HALIFAX — The Nova Scotia film business may be getting a big new soundstage to attract big new movies.

Tour Tech East in Dartmouth, NS, has plans to expand — to build one 41,000-square-foot studio as well as a smaller one with a water tank for underwater filming, to add to the existing 10,000-foot and 4,000-foot studios.

Peter Hendrickson, president of Tour Tech, says the business plan for the expansion has been presented to the Atlantic Canada Opportunities Agency, which was key in turning a Halifax power station into Electropolis, currently the largest studio in Atlantic Canada.

Though Tour Tech has been kept busy in the past few years with the regular editions of the Tom Selleck Jesse Stone MOWs for CBS, and this spring is expecting to host the third season of the TMN/Movie Central series G-Spot, Hendrickson thinks the local business could attract higher-budgeted productions if soundstages could accommodate them.

‘The focus is to attract larger features,’ says Hendrickson. At the moment, ‘even if we wanted the $30-million to $50-million features, there’s nothing to support it.’

The timing of Tour Tech’s expansion may be especially good for the Nova Scotia film business, as the future of Electropolis as an operational film studio is uncertain. In November, landlord Nova Scotia Power and long-term tenant Halifax Film, which had all its children’s animation production in the building, couldn’t come to an agreement on rent for the space.

Halifax Film moved 170 employees into office space up the road and NSP reopened Electropolis for short-term rentals. The miniseries The Sea Wolf is in there at the moment. But the energy company has been speaking to architects on the possibility of refurbishing the studio as a new location for its head office in 2010.

‘The possible loss of Electropolis would be a big blow,’ says producer Bill Niven, who is on the studio committee of the Nova Scotia Motion Picture Industry Association, and was involved in the ACOA project that converted Electropolis into a film studio. ‘We’re concerned. There’s no question studios are a critical part of the equation.’

Ginny Duzak, production manager on The Sea Wolf, has been in the building many times. ‘It would be a shame if this space was used for something besides a film studio,’ she says.

The newest would-be studio mogul in Nova Scotia is Australian Steve Gilmour. Though his company’s efforts to buy a vacant studio space in Shelburne didn’t come together, Gilmour is adamant that the government needs to protect its investment in the film business. ‘We have to put film facilities first, not as an afterthought,’ he says. ‘Any international producers attracted initially by the lure of Nova Scotia shall regretfully be turned away to more equipped venues in the world, regardless of our high tax-credit advantage, unless the government acts to retain facilities such as Electropolis and Shelburne and not let them be ploughed over.’

Gilmour says he has feature scripts and financiers from Europe ready to shoot in Nova Scotia. ‘Frankly, I’m embarrassed,’ he says, when he talks to his investors about starting a new film production locally. ‘Where the hell can I shoot it?’

The biggest shows to come to Atlantic Canada in recent years — largely for location shooting — were The Shipping News, K-19: The Widowmaker and Outlander.