WGC’s new president Bruce Smith on AI, member solidarity

In a Q&A with Playback, Smith discusses the Guild's tentative deal with the CMPA and the impact of the strike authorization vote.

The Writers Guild of Canada’s newly minted president Bruce Smith takes the helm at a pivotal time in the Guild’s 33-year history.

Ahead of his two-year term, the scribe was heavily involved in negotiations with the Canadian Media Producers Association (CMPA), reaching terms on a three-year Independent Production Agreement (IPA) earlier in May. The negotiations sparked the first strike authorization vote ever for the Guild, with a near-unanimous result. The IPA is currently pending approval from WGC members and the CMPA board of directors, with details not publicly available at press time.

Smith, whose TV credits include Durham County, 19-2 and Street Legal, has been involved in nearly every IPA negotiation for the past two decades, he tells Playback Daily. He decided to run for the position of president after outgoing president and WGC council member Alex Levine’s term ended. The seat came open just ahead of the IPA closing, and members wanted someone involved in the negotiations to step into the role in case talks dragged on. Smith was a natural — and passionate — fit.

“I took the job because I’m a guy who had the opportunity to go to the States really young,” he says. “I decided to stay here because I thought we were going to build a culture and I’m not super happy with how that’s gone. But I believe very much in fighting the fight. Maybe we need to restore the idea that there’s value in having a Canadian culture as opposed to just taking American culture secondhand.”

And the work isn’t done — the next step is to ensure the implementation of Bill C-11 is completed with the sake of Canadian writers in mind, and tackle the uncertainty around the rise of artificial intelligence (AI).

The following interview has been edited and condensed

Playback: What is the biggest issue currently facing Canadian writers?

Bruce Smith: The lack of funding for Canadian content. The industry in a service aspect is doing really well. And we’re training all this talent up here. Directors, actors are getting better, there are recurring roles in shows. I think writing rooms will move up here pretty quickly if the streamers are incentivized to do it. They don’t mind, it’s not hard for them. It’s cheap, we’re cheap, just like all the other guilds are compared to American versions. I feel like they’re waiting, understandably, to know what commitments will be forced on them before they’re willing to commit to anything. But I’m hoping if they are asked to commit, it’s actually not hard for them and it won’t make them do less business here.

Other than incentivizing the streamers, what are some other things the industry could be doing better?

It’s partly cyclical and it is a tough time, but I feel like, as someone who does creative, the job of being a creator in every industry has never been held in less value. Partly that’s the onslaught of AI and social media and influencers. I feel like that’s transitory, that will return. People care about stories, art, movies, paintings, music and the value of the individual. There’s an assumption that it’s somehow not as essential as it used to be, and I’m hoping that won’t quite play out.

The WGC has been warning about an industry collapse and, last year, revealed a 22% decrease in earnings over five years. Is this still the case?

That’s certainly my experience on the job, and it sounds right, [but] I do feel hopeful. I’ve lived through a real bad downturn before, early in my career. A bill like C-11 helps a lot. No country in the world has a functioning cultural industry without subsidizing it. Nobody can compete with Marvel movies commercially.

Do you feel like the WGC received a good deal in the end on the IPA, especially on those AI protections?

Absolutely. And I’m really proud of the way we came up with new inventive solutions. I don’t mean just the writers, I mean collectively with the producers. It was tough. But we did some really good work, and we have some stuff in our agreement that’s new and groundbreaking.

One of the big important reasons negotiations with the CMPA were so tough is the world has changed. And we’re trying to negotiate over stuff that nobody’s ever negotiated before, like AI. Every employer is reluctant to add new sections to their employment agreement. We were in a circumstance where we had to deal with stuff, not because we decided to change our working agreement, but because the world was changing on us. And I think AI is the standard issue there. We were able to come to an agreement that I believe is really good and functional, allows us to collaboratively work together and move forward in a changing environment.

Do you have a timeline on when the ratification vote might be?

Both sides are doing it as quickly as we can. A couple of weeks.

Did the historic vote turnout to potentially strike incentivize both sides to come to an agreement quicker?

No question. Absolutely. It was no fun going to a strike vote and it’s not something the Writers Guild had ever envisioned. And, again, it’s as much a product of the difficulty of having to negotiate unexplored territory as anything else that led us there. But the response from the membership was outstanding. The turnout, the support and the communication among and within writers I think, was at a level I’ve never seen before. And it absolutely helped us cut a deal, there’s no question.

Are there ways AI can be beneficial, or do you have thoughts on how writers could work with it in the future given the copyright issues that come with it?

The genie’s out of the bottle, so I don’t think we can ignore it or pretend it doesn’t exist. A lot of the negotiations in our deal were how to deal with that genie being out of the bottle, while at the same time, recognizing the difference between the Canadians and the Americans, particularly in live action. The American studios hire their writers as employees, and they own the copyright of their work from the minute it’s a work product. And we live-action writers in Canada, we’re independent contractors. We’ve licensed you the right to make a show, but we own the copyright. So our position, and largely the CMPA’s position, is that if an AI generated it, it’s not copyrightable. Those are core issues for us.

I’m somewhat skeptical about what the current AI can do in terms of finished product, as opposed to preliminary stuff. But it’s anecdotal, I’m no expert. I certainly see signs that some of these flaws are not going to correct themselves and you’re going to have an unreliable product if you’re trying to write complete scripts. So the deal is, how do we cope with using it? Go ahead and play with it, use it, but you don’t own it. It’s the same as if you took a 100-year-old newspaper article out of a library and gave it to me to use. That’s very interesting, maybe full of fascinating stuff, but you don’t actually own it. It’s a public domain thing. And frankly, as the WGC, if an AI wrote it, that’s not Canadian content.

Looking at the challenges ahead, how are you getting started and what are you prioritizing?

One of the best things out of this negotiation and the strike vote is it really increased communication with the members talking to the Guild. I remember being a young writer turning professional and being afraid the Guild was this thing you could get in trouble with. You could mess up somehow and they would come down on you. That was my own fear. And as I got to know them, that’s so not what the Guild is. Writers really tend to get isolated unless we’re in a writing room, and we spend less time in writing rooms and more time in Zoom rooms. So the writers communicating with each other and with the Guild was a really wonderful, unintended consequence of having a difficult negotiation, and that’s something we need to not let slip away.

And the whole animation sector, which had unfair treatments embedded in the way they worked and were compensated compared to live-action writers. We are levelling the playing field over time. That’s super important to me. I felt in this deal, animation writers have felt some worth and value in having joined the Guild, maybe more than before.

Image courtesy of the WGC

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