A push to evolve has been at the heart of the Canada Media Fund (CMF) since its inception 15 years ago, something that’s more relevant than ever today as the screen industry faces a wave of change in the digital revolution and stalled regulatory advancements.

“[We’re facing] a fundamental reset of how content is going to be made in this country in the future,” the funder’s president and CEO Valerie Creighton tells Playback Daily.

For Creighton (pictured), the journey has been longer than 15 years. She was named head of the Canadian Television Fund (CTF) back in 2006 after spending more than a decade as Saskatchewan’s film commissioner. CTF was then merged with Telefilm’s Canada New Media Fund (which was dedicated to digital media) in 2010 to create the Canada Media Fund, with Creighton at the helm.

“There was a lot of resistance [from the industry] to that change at the time,” Creighton recalls, including from the broadcasters. The new organization proceeded to launch under two streams — Convergent and Experimental — to support linear TV and digital media productions.

“I won’t say there was great consensus; we weren’t looking for consensus because … we were looking for a tacit agreement on how to move forward with this new mandate,” says Creighton.

She recalls one particular instance when Serge Sasseville, a former SVP at Quebecor Media, told her he didn’t like the new funding body. “He said, ‘I’ll go along with it, but if something goes wrong and it doesn’t work, you have to promise me we’ll change it.’ And I said, ‘of course we’ll change it.'”

That principle has guided the CMF through multiple evolutions in its 15 years. More recently, the funder did away with the Convergent and Experimental streams, replacing them with Ideation, Creation and Industry, in order to align programs with the natural life cycle of a project from development, to production, to sector-specific support.

The CMF has also introduced programs along the way to curtail a requirement for broadcasters to trigger funds. These include the Slate Development Pilot Program, which gives producers direct development funding, and the Distributor Program, allowing eligible Canadian distributors to trigger production funding.

The first round of funding for the Distributor Program brought in 105 applicants representing $45.9 million in funding requests, which accounts for more than double the program’s actual budget of roughly $20 million. That outcome speaks to a larger problem for the CMF: oversubscription.

“Every single program is like that at the CMF,” says Creighton, adding that it’s a shared problem with Telefilm, the National Film Board of Canada (NFB) and the Indigenous Screen Office (ISO). “There’s just not enough financial support through the funding agency to do all of that. We need to look at different models.”

The path forward is unclear, admits Creighton, but the CMF is actively looking for solutions. One way is through collaboration with fellow funding bodies. She says Canadian Heritage has been leading a head of industry agencies table, which they’ve nicknamed the “HIT table.”

One of the initiatives that has come out of the HIT table is a strategic partnership between CMF, Telefilm, the NFB and the ISO to collaborate on audience data to inform their strategies and understanding of the market.

Another initiative is a new campaign at Made | Nous, which saw TV personality George Stroumboulopoulos travel cross-country this summer to ask Canadians what films or series define Canadian culture for them.

“We don’t have all the answers at the moment, so where does it leave us? I think it leaves us in a place where we have to get very creative,” says Creighton. “We have to work with our industry to figure out how we can get across that bridge. Some things will fall off, I’m sure, some things will get stronger. It’s just a natural evolution in terms of where the sector is at.”

One hope from the Made | Nous campaign is to give funding organizations more power to advocate for increased financing support from the government, as revenue from traditional BDUs continues to dry up and contributions from foreign-owned streamers remain in limbo while awaiting a decision from the Federal Court of Appeal.

“You can’t keep doing everything the same when you’ve got half the money. If you want this many jobs, if you want $12 billion impact on the GDP, if you want this international recognition and international impact that Canada’s storytellers bring to the country, then this is what you have [to do],” Creighton says. “It’s no different than any other industry.”

Creighton says the CMF is ready to be “nimble and respond” no matter what the appeal outcome is, and their push to modernize will continue regardless of the level of funding available.

“The industry can expect we’re going to stay with them. We’re gonna be transparent about what we’re doing,” she says. “It might take some time; these are big things that don’t happen overnight. There might be a bit of trial and error. I’m sure there’ll be resistance in some sectors, because there always is to change. But I think if we try to stand and stay where we are, it’s not gonna be pretty in the long run.”

Image courtesy of the CMF