The Canadian Television Fund recently named most of the people who will make up its board of directors through the coming year, as the oft-embattled outfit moves into the broader mandate of backing both television and new media content.

Following a closed-door meeting at the Banff World Television Festival, the CTF brass emerged with six names, some new, some familiar, for 2009/10. The new, leaner board is made up of two nominees put forth from the Department of Canadian Heritage and four from the Canadian Coalition for Cultural Expression, a banner which includes cable and satellite companies.

The CCCE’s nominees are: Alison Clayton, former VP of programming at The Movie Network; Ronald W. Osborne, current chair of Sun Life Financial and past president/CEO of Ontario Power Generation; Montreal businessman Louis L. Roquet; and Guy Fournier, author, playwright and short-lived chairman of the board at CBC. (Roquet will chair the board.) Heritage has put forward CTF alums Cheryl Barker and Eileen Sarkar. A seventh director will be named at a later date, said the CTF.

Although a town hall-style meeting followed word of the new board in hopes of allaying any industry misgivings, some have already begun to express concern. For example, some of the biggest players in the Quebec film and TV industry have already begun denouncing the appointment of Fournier to the new CMF board, as he’s on the payroll of cable magnate Pierre Karl Péladeau.

‘How can Fournier possibly be independent when he works for the Journal de Montreal?’ asked Claire Samson, the president of Quebec’s producers association, the APFTQ. Fournier, the former TV writer and CBC chair, pens a TV column in Montreal’s most popular tabloid, which is part of Péladeau’s massive Quebecor media empire. ‘This is an insult to our intelligence. It’s very obvious he’s going to be taking his instructions from Quebecor,’ said Samson.

In an unprecedented show of solidarity, four other industry groups representing directors, actors, writers and technicians – the Association des réalisateurs et réalisatrices du Québec, Union des artistes, Association québécoise des techniciens de l’image et du son and Société professionnelle des auteurs et des compositeurs du Québec – joined forces with the APFTQ to publicly express their displeasure with the appointment of Fournier.

‘The government has failed its first test. They said the board would be independent and it’s not. Now we are very worried. What does this appointment say about what the consultation process will be like?’ questioned Samson, referring to the upcoming consultations on CMF’s guidelines.

For his part, Fournier knows a great deal about the TV industry. Now in his late seventies, Fournier founded the Institut québécois du cinéma in 1970, and in the 1980s helped launch the TQS network. He also wrote the much-loved Quebec teleroman Jamais deux sans toi, and in 2003 wrote a comprehensive report for the CRTC on the state of Quebec French-language TV.

But he also has long-standing ties with the Péladeau family. In 2007 he told a Quebec journalist he was working on a feature film about his friend and founder of the Quebecor empire, the late Pierre Péladeau.

Samson says there is nothing the film and TV community can do except make its concerns known. ‘There is nothing we can do legally. But we feel that if the government really thinks Fournier is independent, they are blind,’ she says.