Veteran Canadian producer Anne Marie La Traverse says her career has been a slow build to the breakout success of Flashpoint. And the key, she insists, was finally learning to go with her gut when it came to building a successful TV franchise.

‘The one thing I’ve learnt is to trust my instincts. That’s hard to do where a lot of decisions are made by committee,’ says La Traverse, 49, who founded her production shingle Pink Sky Entertainment in 2003.

Originally from Montreal, and a graduate of Osgoode Hall Law School in 1983, La Traverse practiced law in Toronto and was director of legal and business affairs for Sunrise Films before she landed at the former Atlantis Communications in 1991 in the business affairs department.

After a year, La Traverse began to executive produce, initially with mainstream TV movies including Derby and Race to Freedom: The Underground Railroad, and TV series including Cold Squad and The Associates.

That provided lots of room for trial and error and valuable lessons, says La Traverse.

‘What’s great about having the opportunity to work on so many projects is you can make a lot of mistakes, and you learn from those mistakes,’ she says.

‘I’m a perfectionist, and at the end of the day, when I finish a project – when I look at it – the first thing I ask is ‘What have I learned and what can I bring to the next project?’,’ she adds.

La Traverse easily made the transition to Alliance Atlantis when Atlantis merged in the late ’90s with Alliance Communications, the country’s then-largest production company.

She flourished in the new powerhouse regime, working her way up to the position of SVP of television production, again on a host of CTV projects in collaboration with Bill Mustos, then SVP at the network.

Her Alliance Atlantis credits included The Eleventh Hour, a dramatic series that she developed and executive produced, and numerous CTV MOWs, including the Paul Gross-starrer Murder Most Likely, Lucky Girl, starring Elisha Cuthbert, and AKA Albert Walker.

After she unfurled the Pink Sky banner, La Traverse continued to produce for CTV with Tripping the Wire, which won the Gemini for best TV movie in 2005, and Hunt for Justice: The Louise Arbour Story, the Geminis’ best TV movie of 2006.

By then, La Traverse had a pretty good idea what CTV sought for its primetime schedule, which came in handy in 2006 when she was paired with writers Stephanie Morgenstern and Mark Ellis to produce the Flashpoint TV movie, then called Sniper. And by that point, the Canadian Television Fund had introduced funding for series pilots. So La Traverse considered the Flashpoint movie as a backdoor pilot for a possible series.

La Traverse knew that Flashpoint as an ensemble cop drama was fraught with risk. But she’d also arrived at the stage in her career where risks were well worth taking.

‘At the end of the day, it’s only about creative vision, and it’s not about making deals and finding ways to do series. A lot of creative decisions that are made in this country are dictated by tax credits and requirements to cast local people and to hire local people. But that’s not always serving the best creative ends,’ she says.

Ultimately, La Traverse credits her partnership with Mustos, as the two have together completed unfinished business after their many years in the trenches of Canadian TV and coproduced a breakout hit.

‘It’s really important to have that singular vision. We are an exceptional team. We’ve been able to speak with one voice,’ La Traverse concludes.