Cancon is being critically undervalued in the international buyer’s market and the system needs to incentivize broadcaster risk-taking in order to address this, John Morayniss, CEO of eOne’s TV group, told the CRTC at the English-language TV licence renewal hearings Thursday.

Morayniss said the domestic regulatory system needs to find a better balance between cultural commitments and market realities, or else face more of the same “brain drain” for above-the-line talent that is preventing Canada from becoming a leading creator of content – rather than a manufacturer.

In the area of drama in particular, Canada is losing ground to its international counterparts, Morayniss argued during an intervener’s presentation.

“Canadian drama programming isn’t getting the same pricing as programming coming from the U.S. or the U.K.,” he said, adding that Canada’s creative brand doesn’t have the same cache as territories such as Israel or Scandinavia.

“In other words: there’s a discount on Canadian drama content in the international marketplace.”

The topic of export has been one of the prevailing issues to emerge from the Canadian Heritage consultations. Last month a group of Canadian companies, including eOne, announced the formation of the Canadian Association of Content Exporters – Association Canadienne des Exportateurs de Contenu (CACE-ACEC), with the goal of enhancing the international visibility and export of Canadian content.

Calling it a “uniquely Canadian problem,” Morayniss told the CRTC that a situation has been created whereby the sum of the parts (top-level actors, creative talent and producers) is perceived as having more value than the finished product. In order to reverse this trend, eOne insists current Canadian programming expenditures (CPE) requirements be retained and invested in local independent productions.

When asked by the commission if the problem surrounding the undervaluing of Cancon was an “attitudinal or economic” problem, Morayniss insisted it was not the former. The issue, he said, is that broadcasters are not investing sufficiently in the development phase of projects. “It’s more about the framework of the way production and development is working in Canada. It’s difficult to spend a lot in R&D. The process is becoming very expensive.”

With Canada now having among the best content-production infrastructures in the world, the next step, said Morayniss, is to create a system that encourages a greater degree of financial risk-taking. And for this, Canada’s broadcasters must take a more central role in investing in R&D and be “willing and able to fail,” he said.

Elsewhere in the presentation, Morayniss said eOne and the companies under its umbrella spent $630 million developing and producing TV content in Canada last year.