The Writers Guild of Canada made history last week when just over 70% of its members made a near-unanimous vote (96.5%) to authorize a strike while in talks over its Independent Production Agreement (IPA) with the Canadian Media Producers Association (CMPA).

The vote marked the first time that WGC members went to the polls to authorize a potential strike, said executive director Victoria Shen in a statement on the result. The parties have been in talks off and on since last October, and engaged a third-party mediator in January.

“This strike mandate is a resounding statement from our members that they’re prepared to defend themselves should negotiations reach an impasse,” WGC president Alex Levine tells Playback Daily.

However, he emphasizes that the WGC’s goal is not to strike. “Our interest is to achieve a negotiated settlement and a new IPA that is acceptable to all parties and that will provide stability for the industry and, most importantly, will protect the livelihoods of our screenwriter members and ensure the viability of the industry and being a screenwriter in Canada,” says Levine.

Levine says the parties could be meeting as early as this week to resume negotiations.

The WGC has been vocal in recent years about the tentative situation for their members. In a submission to the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) last year, the guild revealed that its Canadian citizen members’ aggregate earnings saw a 22% decrease in earnings, adjusted for inflation, over a five-year period.

In that same submission to the CRTC, the guild warned that “the ecosystem for the production and presentation of Canadian programming is in a state of collapse.”

The WGC has also publicly raised the red flag on the potential harms of artificial intelligence (AI), which has emerged as one of the core bargaining points in the IPA.

Levine says a “sticking point” has been negotiations surrounding pre-development, including pitches, concepts and development proposals. He says the current IPA doesn’t cover pre-development materials, so the guild has proposed that, if producers are ever using AI, that they be required to contract with WGC members to ensure they are protected.

He adds that the claim that what the CMPA is offering is substantively the same as the protections offered to the Writers Guild of America by the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers is not correct.

“We’re not being offered the same protections and the agreements work differently,” he says, noting that copyright terms and the nature of the relationships between parties also differ.

When asked for comment, the CMPA deferred to its statement released on the WGC strike vote results, which said that “Canadian producers value the work of Canadian screenwriters and sincerely believe that future Canadian projects should be written by humans, not AI algorithms.”

Another core negotiation point is minimum participation of writers during production. Levine says the guild is asking to hire a staff writer with a co-producer credit or higher to work for the duration of production on greenlit shows above a certain episode order “on a negotiable rate.”

He says the guild has seen instances where writers’ rooms are closed before production ends, leaving the showrunner to handle all of the rewriting work during the last few episodes, though he notes that’s not always the case.

Levine argues that those instances create two core problems: the showrunner can’t oversee production when they’re handling all of the rewrites, and it reduces training opportunities for low- to mid-level writers.

“If writers can’t learn the job of producing and how a show gets made, if they can’t be on the floor watching the show get shot, they can’t be trained to become the next generation of showrunners, and we’re seeing it happen too often,” he says.

The third core bargaining issue is compensation for animation writers. Levine says the guild has proposed that animation writers receive the same script fee as live action writers to create parity between the two roles.

Levine says animation workers don’t receive commensurate compensation with live action writers in other ways under the IPA, including transferring copyright, a lack of production fees and lower compensation for pitch materials when participating in animation room summits. “This is one way that we can help even the playing field,” he says.

He also says the guild has “complete lockstep outpouring of solidarity” from other guilds and unions in Canada, including the Directors Guild of Canada (DGC) and Alliance of Canadian Cinema, Television and Radio Artists (ACTRA), as well as its sister writers guilds in the U.S.

The DGC issued its own statement on the WGC vote, saying it “backs the WGC in this effort unequivocally” and called on the CMPA “not to force a damaging work stoppage at a time our industry needs to move forward.”

The CMPA’s prior statement said it “remains at the table and is committed to a negotiated settlement with the WGC.”

“This is the first time in 33 years we’ve ever been this far down this path. The first time we’ve had a conciliator, first time we haven’t had agreement after [six months of] bargaining. So it’s very frustrating for us,” says Levine. “But at the same time we remain committed and we hope that the CMPA is getting the message that they can no longer ignore these core issues.”

Image courtesy of the WGC