WGC. The guild also noted that “trends affecting writers take more time to show up in overall production statistics,” so the situation may be worse than current data suggests.

Levine said the data “should be a wake-up call to the government and the CRTC” to ensure that “Canadian content must be Canadian-written” when forming modernized regulations. “We can’t just be a branch production plant for Hollywood,” he added.

The WGC has previously raised the red flag on declining earnings through its 2022 Equity, Diversity and Inclusion Report. The guild said earnings under its Independent Production Agreement (IPA) with the Canadian Media Producers Association had declined by 16% between 2018 to 2022, and the total number of working writers under the IPA had declined by 5%. The report attributed the declines to reduced episode orders for live-action programs and shorter episode lengths in animation.

In its submission to the CRTC, the guild characterized the current production ecosystem as “in a state of collapse,” adding that “many players in the system, if not the system as a whole, are now facing an existential crisis that requires a strong regulatory response that doesn’t just enshrine the status quo as it is today, mid-collapse, but actually rebuilds and grows that system into the future.”

Among the WGC’s recommendations to the CRTC are that the residency of key creatives must be considered part of the regulatory framework; that 100% of new funding be directed to the Canada Media Fund, or at least 80%; that productions should be 10/10 on the CAVCO scale to be eligible for Certified Independent Production Funds; and that an initial base contribution from online undertakings should be no less than 5% of their gross annual revenues.

The CRTC has scheduled a public hearing on the modernization of the Broadcasting Act to begin on Nov. 20 as part of its first phase of consultations.

The WGC recently voiced similar concerns on the impact of artificial intelligence (AI) in a letter addressed to Minister of Canadian Heritage Pablo Rodriguez and Minister of Innovation, Science and Industry François-Philippe Champagne. The letter warned that the use of generative AI tools has created a “paradigm shift” in the audiovisual sector, calling on the federal government to protect the rights of human creators.

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