Bustling homegrown production has emerged as a surprise savior for the Canadian film and TV production sector, which is drastically short of U.S. location shoots as the Hollywood producer-Screen Actors Guild talks in Los Angeles approach D-Day on Monday.

‘The service work in Canada is really dreadful. I’ve never seen Toronto this slow at the end of June,’ Paul Bronfman, CEO of production equipment supplier Comweb Group, tells Playback Daily.

The lone hot spot in the country is Vancouver, which was quiet until May, but has recently got busy with movies like Brad Peyton’s Cats & Dogs 2, Shawn Levy’s Night At the Museum 2 and Roland Emmerich’s Farewell Atlantis.

But elsewhere, it’s a waiting game by studio operators eyeing the horizon for U.S. film shoots like sailors at sea as the industry waits to see how the SAG contract talks will play out.

‘Toronto is very quiet because of strike threat. But this being summer, not only are we quiet, but the phone calls are not as plentiful,’ Jim Mirkopoulos, VP of Cinespace Film Studios, says.

‘The producers want to show the actors they mean business,’ he adds.

Mirkopoulos says he has fielded exploratory phone calls about U.S. producers returning to Toronto in late summer or fall, after labor peace breaks out in Hollywood.

But estimating when the Americans may return, and in what numbers, has confounded the industry.

Calls to Filmport, the newly built Toronto megastudio where no tenant has so far been announced amid the SAG contract talks, were not returned at press time.