The Canadian television landscape is riddled with reasons why service production activity may or may not be slumping. It’s like a good whodunit: so many unusual suspects, so few conclusions, and only time will tell which culprits are accountable for what.

While production generally does slip to a comfortable lull around this time of year, the question surrounding the current and, more so, potential downturn of foreign production volume in Canada lingers.

And the combination of possibilities is endless.

First there’s the sinister SAG contract negotiations that ended not in an anticipated strike, but nonetheless forced American broadcasters to stockpile programming in the first half of the year.

Then there are the menacing issues surrounding runaway production, only compounded by the resurgence of American patriotism and fear of travel post Sept. 11.

And who can discount the death of TV drama, a high-priced genre recently murdered by, among other things, diminished licence fees that give way to low-cost lifestyle/information programming.

And just when everything that could go wrong seemed to have gone wrong, in comes the evil elimination of Canadian tax shelters one week after Sept. 11 and in the wake of Australia- the low-dollar location that it is- amending its tax credit system to offer foreign producers a rebate of 12.5%.

When on Sept. 18 Paul Martin announced amendments to the matchable expenditure rule, which would effectively eliminate the use of tax-sheltering as a production financing mechanism (that brings in the equivalent of $1.5 billion a year of production), it wasn’t just shelter brokers Sentinel Hill, Grosvenor Park and Cinegate who were up in arms.

While pundits and Ministry of Finance lackeys were quick to point out that Canada’s low dollar, quality service industry and tax credits were enough incentive to keep studio productions heading north, the CFTPA raised concern about the shoot-yourself-in-the-foot nature of such a decision, at such a time.

But in a surprise reversal of misfortune, the Tax Policy Branch has responded with a proposal to delay the plan to end tax shelters until April 2002, instead of the original Dec. 31, 2001 deadline.

And the Finance Ministry is not the only one making an effort to ease the return of U.S. producers to Canada.

ACTRA and the Canadian producers associations settled what were expected to be tumultuous IPA negotiations in record time with record compromise from both sides, including ACTRA forfeiting its pursuit of wage parity with SAG. ‘In a very difficult time, when this industry needed a win, we gave it a win,’ said CFTPA chief negotiator John Barrack (see story, p. 22).

An increasingly declining Canadian dollar and the fact that if flying has become an issue, U.S. producers are more inclined to travel an hour to Vancouver than to Australia are some more, albeit ironic, good-news stories for the Canadian production industry.

The truth is, while some service producers have reported they’ve lost business following Sept. 11, there is still strong indication that feature film production in Canada is booming (see story, p. 1).

We’ll likely have to wait at least six months to gauge the real impact of the terrorist attacks on production in Canada.

Meantime, let’s chalk it up to a bad news/good news story.