Really, where do you start…?

It’s impossible not to categorize the decision to place the Canadian Television Fund and the Canada New Media Fund under the purview of cable and satellite operators as anything but an overwhelming win for the ‘casters. And, in the absence of a detailed plan that spells out the guidelines of the funding structure to the letter, you can forgive the industry for looking to the lowest common denominator and becoming – how should one best put it – alarmed.

And while the mainstream media remains largely silent (surely that’s not because most of Canada’s press is owned by the people who own broadcasters, is it?), the industry is just beginning to, as one producer described it, recover from its ‘state of shock.’

The production community is understandably tentative about this one. After all, the broadcasters are their customers and no one wants to bite the hand that feeds them, but they’re between a rock and a hard place – say nothing and let the minister take a crowbar to their business model, or complain and lose their customers.

Off the record, however, issues are being raised. Overwhelmingly, the main area of concern lies in that vague, yet potentially devastating qualifier ‘in-house’ as it refers to production funding.

Now, ‘in-house’ might refer to one small envelope, but it might not, and that has producers nervous. Unless it is heavily regulated, allowing operators direct access to a sizeable amount of CMF funds for in-house production could have a devastating impact on the independent sector in Canada. The extent of that damage will be in direct proportion to the severity of the criteria placed on the distribution of monies.

Should broadcasters decide they want to fire up sizable in-house production entities, and jobs are brought in-house and assembly-lined in the name of efficiency, it could be shattering to indies. And an efficiency that boils down to media clear-cutting – burning through the sector to take advantage of short-term ‘efficiencies’ at the cost of long-term core competency – is hardly a savings.

In the worst-case scenario, producers fear that the majority of the independent sector will either: i) become diminished into a service capacity; ii) fight for remaining scraps, most likely by using unsustainable economics as a selling feature for broadcasters; or iii) go out of business.

The second concern I’m hearing is about the makeup of the board. It’s not often you can accuse the head of a union or guild of playing down a threat, but when Stephen Waddell, national executive director of ACTRA, said that giving cable and satellite providers control of five of seven board seats is ‘like putting the fox in charge of the henhouse,’ I think he might actually have been understating things.

Granting majority control of any oversight board – from the outset – to a party with a vested interest in its decisions is more like locking all the chickens in the henhouse before you burn it down. It’s difficult to imagine a scenario in which broadcasters would nominate board members who did not serve their best interests. It’s a baseline conflict of interest – and that’s hardly the first time that charge has been laid in this regard.

And that’s not even beginning to consider the audience. One of the emphases of allocations to date has been diversity – content that reflects the needs of all Canadians. Has the government abandoned its stewardship of the airwaves, and will public money be used only to chase ratings?

Lastly, producers outside of major centers are especially concerned. It’s not a stretch to imagine major production will all but cease outside of Montreal, Toronto and Vancouver. The CTF has been critical in keeping the playing field level in a number of ways, one of which is through regional diversity. If those criteria are removed, the majority of jobs will contract to where the funding key-holders are.

Those are the main areas of concern, but they’re hardly the only ones. And as the industry contemplates the potential impact of the new fund, many more questions will be raised.

Although an April 2010 deadline is being bandied about, the board will be in place at Banff in June, so it’s hard to imagine that outrage alone will have much impact after that, short of a wholesale storming of the Bastille.

One would hope, as one producer suggested, that this announcement was a trial balloon to gauge industry reaction – not a stretch in light of the protest over C-10, which may have cost this government the majority it wanted. (And in light of recent announcements, thank God for that…)

If so, I would suggest that the amount of counterbalance that is to be found in the guidelines remains in direct relation to how much negative feedback the minister hears before Banff. If that’s the case, the time for producers to publicly voice their concerns is right now.

For industry perspective on the potential positive and negative impact of the new CMF, don’t miss the April 13 issue of Playback