Playback‘s two-part feature on the state of the kids’ sector in Canada concludes with a look at how key funders are seeking ways to continue to support producers and programs, and how producers are circumventing traditional models to keep making content.

Click here for part one, which examines the fallout from the closure of Family Channel and the other WildBrain kids’ channels.

The reduction in children’s and family commissions from Canadian private broadcasters has presented a challenge for funding bodies like the Canada Media Fund (CMF) and the Shaw Rocket Fund (SRF) seeking to keep the sector afloat.

The CMF’s Trent Locke, COO, EVP of finance, strategy and analytics, says the three-year, $127.5 million commitment that the CMF received in the latest federal budget will enable it to keep programming stable for the next few years, including its support of kids’ content.

Unfortunately, stable funding doesn’t solve the commissioning problem. Locke says CMF set a target of 22% for broadcaster envelopes to be put toward children’s and youth content for 2024-25. In the end, the share was 8.5% for English and 11% for French. 

“That’s a big miss: 22% of our envelope is around $47 million, and $20 million got spent through the envelope system,” he says. “The broadcasters just aren’t accessing it.”

One of the ways the CMF is attempting to overcome the downturn in private broadcaster commissions is through the Distributor Program, launched in 2024, which allows a distributor to trigger funds without a broadcaster. For the 2025-26 fiscal year, the CMF reserved 40% of the program budget for children and youth programming, which Locke says was maxed out. A total of 25 children’s and youth programs received funding in its second year, out of 63 selected productions.

The CMF also made significant changes within broadcaster envelopes to incentivize commissioning children’s and youth programming, including increasing the maximum contributions in the English and French development envelopes, and reducing commitments thresholds for linear programming.

“We’re trying to let the market and demand speak [for itself],” says Locke, referencing the audience shift from linear to digital. “We’ve lowered a bunch of the thresholds to make it more affordable for broadcasters or a combination of broadcaster, distributor, foreign trigger and streamer.”

Rocket Fund runs aground

One of the hardest-hit parts of the kids’ sector in Canada is the SRF. The organization was founded by Shaw Communications in 1998, and has provided roughly $290 million to more than 1,150 children’s programs since. However, the Fund’s programs stalled in September after its contributor Rogers Communications pulled funding, citing a decision from the CRTC that its contributions would expire at the end of its licence term.

While SRF has been approved to receive contributions from foreign-owned streamers, payments are in limbo while the contributions decision is in front of the Federal Court of Appeal, meaning little to no money is flowing into SRF at present.

President and CEO Agnes Augstin says the Fund is “looking for solutions” and ways to support the kids’ sector. The remaining funds are being directed to a discoverability support program operating on a case-by-case basis, which is open to productions already funded by SRF.

Prior to the loss of funding, the SRF was contending with problems in oversubscription, as reduced licensing commitments from broadcasters required funds like SRF to fill the financing gap. In fiscal 2024, the Fund was only able to support 34% of applicant projects, a sharp decline from the 56% supported in 2023. In comparison, 77% of applicant projects were supported in 2018, and 72% in 2017.

Augustin says “this has been the hardest time that we’ve ever seen” for the kids’ content sector in the nearly three decades that SRF has been operating, but that the industry has rallied its support around the Fund as it seeks relief from the CRTC.

The SRF issued a Part 1 application to the CRTC ahead of the expiration of the Rogers contributions on Aug. 31, asking for the Commission to uphold its previous order on the contributions. A response from the CRTC has not been issued at press time, though a previous staff letter issued to the CRTC in May stated that Rogers’ interpretation on its contributions expiration was correct.

After opening the Part 1 application for comments, the CRTC received dozens of submissions in support of the SRF from industry stakeholders, including the Youth Media Alliance (YMA), Boat Rocker Studios, Eagle Vision, the Writers Guild of Canada, Knowledge Network and the Canadian Media Producers Association (CMPA), to name a few.

“The loss of almost all of the funding for the SRF at this critical juncture would inflict potentially fatal damage on Canadian children’s and youth producers,” wrote the CMPA in its submission, citing a 35.7% decrease in kids’ content production volume between 2015-26 to 2023-24, and a 58.3% decrease in investment from private broadcasters between 2018-19 to 2023-24. “This is not merely a funding issue – it is a cultural emergency.”

The Commission is also in the midst of updating its regulations around Canadian programming. Last week, the CRTC updated its definition of Canadian content to be more flexible, but did not include any explicit provisions to support the children’s sector. 

Locke says the CMF is waiting on the CRTC to issue its decision on Canadian programming expenditures and programming of national interest to see if new regulation will bring in some new investment to the space.

For its part, the SRF is hoping that its efforts to advocate for the children’s sector throughout the consultation process has reached commissioners. “Something that we have seen over the years that when [regulations are] discretionary, it doesn’t tend to be in children’s [media],” says Augustin. 

Going global

As the SRF continues petitioning the CRTC to maintain domestic funding support for children’s programming, Locke says that many Canadian production companies are looking to bypass the system through a model of coproductions and co-financing with international partners. 

For example, 9 Story Media Group and Sinking Ship Entertainment have secured commissions from outside of Canada, including with public broadcasters PBS and the BBC with respective shows Xavier Riddle and The Secret Museum and Odd Squad UK (pictured), and foreign-owned streamers such as Apple TV (Sinking Ship’s Jane). In the case of 9 Story, they’ve also secured critical investment with Scholastic.

Youth Media Alliance co-president Maria Kennedy, owner and executive producer at Little Engine Moving Pictures, says that Canadian producers have no choice but to look beyond their borders as the commissioning climate at home gets drier by the day.

“[Little Engine’s TVOKids series] Hare of High Park is all Canadian financing, but we’re doing it by the skin of our teeth,” she says. “[International coproductions are where] Little Engine will be going next, because you simply can’t produce a series or a feature film on a solely Canadian budget, certainly not an animated one … I assure you, we’ll be going abroad more often.”

Adapting with the times

Despite such strategic realignments and the ongoing wrestling with the domestic regulatory situation, there are some in the sector who suspect that this all may simply be a case of rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.

Nelvana co-founder and former WildBrain executive chairman Michael Hirsch says that the domestic industry has been in an irreversible slide for over a decade, and that looking for salvation on other shores is a short-term solution at best. 

“If you’re relying on the international marketplace, you’re eventually going to be disappointed, because that’s going the same way that our industry is going,” he argues.

Hirsch says that the only way forward for the sector is to adapt to the industry’s ongoing digital transformation, even as the creative economy that has flourished in that space can be a profoundly alien one to businesses nurtured on broadcast.

“It’s a total change in the marketplace [and] … the economics of the business,” says Hirsch of the online creator sphere. “It favours the people who have no overhead, or almost no overhead, who can work for nothing for a year or two building up a property.

“[But producers have] got to be nimble, and they’ve got to embrace these changes,” he says. “If you focus totally on the legacy business, you’re not going to be around for any long period of time.” 

Rennata López of Lopii Productions (The Fabulous Show with Fay and Fluffy), the Toronto kids’ content studio she co-founded with her sister Georgina, says that their prodco is sticking to its motto of “creating television where every kid can see themselves” as inspiration to keep producing quality series.

“I think [it’s about] going to where the children are currently finding media,” she says. “It doesn’t have to be traditional cable: we can still find [where the] children [are] and make good content for them.”

With files from Jamie Casemore and Andrew Tracy

Image courtesy of Sinking Ship Entertainment