With the January departure of its sole staff member, Saskatchewan’s Crew Call program seems to have crumpled in a heap.

The main purpose of Crew Call is to co-ordinate recruitment and training by bringing together organizations such as the Saskatchewan Film Producers Association and the Saskatchewan Motion Picture Industry Association (SMPIA), unions (namely IATSE and the Directors Guild of Canada), and educational institution the Saskatchewan Institute of Applied Science and Technology.

The $580,000 program was announced in March 2000 and launched in June 2000. Its goal was to bring the number of people in the province working in the industry to 2,000 over the next four years.

The training initiative goes through HRTC Future Skills. SMPIA’s Cindy Beland sums up the program as being primarily an exercise in co-ordination. ‘Future skills are available to a lot of different industries but in the film industry there isn’t the expertise from the post-secondary education level. You need a person who understands a crew to ensure that these people are getting trained properly; you need to have the unions involved, you need co-ordination.’

One aspect of this co-ordination is a database aimed at connecting those in need of training with those who have the experience. ‘If someone wanted to shoot and couldn’t find crew, they could use the database as a means of finding people who have been trained and some who are yet-to-be-trained but could be a trainee.’

‘We’re right in the middle of a crossroads, trying to come up with a direction,’ says Dwayne Dreher, business agent DGC Saskatchewan and chairman of Crew Call’s advisory committee. ‘We’re trying to get feedback with unions as to where we’re headed. It’s in a state of flux right now. We haven’t run Set Protocol courses, [which, with the Set Safety course, are prerequisites for other courses] so that’s our main goal for now, to get up and running again. The instructors that we had had very heavy seasons and weren’t available. Some courses didn’t meet the required number of students and were cancelled.’

According to Wayne Inverarity, applied arts program head and extension and training consultant at SIAST, the classes fell victim to the credentials of the instructors and the province’s lively industry: qualified instructors frequently aren’t available because they are working on film shoots.

‘When someone frees themselves up and can run a course, sometimes there’s not enough lead time to advertise the course [accounting for the lack of sufficient enrolments].’ Both Set Protocol and Set Safety are to be run in April at SIAST.

The second component of Crew Call’s mission, now being administered through SaskFilm, is the deeming process as it relates to tax credits. Saskatchewan’s employment tax credit has the flexibility to ‘deem’ individuals from outside the province to be Saskatchewan residents for the purposes of a shoot provided that no Saskatchewan residents can do the job. Mentoring of Saskatchewan residents is linked to deeming.

‘A production company submits a part A request for the tax credit if they have people they want to deem. In the past, Crew Call assessed deeming applications and had the unions approve them,’ says SaskFilm’s Valerie Creighton. ‘During the next production season, SaskFilm will be administering the deeming.’

Beland is adamant that Crew Call will recommence once the staffing issue is resolved.

‘We need strong crews in Saskatchewan. We have to get facilities and infrastructure here [to attract productions]. All of those things will come into place in the future. It’s like a vicious circle, without those elements it’s more challenging.’ *