It’s just like last year all over again.

First the federal Liberals reinstate the Canadian Television Fund to the level it was at prior to cutting $25 million in March of 2003. Now the Ontario Liberal budget has given the film and TV sector the exact same deal the previous government gave in its 2003 budget – a pledge to remove the so-called grind against the 20% Ontario Film and Television Tax Credit.

Finance Minister Greg Sorbara must have found inspiration in the feature film The Gospel of John, a word-for-word recitation of the Book of John in the Bible, because the paragraph in the 2004 budget document pertaining to the film and TV sector is a word-for-word recitation of the Ontario Tory promise of 2003, which was never triggered.

‘Effective for productions commencing principal photography after March 27, 2003, qualifying labour expenditures would not be reduced by equity investments from Canadian government film agencies,’ is how both documents read.

The Liberals did make some minor adjustments allowing the credit to apply to labor expenses incurred up to two years before principal photography begins. Rules now also allow for investors outside the production company to claim a stake in the production.

Is that enough? Not by a long shot.

Ontario’s $2-billion production sector, which employs 20,000 directly and tens of thousands more indirectly, continues to drive the $5-billion national industry. Producers had hoped to see the 20% OFTTC boosted to 33% and the 11% Ontario Production Services Tax Credit hiked to a competitive level, as well.

Meanwhile, Ontario continues to help support production around the country. There’s a whole stack of ironies here, not the least of which is that any level of tax credit in Ontario, so long as it remains uncompetitive, is meaningless to Ontario producers who stream to other provinces to take advantage of far higher tax credits in places such as Manitoba. Another tangential irony is that these interprovincial coproductions result in less tax money overall for the Ontario coffers.

At the same time, other provinces continue to develop innovative strategies to keep the productions coming.

In its April budget, the Manitoba government enhanced its 35% labor tax credit by adding a frequent-filming bonus of 5% that rewards producers who have shot more than two productions in the province. There is also a 5% bonus for shooting outside Winnipeg, effectively boosting the tax credit to 45% on labor costs to productions that meet all the requirements.

Production in Manitoba grew by 26% last year to $107 million.

Over roughly the same period, production in Ontario fell by 36% thanks to a combination of SARS, a soaring dollar and an uncompetitive tax credit. The provincial government can’t do anything about exchange rates or pandemics, and it seems unwilling to step up where it can.

‘[Ontario] has got the worst tax-credit system in the country. It’s wiped out almost any sort of Canadian drama being produced in Toronto,’ Bernie Zukerman, president of Toronto’s Indian Grove, told Playback last year in a story about the rise of interprovincial coporductions.

This year, nothing has changed.