MONTREAL — The Quebec TV industry is unified in its message to the CRTC team looking to reconsider how television is financed in this country. They say the Canadian Television Fund is fine just as it is.

And Quebec media mogul Pierre Karl Péladeau’s idea to create a separate, private, Quebecor fund to finance Canadian content is at the top of their ‘don’t do’ list.

‘Péladeau is completely self-serving. He wants to put money into a fund which will finance programs he will show on his network. It shuts out everyone else,’ says Claire Samson, the head of the Quebec producers association, the APFTQ.

Péladeau, who owns cable provider Vidéotron and Quebec’s most popular French-language network TVA, has proposed scrapping the CTF altogether and replacing it with a financing model of his own design — the Quebecor Fund — which would pledge $109 million in its first three years. Although the media mogul wants the CRTC to help manage the fund, he wants to retain copyright to the content so it can air on his various media holdings. The Quebecor Fund effectively eliminates the need for independent producers.

‘His fund would completely shut out other players; it’s totally unfair,’ Samson tells Playback Daily. ‘There is no reason to change the system. It supports creativity and culture.’ The APFTQ and the province’s largest actors union, Union des Artistes, made their case on Tuesday before the CRTC in Gatineau, which this week is holding hearings on the fund. Representatives from Quebecor and Shaw Communications will appear Thursday.

Péladeau and cable mogul Jim Shaw helped spur an industry crisis and the CRTC review when they temporarily stopped making payments into the fund last winter, calling it a poorly managed ‘subsidy machine’ out of step with the digital age.

Although UDA spokesman Raymond Legault echoed the APFTQ’s concerns, he believes the CRTC team looking into the CTF is under ‘incredible pressure’ to bend to the desires of Péladeau and Shaw, who is based in Alberta. ‘I was surprised at how attentively they listened to our presentation. I figured the reception wouldn’t be that good,’ Legault told Playback Daily. ‘But they seem to be leaning towards creating two funds.’

Earlier this week, cable giant Rogers Communications joined the two-fund chorus and called for the CTF to be split into two streams, one for private broadcasters, the other for the CBC. Rogers vice-chairman Phil Lind called for more than half of the $288-million fund to go to private broadcasters, who would create programming with appeal to ‘mass audiences.’ The remainder would go to CBC and Radio-Canada.