CHER Committee Meeting

STANDING COMMITTEE ON CANADIAN HERITAGE

COMITÉ PERMANENT DU PATRIMOINE CANADIEN

EVIDENCE

[Recorded by Electronic Apparatus]

Wednesday, February 24, 1999

• 1506

[English]

The Acting Chair (Ms. Sarmite Bulte (Parkdale—High Park, Lib.)): Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. I would like to call this meeting of the Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage to order.

Pursuant to Standing Order 108(2), the standing committee is conducting a series of round-tables on the government's evolving role in support of Canadian culture in the context of a rapidly changing national and international environment.

[Translation]

A warm welcome and thanks to all our guests. We are honoured to have you with us today.

[English]

The usual practice of the committee is to listen to presentations of our witnesses, but this time we decided to have a round-table, with members and invited speakers sitting together, in order to exchange dialogue among one another.

Our committee is undertaking a study of the challenges facing culture on the eve of the next century, with the globalization of trade, the economy, emerging technologies, the Internet, and other impacts on our culture and our cultural instruments, along with the demographic changes that will transform present-day Canada into a completely different country. Our predecessor committee began this study prior to the last election, and this committee decided that work should continue.

We wish to examine first of all the types of support already put in place by the federal government and how this support—such as the rules governing ownership and cultural content, federal grants to federal institutions, and tax incentives—will enable us to face the challenges of the next millennium. Those are the issues we are dealing with.

[Translation]

As I was saying, the three main challenges facing us, especially for the purpose of our studies, are the arrival of new technologies, the evolution of the global economy and of international trade and, finally, the demographic growth of our country.

Initially, the committee members strove to inform themselves thoroughly. One year ago, we held a parliamentary forum on cultural policy, international trade and technology in the new millennium. On this occasion, we organized round tables for different sectors: the arts, heritage, the publishing industry, movies and video, as well as radio broadcasting and sound recording. This forum yielded very good results. It enabled us to define a few prevalent themes that we hope we will be able to study with you today.

[English]

We have heard from representatives of the various federal cultural institutions and from officials of various departments. We've had briefings from experts on the evolution of technology, on international trade, and on demographics. In this last phase, through these round-tables, we want to cover certain sectors specifically and get input from you, as people who practise culture on the front lines, to find out how you manage to survive in our cultural milieu and how you will face the challenges of the next century.

Obviously in a format such as this and in a very short time, it is impossible to cover a lot of ground, but we want to cover as much ground as possible. At the back of your programs, which have been passed out, you will see there are five questions we wish to have addressed. You may want to address one of them or two of them or any combination of them.

We are interested in your views and hope that by the end of this week we will have some answers to such questions as: Which role should the federal government perform in the future to support the cultural sector industries? Should the government exercise the role of legislator, regulator, owner-operator of national institutions, funding partner, patron of the arts, business developer, or promoter?

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[Translation]

Naturally, this is a bilingual meeting. You can use the language of your choice. We are not expecting dissertations, but rather brief interventions so as to have a lively exchange of views.

[English]

To start off our work, I'd like to go around the table and have each one of you introduce yourself to us, your name and what you do—no long biography, but we'd like to know your involvement in the arts and cultural sectors—and then afterwards, I'd like to open it up to a discussion.

I would encourage discussion in the sense that I would ask that if possible you limit your statements to two to three minutes. We welcome your written statements and written submissions, which we will also be asking you to send to the heritage committee by the end of March. But what we would truly like to do is hear from you what your concerns are. We have questions that we'd like to ask you, and we want to have a true dialogue among ourselves.

We'll start with Ms. Folkmann.

Ms. Helen Folkmann (Executive Director, Film and Video Art Society): Welcome to Edmonton. My name is Helen Folkmann. I'm the executive director of an independent, low-budget, artists' cooperative that works in film and video.

My community is very strong here in Edmonton, but we have members all through the province of Alberta. It ranges between 200 and 250 film and video artists. The work they do is non-commercial, it's artistic-based, and it runs the range of genres. It includes documentary, drama, narrative, experimental, animation, and so on.

We're part of a network, the Alberta Media Arts Alliance Society, and that in turn is part of a national network, the Independent Film and Video Alliance of Canada. I'm sure the committee will meet other members of my community in its travels across the country.

Thank you.

The Acting Chair (Ms. Sarmite Bulte): Welcome.

Mr. Pritchard.

Mr. Garth Pritchard (Individual Presentation): Hi. I'm Garth Pritchard. I'm a rancher from Priddis, Alberta. My background is all in journalism, for the Toronto Star, the Montreal Gazette, and the Calgary Herald. I am now a documentary film producer-director and small businessman in Alberta.

The Acting Chair (Ms. Sarmite Bulte): Thank you.

Monsieur Sauvageau.

[Translation]

Mr. Benoît Sauvageau (Repentigny, BQ): My name is Benoît Sauvageau. I am a member of the Bloc Québécois and party critic for international trade. I am glad to participate in this debate on culture this afternoon.

[English]

The Acting Chair (Ms. Sarmite Bulte): Mr. Lord.

Mr. Doug Lord (Member, Board of Directors, Alberta Motion Picture Industries Association): My name is Doug Lord. I'm a director of the Alberta Motion Picture Industries Association, or AMPIA. I'm also an entertainment and intellectual property law lawyer, based just outside of Calgary in High River. My client base is largely made up of independent producers in Alberta.

The Acting Chair (Ms. Sarmite Bulte): Welcome.

Mr. Phillips.

Mr. Dale Phillips (President, Alberta Motion Picture Industries Association): Good day. My name is Dale Phillips. I am an independent producer operating out of Edmonton, Alberta under the corporate name of Black Spring Pictures Inc., and I've been doing this kind of work for roughly 30 years.

I am currently president of the Alberta Motion Picture Industries Association, which is now representing roughly 235 producer, craft, and student members from all communities across Alberta.

The Acting Chair (Ms. Sarmite Bulte): Thank you.

Mr. Muise.

Mr. Mark Muise (West Nova, PC): Thank you, Madam Chairman.

My name is Mark Muise. I'm a member of Parliament from Nova Scotia. I represent the Progressive Conservative Party on the heritage committee—notice I didn't say critic—and I'm looking forward to this afternoon's interventions. Thank you.

The Acting Chair (Ms. Sarmite Bulte): Thank you.

Mr. Rollans.

Mr. Glenn Rollans (Past President, Book Publishers Association of Alberta): I'm Glenn Rollans. I'm here today for the Book Publishers Association of Alberta, where I sit as past president.

I also sit as a member of the board of the Alberta Cultural Industries Association, of which Dale is president, and looking for succession now that that's slipped off his résumé in these introductions.

I'm also the director of the University of Alberta Press, which is the book publishing arm of the University of Alberta, and in that role I'm involved with the Association of Canadian University Presses, the Association of Canadian Publishers, and a long list of other alphabet-soup kinds of associations.

I'm also on the board of CANCOPY, which is the Canadian copyright collective that works for authors and publishers both.

The Acting Chair (Ms. Sarmite Bulte): Welcome.

Mr. Glenn Rollans: Thanks.

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Ms. Joanne Levy (Executive Director, A-Channel Edmonton (CKEM) Drama Fund): Good afternoon. My name is Joanne Levy. I'm the executive director of the A-Channel Drama Fund. I'm here representing Craig Broadcast Systems Incorporated.

Craig Broadcast Systems is a diversified media company with holdings in television and radio in western Canada. Craig also owns and operates Sky Cable in Manitoba, which is Canada's first digital wireless cable system. We are a privately held, family-owned company.

My own background is that I've worked for the A-Channel operations in Alberta since before they went on the air in September 1997, and we've been making movies here since about May and contributing to same. So my background is on the creative side of trying to get Canadian stories and Canadian productions to the screen.

The Acting Chair (Ms. Sarmite Bulte): Thank you. Welcome.

Ms. Cheryl Ashton (Executive Director, National Screen Institute-Canada): Hi. My name is Cheryl Ashton. I'm the executive director of the National Screen Institute-Canada. We're one of the four federally funded training institutions in Canada that focus on the training of Canada's emerging writers, producers, and directors. We are the oldest training centre in Canada. Our fellow training centres include the Canadian Film Centre in Toronto, INIS in Montreal, and the Canadian Film Institute in Ottawa. We have recently opened up an office in Winnipeg, Manitoba.

We are in the process of sponsoring Local Heroes International Screen Festival this week in Edmonton. We've had sold-out houses, just an incredible response from the general public. We're really happy to have you here this week.

The Acting Chair (Ms. Sarmite Bulte): Thank you. Welcome.

Mr. David Balcon (Representative, Northwest Research and Consulting): Good afternoon. My name is David Balcon. I have a roundabout route of arriving here in Edmonton.

After about 10 years during the 1970s developing policy at the CRTC and at the secretary of state on secondment, I went to the National Film Board for several years to work on introducing new media technologies to the National Film Board in the early 1980s.

Moving out to western Canada, I spent most of the 1980s working with a number of provincial governments in setting up the cultural industries infrastructures in Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and here in Alberta, and doing subsequent economic and other impact studies on the cultural industries here, specializing in small-market economies of cultural industries.

In a roundabout way, I've also ended up making a couple of documentary films and working in other sectors of the arts and culture. I'm glad to sit on the other side and see Wanda Noël, whom I worked with through the troughs of copyright for many years in Ottawa.

The Acting Chair (Ms. Sarmite Bulte): Welcome.

[Translation]

Mr. Bélanger.

Mr. Mauril Bélanger (Ottawa—Vanier, Lib.): Mauril Bélanger, Member for Ottawa—Vanier, an Ontario riding, in the National Capital Region.

[English]

I've been on this committee for the better part of three years. Although I don't have your experience in copyright, I have a couple of scars from Bill C-32, which I guess was act 2. I don't know when we'll get act 3, but we'll find out.

[Translation]

It was there that I really began to take an interest in this whole issue of intellectual property, including the way a government, through legislation, can encourage the development of creative work. I will be sparing in my comments this afternoon. I would rather listen to what people have to say.

[English]

The Acting Chair (Ms. Sarmite Bulte): Merci.

Good afternoon. My name is Sarmite Bulte, but everybody calls me Sam. I am a member of the Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage. I have been given the honour and the privilege of chairing this western tour of our cultural consultations. I am the member of Parliament from Parkdale—High Park in Toronto and I am also the chair of the international trade, trade disputes, and investments committee. In my past life I was the chairman of the Canadian Stage Company and also a lawyer.

Welcome, all. We are delighted to have you all here. I also want to point out to the audience that there is a microphone at the back, and halfway through and at the end, I will be taking some questions from the audience as well.

So to the audience, if you hear something you'd like to comment on or if we miss something, please feel free to speak when I call upon you.

With that, ladies and gentlemen, I'd like to begin. Who would like to start?

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Mr. Dale Phillips: Let me start with a small concern, picking up from where Mr. Bélanger left off, Bill C-32. This is a bill where maybe one quarter of the cultural industries has been side-swiped by another quarter, in that a levy seems to have been placed at source on recording media.

The cost of the recording media, when it's used on a wholesale basis for re-manufacturing in the film industry, is—perhaps intentionally, but I hope accidentally—increasing the cost of production. It wasn't so many years ago, prior to the GST, that the film industry had a manufacturer's sales tax to deal with, and it looks to us very much as though it's come back again through the back door.

I'm curious to know if there's any potential or possibility for exemptions, because it occurs to me that I'd be very happy to support it at a retail level, where I think it belongs to avoid piracy, but we're not in the habit of pirating other copyright-holders in our trade.

Mr. Mauril Bélanger: Madame Noël would probably be best to answer that part, since she was our expert on the committee at the time, but my recollection of that is it's decided from the law, and it's now before the Copyright Board for a decision sometime before the end of this year, but it's on audio, not on video. It's a levy on blank audio.

Mr. Dale Phillips: I understand this. We are an audio-visual medium, and a lot of our production is done on tape or audio production media. We've just experienced a 357% increase on 92-minute audio cassettes, 270% on 62-minute audio cassettes, 45% on 124-minute DATs, and on it goes.

Mr. Mauril Bélanger: I'm not going to defend the increases or not, but the levy has not yet been set. There have been proposals from quarters—warring quarters, if you will—but the Copyright Board, partly because it's not fully staffed right now, has not made a decision. So any manufacturer that has self-imposed a certain levy, that was a decision of their own making. It's not been set.

Mr. Dale Phillips: Okay, thank you.

Mr. Doug Lord: May I ask a supplementary question? I'm not intimately familiar with this amendment in Bill C-32, but I don't believe the Copyright Board has the power—and correct me if I'm wrong—to exempt certain tapes from the levy. They will pass the amount of the levy and it will be imposed on all of the tapes that are sold, I believe.

The Acting Chair (Ms. Sarmite Bulte): Perhaps, with everybody's consent, we can have Ms. Noël answer that question, because Ms. Noël is also a solicitor who is very much involved in this.

Ms. Wanda Noël (Committee Researcher): I have two points of information to add.

First, by voluntary agreement, the people who are entitled to collect the levy have agreed not to collect it until the end of this year or until the Copyright Board sets a rate, whichever comes earlier.

The second point is on the issue of exemptions. When the legislation was passed, there was no provision in the law to provide for any exemptions beyond what was provided in there, which was a limited exemption for people with perceptual disabilities. There have been some voluntary discussions from those who are entitled to the royalties to provide exemptions in limited cases, and as I understand it, those negotiations and discussions are ongoing at the present time, but there is no provision in the law to allow for that.

Mr. Doug Lord: So just to clarify, Mr. Phillips' comment then is correct that basically when the tariff is set, it will apply to audio tapes that are being used in the manufacture of a product and are not really the subject matter of what the law was intended to catch, which is piracy.

Mr. Mauril Bélanger: It's not piracy; it's the recognition that there are—

Mr. Doug Lord: It's a recognition that piracy exists, and it's to compensate the industry for people making copies that would otherwise be infringing.

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Mr. Mauril Bélanger: The law essentially recognizes the ability of people to make copies for personal use, and to compensate for that, a levy has been imposed. The amount of the levy is yet to be determined. It's simplistic, but that's the state of matters as they are.

The Acting Chair (Ms. Sarmite Bulte): Mr. Phillips or Mr. Lord, if you have a written brief specifically on this point that you could file with the committee or that we could review, we'd be pleased to do that and to address specifically this concern.

A voice: Thank you.

The Acting Chair (Ms. Sarmite Bulte): Ms. Folkmann.

Ms. Helen Folkmann: Thank you.

As I said in my introduction, I represent independent filmmakers, some of them here in Alberta, but many of them right across the country. The primary sources of support for the projects that film and video makers in Canada do are various arts funding bodies. I'd just like to tell the committee that the Canada Council is very important in filmmaking here in this country. In fact if we didn't have the Canada Council, we would not have Atom Egoyan, we would not have Bruce McDonald, we would not have Lynne Stopkewich, we would not have any of those people.

And I must say the Canada Council continues to be important in these people's careers and artistic choices. For example, Lynne Stopkewich, whose film, Kissed, you may have heard of—it made an international splash—started with the Canada Council. Telefilm, which is a nationally funded industry, wouldn't look at her stuff. It was Canada Council that got her started. In fact it wasn't until she had completed her film on her own and had submitted it to the Toronto Film Festival that Telefilm helped out, and then because it was already good.

So I'd like to underline the importance of the Canada Council. Once those filmmakers are finished and have in fact produced a very good film—another example is an Alberta filmmaker, Gary Burns—they aren't necessarily on the road to success in Telefilm's eyes. In fact they must go back to Canada Council, because Telefilm, unless it's a commercially acceptable project, are not going to invest. So Gary Burns and Lynne Stopkewich have nowhere else to go except back to Canada Council.

This is where the problem is. We have emerging, established filmmakers who are recognized around the world... In fact Gary Burns has won prizes right around the world; he's been acknowledged as an accomplished filmmaker with a unique vision. Telefilm won't look at him. He's had to go back to Canada Council.

Canada Council will only fund your project as a filmmaker—and I know this from my own experience as well—up to a maximum of $60,000. So when you ask what are major impacts of technology on filmmaking, well, if you make a film in this country and nobody gets paid, it's just the stuff you have to buy. You're looking at up to $5,000 a minute, and that's if nobody gets paid. It's completely low-budget. It's completely artistic-run. It's a very expensive medium.

Canada Council, the arts funder, looks at projects, and they're not looking at whether or not a broadcaster jumps in. They're not looking at whether or not it has marketability, which I'm sure broadcasters take into concern. They are, after all, a business. What Canada Council looks at is the idea, the artistic idea. This is very important.

I'll run these names past you again: Atom Egoyan, Bruce McDonald, etc. Those people got started because of their artistic ideas, which were looked at by other artists in their peer jury judging, and they were supported for those ideas. And voilà! They are the fresh, new wave of Canadian filmmaking and we're all proud of it, and in fact Telefilm takes full advantage of that and then comes in if they're accepted.

The Acting Chair (Ms. Sarmite Bulte): I have a point of clarification on the $60,000 you spoke about. Where does that money come from?

Ms. Helen Folkmann: Canada Council's film production grants. You can get grants for your production. As a film production project, the maximum you can be supported for is $60,000, which is nothing. It's absolutely nothing. There's a gap. Telefilm will be looking at $1 million. There's a huge gap between $60,000 and $1 million. But there's an awful lot of talent in this country that falls between those cracks.

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I'm not sure if your committee is involved in this or not, but there was a committee that came out with a suggestion. It was a heritage standing committee on the industry, and there was an emerging filmmaker suggestion. I'm sure there must be some overlap, if it's not the same individuals involved.

Those industry people had the right idea in mind. They wanted to support emerging filmmakers. Well, there's lots of support for emerging filmmakers. There are so many training programs you can shake a stick at them. They're very important, but what I'd like to point out is that there are many established filmmakers who are not necessarily being supported. They're very good, and they have been tried and tested in international venues and arenas and have been so acknowledged.

It's very good to be supporting our industry. I'm a huge fan of the talent in this country. There's absolutely nothing like the Canadian vision when it comes to film. But there has to be some support between $60,000, which is the maximum from Canada Council, and $1 million. We could be seeing a lot more very interesting films coming out.

The Acting Chair (Ms. Sarmite Bulte): As a follow-up to that, where would you see the appropriate place to have this money coming from?

Ms. Helen Folkmann: Actually there were some recommendations about that. One of them was to take money away from the National Film Board. Don't do it, please, because the National Film Board does support us.

My own cooperative gets support from the National Film Board already. It's not much, but it's a cash prize, which we in turn make available to our own members in a competition. They've been giving this to us for the last 10 years. It's not a lot—it's $5,000—but every year it starts three short films. It's really valuable. We match it in turn in our co-op with equipment access.

The National Film Board does this right across the country. It's never enough, but it is something. If that money gets yanked away for an emerging filmmaker project, then it's not going to be supported at the grassroots. It's very important that the grassroots gets supported. At this point it's being given to the co-ops right across the country. Please don't take that away.

The Acting Chair (Ms. Sarmite Bulte): Thank you.

Mr. Balcon.

Mr. David Balcon: I'd like to address questions 1 and 2, but at this point I'll limit myself to point 1, because we should begin at the beginning.

Unfortunately we call these things markets. Every product we make goes into a market and somebody consumes it. Back when I started off in Ottawa, we made cultural things for people to watch, to listen to, to celebrate what Canada was as it came out of its 100th anniversary, its centenary. We created an infrastructure of theatrical, musical, and book publishing enterprises, facilities, and companies to begin to really put on a steady base, in partnership with the provinces, a sound infrastructure of talented Canadians who could express themselves on stages and such.

When I got to the CRTC, electronic media—radio and television—were becoming the main stages for almost every creative endeavour, whether it was at the CBC, with a broader range, or even at some of the private TV stations that were still doing local live television, recorded weekly television variety, and other things. It became important at that time to see that broadcasting was going to be the central delivery system for a lot of the artistic creation in Canada, so that's where Canadian content regulations came in.

For better or for worse in many people's minds, we've seen in the last 25 years... Well, look at the Grammys tonight. I think out of the five women nominated, three are Canadian. The industry grew in the music world primarily because our broadcasters for the first time had to air Canadian music. There are a lot of problems with the regulations and details I won't get into.

Similarly, we had Canadian content regulations in television, but they weren't working, except at the CBC, because the system was underfinanced to begin with. It was built as an addition to an American-based system whereby broadcasters, including the CBC, were able to acquire less expensive offshore programs and then only fill part of their schedule with Canadian programs, so they didn't have to bear the cost of production of an entire schedule. Because of that, ad rates in Canada were always set at half the level they are per capita anywhere else in the broadcasting world: Britain, Australia, New Zealand, and the United States.

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We always underfinanced both the private sector and the CBC's grafted-on advertising activities, so it became essential to find other mechanisms to put in the real dollars that were required to make original Canadian programming a reality. That came during the 1970s, when we started to graft on things such as Telefilm or the CFDC. Also, Telefilm was merged with what was then a subterranean tax on cable viewers to create a fund of money, which was then transferred into Telefilm and for the first time allowed television producers, independents, to create product at budgets matching or equivalent to, in quality, what we found south of the border.

Over the last 10 years, the quality of those programs, such as Traders and many others we could talk about, has risen to the point that although people knock the fact that only 3% or 4% of Canadians are watching Canadian drama on television, when you look at the number of hours of Canadian drama there are on television, there are only 3% or 4%. So every percent of drama we have on the tube, as Canadians, we are watching it.

But that is so costly. As we all know, we're now at a threshold where, even with Mrs. Copps' additional fund, as they call it, or the cable fund, we can't afford the volume of programming that the networks are requiring. There's a squeeze on licence fees, and many of us have just gone through an exercise of financing projects to the cable fund.

Last year we saw the fiasco where it was so oversubscribed. It shouldn't have been a surprise to anybody in Montreal at Telefilm that that fund went in 24 hours, because there were so many pent-up projects. The CRTC had put five new licensees in line for those services.

Quite honestly, there is not enough public money, or publicly redirected money, to finance the infrastructure of broadcasting that we've created, and that's going to create increasing pressures.

On the other side of the cultural industries, the issue really is: Do we still want to make a commitment to expressing Canadian stories and ideas in all of the artistic media? That has to be the ground rule we work on in the future, then deal with issues of trade and other things that flow from it.

Even The Economist, that rank magazine of right-wing political economy, has identified the fact that it may be quite appropriate, when someone discovers a “missing market”, as they call it, that government subsidies be provided in order for domestic participation in that sector to take place. When it gets into trade and foreign areas, we've run into a whole slew of other things, as we're seeing with the Americans.

It's also interesting to recognize where Hollywood and the American recording industry got their start. They didn't get massive amounts of capital out of private investors in the traditional way. If you go back to the 1950s and 1960s, that was Mafia money channelled into Hollywood, channelled into the recording industry, through parking lots and the Kinney Corporation. It wasn't all perfect, clean money that started the massive corporate empires of today.

Somehow we have to reconcile the fact that if we're going to have cultural expression in Canada, the sizes of our markets... We're not 10% of the size of the United States; we're really one-fifteenth the size of the United States in English Canada, and French-speaking Canada is even smaller. So we can never create enough product for ourselves if we don't have some form of public participation in that funding model.

The real issue becomes: Are we willing to recommit ourselves to some form of public support, and are we going to be able to do it in a way that doesn't irritate the Americans or the Europeans or whoever else is in the trading world with what is now cultural products? Cultural industries create cultural products, and that's a catch that is going to get us into a lot more difficulty.

The Acting Chair (Ms. Sarmite Bulte): Thank you, Mr. Balcon.

I'd like to take this opportunity to inform those of you who don't know that last week, on February 17, the Cultural Industries Sectoral Advisory Group on International Trade released to people throughout the industry its two-year study, Canadian Culture in a Global World: Strategies for Culture and Trade, which deals with just these issues you're talking about. Again, it addresses the fact that Canada has to stop being defensive and look forward when it comes to arts and culture. One of the things they found is that we must acknowledge that cultural goods and services are significantly different from other products.

• 1540

So I encourage you, if you have not received this, to get it off the web site. Again, this is a study that will also be further looked at by the international trade committee or the heritage committee. That's just a point of information.

Who'd like to follow next? Mr. Pritchard.

Mr. Garth Pritchard: I'm the guy in the mud, the blood, and the beer. I'm the guy in western Canada and in Alberta who has to come up with the idea, then has to make it work to get a documentary on television.

Three years ago, the infamous Telefilm CTCPF showed up in western Canada, and four weeks into their mandate, they were broke. Interestingly enough, 26 western producers did not get the funding they had been told they were going to get. Then we go on down the road in history and we see the $100 million fiasco this gentleman just talked about. Having been around the planet Earth, you want to talk about banana republics?

The other situation that has been occurring here in western Canada is that the money is not coming here. It never gets down to the people who are doing it: me, the guy at the bottom of the totem pole.

I have no idea what you just said, sir. I'm sure it all makes sense in Ottawa.

What's going on is very simple. When we started to look at where the money was going—and here are your own figures on projects funded from April 14 to November 25, 1998—we discovered that Quebec gets 1,650 projects funded, in some way or another, by this monster. In Alberta, we get 78.

The Acting Chair (Ms. Sarmite Bulte): As a point of clarification, where is this money coming from, what project? Is this from the fund?

Mr. Garth Pritchard: Yes, we're talking about money from the Canadian Television Fund in that time period.

Now it's all been set up to happen again. You know it and I know it. We are funding culture, all right—Quebec culture. We're funding programming, all right—in Quebec and Ontario.

Last year, for the $100 million fiasco in one day, the man who ran the operation was in China. I say in the rest of the country, any businessman who would be in China on the most important day of his company's life... I rest my case.

We also discover that when you look at the Quebec-Ontario problem, Ontario has access to the media. After the $100 million was given away—and we've now found out where it went—Ontario was capable of causing a stink in Ottawa, in the golden triangle, so money was borrowed from this fiscal year to make sure the big boys in Toronto got funded.

The Acting Chair (Ms. Sarmite Bulte): You didn't receive any of that money?

Mr. Garth Pritchard: Well, I just told you, there is zero. I think if you talk to people such as Mr. Dale Phillips, who's here, you'll hear there's very little. I know Channel 5 has some for drama. But when you talk about Alberta, three years ago there were 26 producers who didn't get any. Now, with these figures, there were 22 last year who got some. If this is what Ottawa calls fair and equitable, you're in a deep world of hurt.

I want to go to Quebec, sir, and I want to tell Quebec stories, and I want Quebeckers in Alberta and I want them to tell Alberta stories. This system makes it impossible. We're not looking at each other. We are not telling Canadian stories.

I desperately wanted, and had a licence, by the way, to do the 50th anniversary of Search and Rescue. I know it's not a Canadian thing. They only saved 40,000 people in their 50-year history. That documentary never got done, even though we had a licence. Do you know why? The system was broke. It was in Quebec and it was in Ontario. You'd better fix that. If you think we are not going to be in front of other groups that are coming behind you...

Everybody's wondering what happened to CBC. Well, we have a few things to tell them about that. And the Prime Minister of Canada is coming through asking about western alienation. I rest my case.

At the end, instead of tearing things down, being a good rancher, I'll try to give you what I believe might be a fix that would help my colleagues in Quebec and us in Alberta.

This young lady is absolutely right, and it's not just where she's at. You're talking about $250 million, folks. You give $100 million a year to CBC. I thought they had their own budget. God, I'd love that at the ranch. It just goes on and on with you people.

• 1545

We either fix it or we don't. You're either in or you're out, where we come from. If it's not going to be fair and equitable, then get the hell out and let us do it our way, which unfortunately means going to the States, which is precisely what I'm doing right now on a 13-part series called Tracks.

The Acting Chair (Ms. Sarmite Bulte): Thank you, Mr. Pritchard, for your comments.

Mr. Lord.

Mr. Doug Lord: I can perhaps amplify on what Garth said.

The figures are right on the Canadian Television Fund web site. You can do a fairly simple mathematical analysis for 1997-98. If you look at what Quebec got and subtract that—and I'm including French and English—and then look at what is left, for the rest of English-speaking Canada, there was some $95.5 million left in that fund.

On the basis of population—solely on the basis of population—Alberta should have got $11.8 million of that. It in fact received $4 million. Where did the money go? Ontario got some of it and other areas of the country, Nova Scotia in particular. And of course some areas of the country didn't get any.

Those are the facts. I don't know what's going to happen this year. The Canadian Television Fund came out with their guidelines on December 10, giving producers some two months, until February 15, to apply for the equity fund, and I think until March 8 for the licence fee program. They also changed the rules substantially from a first come, first served basis to a rating process.

Because of all that, this is my sense. I may be wrong, but I've spoken to many independent producers, and firstly, a lot of them simply have not been able to get a commitment from a broadcaster, and secondly, two months was not enough time for them to get organized. So I would suspect that this year it's going to be much the same story.

The proposal I am suggesting—and it is my own; it's not AMPIA's proposal—is that the federal government very seriously look at an envelope situation to ensure that the provinces are equitably treated. Because if, two years in a row, in a province such as Alberta, with 2.8 million people, we are not getting our fair share—in fact we're getting about a third of what we're entitled to—the effect this has on the production industry is disastrous. What you see happening is that people are moving, and this will continue. Once this starts to happen, it accelerates, and it takes many years to put it back together again.

That's my simple suggestion.

Mr. Garth Pritchard: May I just follow on that?

Doug is absolutely right. You know there is no licensing available in Alberta. We call it linguistic lying. As a journalist in both the east and the west, I see that what's going on right here is that the system knows damn well that because we need a letter of licensing and there aren't any in Alberta, there's no hope for this young lady and the people she's supporting, or for old farts like me who have a background.

When I say “linguistic lying”, what I mean is very simple. If Chevrolet said, “We are giving away Corvettes on one day, on a first come, first served basis, and we're letting only dealers in the east have the letters for licensing”, how many people do you think would be there for Corvettes? Do you think they'd have enough?

• 1550

When I hear the system's public relations spin doctors say, “We're in great shape; more and more people want this production”, I know it's because you have this give-away system. There is nothing based on background, certainly not coming from the regions.

I was appalled and shaken, as a journalist, that when the Canadian Television Fund came through here a couple of weeks ago, there was nobody at the meeting in Yellowknife. Hey, folks! On April 1 the aboriginal people of Canada are going to have their newest state government, and nobody in Yellowknife—no producer, no director, nobody—was saying, “Hey, I'm out here in Yellowknife. I should get some money to do a documentary or a film on April 1. Tell me all about it.”

Look at these things, because that's what you're doing to our country when you insist on putting all the money in Quebec and Ontario. Just be fair. Just be fair.

The Acting Chair (Ms. Sarmite Bulte): Mr. Lord, is there something else you wanted to say?

Mr. Doug Lord: I think Mr. Phillips has a few words.

The Acting Chair (Ms. Sarmite Bulte): Before we move on, I have a point of clarification. You said that in December all these rules were changed for the fund. Were they changed for the better or for the worse? What was the change? It was just no longer first come, first served?

Mr. Doug Lord: It's no longer first come, first served. First come, first served might work in an envelope situation where you set aside money for a province. It certainly doesn't work on a national basis. I realize they had to change the regulations, because the system fell apart, but what has replaced it makes it very difficult for smaller producers.

I don't want to go into any great detail, but it favours larger producers who are established, who have a distribution arm to their production company, and who can in fact put all the elements together. Certain weightings are given to various categories. It's a point system, and it's a complicated point system, but basically, if you look at it overall, it does not favour smaller independent producers.

The Acting Chair (Ms. Sarmite Bulte): Thank you, Mr. Lord. Again, if you have more detail... I know you don't want to get into it here, but if there is detail that you could share with the committee by a submission or some kind of a paper, we would appreciate it.

Mr. Doug Lord: Certainly.

The Acting Chair (Ms. Sarmite Bulte): Mr. Phillips.

Mr. Dale Phillips: I'm happy to speak, but there are other speakers we haven't heard from, and I think it only fair—

The Acting Chair (Ms. Sarmite Bulte): No, I have a speakers' list, so go ahead.

Mr. Dale Phillips: Okay.

Picking up where Doug left off, it's clear now, as Mr. Balcon alluded to earlier, that we've created a hungry monster on the broadcast side of the situation, and we can scarcely afford the monster we put in place.

The Globe and Mail last week had a major front-page arts column on how little viewership has in fact increased across the country, even with more and more television choices. Canadians aren't adding to their broadcast viewing schedule. They're keeping it at a pretty constant scale.

This is not to take away from the fact that we should perhaps be charging more for television advertising in Canada. We haven't looked at that side of the picture.

What we're grappling with as producers is that even with more television competition, more places to put programming, there are fewer and fewer licences coming to fewer and fewer people. There seems to be a supply and demand market that is being met more and more by more vertically integrated companies that have international markets and independent equity arms and cashflow to put money at risk.

I'm not saying all of these things are wrong, but when you come to look at cultural industry and its marriage to public policy, it may be time to ask whether the balance hasn't tilted a bit too far to the industry side of cultural industry and maybe not enough to the culture and citizenship side of the cultural industry story.

I worry that Canadian television is becoming a little bit too monocultural, that taste is being filtered through broadcast program heads headquartered in one corner of the country, and that we're losing our opportunity to deliver diversity, cultural rootedness, and citizenship as we know it in different parts of the country. As Mr. Pritchard said, we should get to know each other by looking at each other and trading each other's stories.

• 1555

We need to revisit the whole notion of culture and cultural industry. I'll leave it at that. Thank you.

The Acting Chair (Ms. Sarmite Bulte): Thank you, Mr. Phillips.

Next I have Mr. Rollans and then Ms. Levy.

Mr. Glenn Rollans: Jumping off from Dale's remarks—and again, I represent book publishers here today—in the cultural industries generally, and specifically in book publishing, we take a sort of “candy mint versus breath mint” approach to this designation of cultural industries.

In the book publishing industry in Canada, we tend to be free-standing companies. We drive our own distribution. We don't sell advertising. It's a very thrifty industry. It's very stable in the sense that projects tend to come out of companies that exist to produce a stream of books. In the case of our provincial association, for example, I think four of the five founding members are still in operation 25-odd years on.

But along the way it's been a matter of survival to at times stress the cultural side and at times stress the industry side. I wanted to highlight that today, because as far as federal policy goes now in Canada, we're finding that the route to the federal government—the route to cabinet and to Parliament—runs most of the time through the Department of Canadian Heritage, which is very appropriate, but in many cases, key decisions are made at other levels, either at Finance or at Industry.

We've recently seen some fairly key discussions relating to that fact settled on the Industry side. It's very difficult for us to see the process, but perhaps at the cabinet level, with more credence given to Industry's submissions or to Finance's submissions...

We are very focused on markets, we're primarily funded out of operations, and at the same time the book industry is a 400-year-old vessel. It's covered with barnacles and its practices are very hard to change, and structurally they're very difficult. By the time you get to the bottom line on any given book project, the pie has been sliced into many defined pieces that are almost impossible for the publisher to vary. There's a major discount to retailers; there's the cost of sales and distribution; there are royalties to authors. All of these are really essential parts of the whole project. But it means that when you get down to overheads and contributions to profits, you're in trouble almost always.

Many large companies manage that issue on economies of scale, but as has been noted in the discussion of film markets, in Canada we face a real challenge there.

I guess I'm talking about questions 1, 2, 3, and 5. I don't think I'm going to talk much about question 4, but while I have the red light, I'll throw in a little bit on all of those.

When we look at direct funding programs—and they include the DCH's programs; the book publishing industry development program; the Association for the Export of Canadian Books; and now, through DCH, a loan loss reserve or a loan guarantee program that was just launched early in the new year—all of these have both industry and cultural aspects. But in most ways they're created and they're coming out of Heritage, recognizing that book publishing has an important cultural component; it has a cultural role to play in both official languages in Canada and in all kinds of minority languages, including native languages. And it's a role that isn't served by large multinational publishers, which of course are also very active in Canada.

Book publishing and book sales have been carried on in free trade conditions virtually forever, so the question of trade liberalization in most ways is not really applicable to book publishing at this stage. We sell books back and forth across international borders as hard and as fast as we can. At the same time, trade and ownership issues are very close to the question of the survival of the industry, and they're among the questions that are coming up for tense discussion within this Industry-Canadian Heritage face-off that I was talking about.

• 1600

Recently the Bertelsmann purchase of Random House-Doubleday-Knopf Canada was approved, very much over the protests of the Canadian book publishing industry. It gives that new corporate entity something like 50% of the trade book marketplace in Canada. Under a single corporate umbrella owned outside Canada, this strikes us a level of control that's very risky, at the very least.

It's always disturbing, in a group of cultural industries professionals, to get into questions of money, because money is that grease for the big machine, and we're all in competition for the same money.

So when I talk about the foreign-owned industry, I do it with real acknowledgement that they're a key part of a culture of reading and a culture of information in the country, just as filmmaking, television, and multimedia are. But when it comes to access to Canadian markets, particularly Canadian markets within institutions—the schools market and the post-secondary market—we believe as an industry that that level of control exercised by owners outside Canada is both an industrial challenge and a cultural challenge for our industry.

We believe that at the policy level at least, there is great support within Canadian Heritage for our position, as Canadian publishers, against that sale. In the end it was John Manley's announcement that confirmed that it had been allowed, and that it had been allowed with certain guarantees for Canadians that included spots for interns within the company and increased or stable employment.

From a professional publisher's point of view, those were almost ludicrous guarantees. Guaranteeing spots for interns, for example, is something we'd all like to do, because “intern” and “slave” are on the same side of the balance sheet when you're paying employees. It's not a non-commitment by a company to train interns, but it's nothing that lets you leapfrog Investment Canada's guidelines on Canadian book ownership.

The other big issue that's been out there of course is the WTO complaint around Canada's advertising policies for magazines. I want to be clear that I'm not speaking for magazine publishers, but I also want to be clear that as an industry, book publishers are following that decision, because we see it as a very dangerous road. Where magazine publishers lose, we expect to lose later. We expect that direct support programs for book publishers will be challenged on the same grounds or on similar grounds.

The reason this is a problem is that structurally, as I was saying, the pie is cut into very small pieces. Direct funding programs in Canada, such as the book publishing industry development program and similar programs run at provincial levels, make the difference between small-percent losses on average and small-percent profits for Canadian publishers.

This isn't a handout. It's not a guaranteed annual income for someone in book publishing. It is that difference of 4% to 6% between making a small loss year on year, which means you're going to get smaller and disappear, and being the stable, contributing industry that we are, in both economic and cultural measures.

So the WTO decision and the Canadian response in legislation we see as a prototype for discussion that will happen in book publishing. I'm very anxious to see that Canadian Heritage's position in cabinet and its position in Parliament, as can be furthered by this standing committee, is well informed about our position and is aggressive in representing, in this candy mint-breath mint face-off, the position of culture first. I also would like to see them represent the position of culture in a way that's cognizant of the fact that, in this case, we are genuinely a stable, productive, self-funding industry, with some very essential but modest provisos to that statement.

As well, through the Association of Canadian Publishers, we look at the future of the industry with three central hopes at the federal level. They have been well represented by the national association, but I'd like to just touch on them very quickly.

The first is the preservation or expansion of direct funding programs. We have, in the last year and a half, been through a refunding of the book publishing industry development program that's been an incredible shot in the arm to the industry and something we're all very grateful for, but something we see as precarious and easily rolled back in the future.

• 1605

The loan guarantee program is the second plank, and as I say, that was announced early in the new year. We have no clear sense of how it's functioning now, and it does have a fairly limited mandate, but we see it as an incremental plus.

The third is structural measures in the tax system that make it attractive to invest in new products in book publishing and that make it attractive to invest in equity in book publishers. Our position as an association—and when I say that, I mean the national association, because, as in filmmaking, there are significant differences between the provincial position and the national position...

As a national association, we have placed new emphasis on a program that would encourage the purchase of equity in Canadian book publishers. This relates partly to the stage of the industry today. We're about 30 years on in the mature Canadian book publishing industry, and many company founders and owner-operators are greying, and they're looking at succession plans that are very challenged by the fact that structurally, it is a marginally profitable industry.

We see a really important role for the federal government in making it attractive to put capital into book publishers. At the same time, we'd see it as a great pot of gold at the end of the rainbow if Finance were to come on board as a partner of Heritage and look at a refundable investment tax credit that would return cash to book publishers in some proportion against the direct investment that they're making in new projects.

The Acting Chair (Ms. Sarmite Bulte): Mr. Rollans, again, because of the nature of the refundable tax credit, could you provide the committee with something written as to how it works so that we can deal with Finance directly?

Mr. Glenn Rollans: Sure.

The Acting Chair (Ms. Sarmite Bulte): Thank you for your comments.

I'm going to move now to Ms. Levy, then I want to open it up to see if there's any audience participation, and then I'll go back to Ms. Folkmann.

Ms. Levy.

Ms. Joanne Levy: As a regional broadcaster, I want to address some of the issues that have been raised by my independent production colleagues. I sit on the board of the Alberta Motion Picture Industries Association as the broadcast representative, so I'm very familiar with their positions.

I just wanted to, I suppose, remind you of something you probably already are well aware of, which is that some of the issues that have been raised here were also raised and expanded upon in the hearings the CRTC held last fall on the whole issue of Canadian content. There was at that time a lot of discussion of the consolidation in the broadcast industry, which has led to difficulty in the regions for small to medium regional producers getting licences, because as broadcast entities have consolidated, their gatekeepers have been reduced—the number of people who make decisions and who can green-light productions tends to be a small number who tend to reside in Toronto, quite frankly.

So as a regional broadcaster, which Craig Broadcast Systems is, we sometimes feel like an endangered species, because we have the opportunity—and we take it as a great responsibility—to licence in the regions, and I think we have been able to have quite an impact doing that. But it ain't easy, because some of the incentives for regional production have been pulled away as well with some of the changes in regulations. So that's something that has to be looked at.

As a broadcaster in the Canadian system, I always have to say we're very grateful for some of the protections that the regulated industry has, but we come away time after time with the recommendation that rather than layering on more regulations insisting that we provide a certain number of hours of Canadian content at particular times, the far better way of approaching it and getting what you want is by providing incentives.

I just want to underline that as a very important point that has come out in the Canadian content hearings and that also came out in the feature film review, which took place last year as well. Those two reports are probably going to give you some interesting reading as well.

The other thing about the television industry in particular in this country is that while it's been consolidated, it's also been fragmented to the extent that we've seen more specialty channels and more competition for, as Dale Phillips mentioned, relatively the same number of viewers. So trying to get higher licence fees out of us and trying to get us to put more Canadian content on the air, as I say, will likely be achieved by incentives rather than by regulation.

• 1610

The other thing that is important to note is that the Canadian Television Fund was never set up to be the sole funding body for all Canadian production. What we are seeing is a growing number of very successful producers, even indeed in the regions, who are able to go out and make international sales to ensure they can get Canadian content on the air.

So although it is very difficult for small to medium regional producers to get the licences they need to start their production and to get the distribution guarantees they require in order to complete the funding of their production, there are avenues and a growing number of producers who are able to go out into the global markets and sell their product as well. I wouldn't want you to be left with the impression that it's all entirely bleak.

But it is true that the Canadian Television Fund and those sorts of sources of funding are absolutely critical for a lot of the start-up projects, and they are critical for the very distinctively Canadian projects that are going to have a very hard time making sales in foreign countries because of their highly culturally significant, individualistic kind of content.

The Acting Chair (Ms. Sarmite Bulte): Could I ask you a question on that cable fund? Is there regional broadcast representation on the board of the cable fund?

Ms. Joanne Levy: No, there is not. The members who sit on the board of the Canadian Television Fund are a group of very diverse people from all aspects of the industry, but there are no regional broadcasters on that board.

The Acting Chair (Ms. Sarmite Bulte): Okay, thank you.

Before I go to Ms. Folkmann again, I would invite the audience to speak.

If you have any questions or interventions you'd like to add, we encourage you to take the microphone and address the committee.

I tried it this morning, and it didn't work the first time, but it did the second time. So maybe I'll go to Ms. Folkmann, and when we come around the second time, you'll change your minds.

Ms. Folkmann, please.

Ms. Helen Folkmann: Thanks.

I'm a media artist, and just from listening to people this afternoon, we're heavily on the film industry end here, but with a certain amount of publishing. That makes me think we're only talking about the making of; we're not necessarily talking about the looking at.

For short films, there's no market out there, with the exception of a festival such as Local Heroes, which is showing as we speak. Luckily there is a place to see short films. That's my big thing.

When we're talking about this industry, it seems mostly what we're talking about really is television. Everybody just sort of conveniently forgot that we used to look at movies in cinemas. Now that's just gotten beyond our control, and we're not even addressing it here.

I happened to be flying on an airplane last night—and this has happened to me again and again, so I thought I'd take the opportunity to vent a bit about it—and I saw an American film on Air Canada again. It really makes me angry, because there's so much good stuff in Canada. Every time I fly in a plane, I see American films, and that really makes me mad. Why? There's great stuff here. I saw CBC on Air Canada. Why couldn't I see a Canadian film?

Most of these films are funded by lots of different levels of Canadian institutions and supports and so on, but we can't see it. This is a big problem. Distribution is huge. It has to be addressed in some way. It doesn't matter how many different ways you can make the stuff. If people can't see it, why would they care?

• 1615

I guess it has evolved, especially in the last couple of years, that our industry has found that the only way they can be seen is on television. From my perspective, movies should still be seen in cinemas and people should be able to see them as films, not on boxes. It's too bad, but I guess the only way we can see them is on television. That's not to say it's a bad thing, and it probably reaches a heck of a lot more people when it's on television, but Canadian content should be seen in its original form.

The Acting Chair (Ms. Sarmite Bulte): Thank you, Ms. Folkmann.

Ms. Ashton.

Ms. Cheryl Ashton: I must be on drugs, because I've just come through a week of showcasing Canadian talent during the festival, and I'm absolutely excited and delighted with what this country is doing. For a relatively young industry, we've done lots of really great things. As with everything, we can always improve, but...

To the people around the table, I want to invite you to a festival to see the young filmmakers who are emerging. They are making their films; they are telling their stories. They've probably put a lot of it on their personal credit cards, but guess what? That's part of the reality.

From our perspective, the Department of Canadian Heritage needs to look at trying to provide a continuum of service or support or involvement. What frustrates me the most is that quite often I find the left hand not knowing what the right hand is doing.

For instance, there is a gap. If at Canada Council the highest amount of grant money you're eligible for is $60,000 and then the next level is $1 million, we have a problem. It's not a huge problem. It's a problem that can be addressed, but it has to be identified and it has to be studied so a solution can be put in place.

We're a young industry. Dale has been involved for 30 years, and I would just like to ask what he's seen in the last 10 years, because that's when we started coming into our own. I think we're going to continue to grow and develop and improve, and it's going to be a great thing. We're doing really great work, and we should all be very proud of each other and our fellow Canadians.

Don't get so negative, because we can't do anything when we're so down on ourselves. The bottom line is that really great work is happening, and as a Canadian, it really excites me.

The Acting Chair (Ms. Sarmite Bulte): Thank you.

Mr. Balcon.

Mr. David Balcon: Thank you again.

I want to move into question 2 a little bit. We could go on forever on some of these other things, but I'm at least glad to know Air Canada's starting to serve Canadian wines on their planes, at least in business class. Maybe that's a portent. When you're flying in business class—some of us have upgrades—it's interesting that internationally there are now 12 or 14 channels, and when you look at the Canadian content of the documentary channel and all of these, it's Discovery U.S.A., it's Arts and Entertainment.

We're in the same situation. Our own filmmakers can get very little access to even Air Canada's or Canadian Airlines' channels, because they tend to be bought and programmed out of the United States or by brokers in Canada who go down to the United States and buy their products. So that's another market that's always been difficult for us.

But that leads me into the area of new technologies, where I'd like to be a little bit more optimistic. Having lived through some of these new technologies, I remember Telidon, which may not be a name that anybody around here remembers. Maybe Wanda remembers Telidon and a couple of others. It was sort of the precursor to the Internet.

In Europe and Britain, equivalent video-tech services were developed during the 1970s and 1980s and into the 1990s, which streamed information on the television band and in effect was like we're seeing now on the Internet. We led in the development of that technology, partially because the federal government put an awful lot of money into it, but Telidon is left in the dust. It was a loser that was backed by governments. We have some stories here in Alberta about losers that were backed by governments.

• 1620

Vidéoway was another technology that was heavily backed by the federal government to look at interactive television and multi-channel cable television. A lot of money was given to Vidéotron in Montreal to develop this way so that you could sit and watch a hockey game and direct the cameras yourself, to prove that interactive television was coming. I think some of us in West Edmonton got it. That as well has gone the way of the dinosaur, and I have three or four other examples of dinosaurs.

Which brings me to a project I'm now working on in Saskatchewan, which is trying to revolutionize the way we receive music, live performances and recorded music. On the Internet we're beginning to see all of these portals, I think they call them. We've read about the great boom in sales of CDs and books on Amazon.com, yet the company continues to lose money.

We see that every one of these technologies has great potential to get our products, our cultural expressions, into people's homes, but unfortunately the gatekeepers have to be there with the dollars to invest in order to allow that content to be developed and then delivered to those out there who want to see it.

One of the issues that has always fascinated me is something I call the appositional markets. That is, in almost every product you see—and I'm sorry to use the term “product” when we're talking about books and films and things, but that's the vernacular of the day—there's a mass market, and we tend to be fixated on that mass market. All of our discussions flow around the 80% of consumption of the mass market, but there's a 15% or 20% appositional market for alternative products. That's where we've seen microbreweries find a market for different types of beer from what Molson and Labatt have been feeding us for 20 years.

You can see the splintering and flourishing of several Canadian companies and Canadian products there. You go through a number of these markets and you begin to see that as you address that 20% audience, you have an economically viable marketplace to go after. It's still not in the mainstream, but it provides enough of a base for small companies to work, and regional companies can actually flourish within those types of marketplaces.

This is probably no surprise to the book publishers, because these are a lot of the things the Canadian book publishing industry has discovered and done across the country. But in television, unfortunately we've had to focus on the national broadcasters, and even with the speciality networks, it's the same players: it's the Batons, it's the WICs, it's the same corporate entities based in Toronto who have a similar mindset.

The seniors' channel... I'm getting grey, and I think most of us around the table are of that generation. We heard the application by Global saying they were going to give us a different TV service aimed at people 50 and up or 45 and up, and it was going to talk about our lifestyles and things we were doing. Then we turn it on and it's Entertainment Tonight and General Hospital; it's the same stuff, but with greyer-haired people.

So when you try to develop projects that are specific to those audiences, even though those niches are there, the marketing dictates continue to follow that mass market. So in the cultural sector, at least in filmmaking and television, we're caught in a bit of a trap: those who deliver the products to the audience are not on the same wavelength as those who are creating it and the audience out there.

There was a piece I think in the Globe and Mail or the National Post yesterday talking about the fact that nobody wants to sell products to those of us over 40 any more. So television, as with radio... We saw when it was all rock radio, and even today, radio is aimed at a very small age range of 15 to 35 or whatever. Those commercial imperatives are basically describing what gets bought and what gets commissioned to go on television, our primary economic market.

The question is: Will the Internet, will alternative streams of delivery technologies, provide us with a way of more directly reaching—and, more important, getting money out of—the audience and therefore allowing us some of the efficiencies that have come on the other side of technology?

We've all moved from all sorts of flatbed editing and huge two-inch videotape editing machines to non-linear AVID desktop editing for film and television. We've also seen our musical compositions all coming out of MIDI suites rather than orchestras and multi-level composers and things. We've seen technology help us at that end to lower our costs. Will we see technology working on the other end to give us more direct ways of accessing the audiences?

• 1625

If we look at the example of pay-per-view TV as we're seeing it right now on cable, unfortunately all we're seeing are the same basic mass-market movies being delivered every 15 minutes on those channels. There is not a single pay-per-view alternate cinema or international foreign cinema. There is still no access to diverse product on those delivery systems. The reason is that the economics are such, they're so expensive to put into place, that only entrepreneurs who want to make a fast return are able to put the money in.

In the project I'm working on in Saskatchewan, SaskTel, the phone company, and the provincial government have invested about $500,000 to provide an infrastructure to allow a very radically different delivery of music and live musical performance and pre-recorded performance to explore this area. But more and more, government is not there to make those investments. It's being left to the private sector. And Canadian entrepreneurs don't have the money to invest to compete against the Amazon.coms and some of the others.

It is going to be a major challenge to see those new technologies work in both exhibition as well as creation.

The Acting Chair (Ms. Sarmite Bulte): Thank you very much, Mr. Balcon.

[Translation]

Mr. Sauvageau.

Mr. Benoît Sauvageau: I would like to make a very brief intervention because I was startled by Ms. Folkman's statements which reminded me of an article that I had recently read. We began our tour of Canadian cities in Thunder Bay. The witnesses we have heard so far share their concerns regarding the promotion of culture. We often hear about increasing program budgets in order to export our culture and make it known abroad. This example of the American film being shown in the airplane points the way, perhaps, to a partial solution that would not necessarily cost millions, but is a sign of goodwill.

The article I was reading—and perhaps our witness from the book publishing industry could give us more abundant details on that—said that tourism is often associated with reading. When we go somewhere as a tourist, we often take a book or two along. We were wondering why it would not be possible to associate the Canadian tourist industry to the cultural industry, as the tourist industry is being promoted in many ways, through tourist guidebooks for instance. In some provinces or in some regions, we could include in the tourist guidebooks a promotion of books by Canadian authors from different regions, be they Quebeckers, anglophones, francophones, you name it. This is not a problem. By doing some small things that will not necessarily cost millions, with some goodwill and by associating different kinds of sectors and industries in Canada, we could make our books and films better- known right here rather than going abroad to make them known on the foreign market. We could promote them to foreign visitors while they are here. In that way we could save the export costs. We would make our national production known to those who have already paid to visit us.

Although this may seem like a very simple and trivial example, we could find many other examples and applications in various sectors. Thank you for having informed me about the article.

[English]

The Acting Chair (Ms. Sarmite Bulte): Thank you, Monsieur Sauvageau.

Mr. Muise.

Mr. Mark Muise: I think we all recognize that there needs to be a certain base funding, be it for museums or for film or television production. But I'm wondering if something else should be incorporated in a cultural policy that you would like to share with us, as people who are in your respective industries.

If it's not dollars—for example, tax credits were discussed earlier—what other things would affect culture and your industries in a positive way, without being just more money put out? I'm not saying that shouldn't be done, because there has been an erosion there; we've fallen behind, and things can't keep going. I'd like to bring that to the forefront, if I could.

The Acting Chair (Ms. Sarmite Bulte): Mr. Pritchard and then Ms. Ashton.

Mr. Garth Pritchard: I'd love to talk to that, if I may.

The Acting Chair (Ms. Sarmite Bulte): Yes, please.

Mr. Garth Pritchard: Farmer fix.

We own CBC. The taxpayers of Canada pay for Heritage. This fund here is financed by Canadians. Here in western Canada we're forced to watch the same news program twice on my national news every day. Why don't we give these people at the Canadian Television Fund two hours a week, two hours a day, be it what it may, of that time so they can show the products that we as Canadians are financing? Let's do the same thing with the NFB.

• 1630

Let's go right across this country and give each person, not a committee... I'm not trying to come up with a quarter horse and coming up with a four-humped camel. Let's have the people who are already in place put their names on the product that they're going to put on television that day. In other words, Peter Kakatodis in Montreal picks his one from Montreal that day and he puts his name on it.

Then we go across the region back and forth. In other words, Alberta gets to put what they want on that day and Quebec gets what they want when they get their shot at it. It's just the math of it. What happens is I can then watch Quebec documentary films, hopefully with the English wording underneath, and I can increase my French by watching it at home if I wish to. We could get out into the territories. We have aboriginals; when it comes their time, they can put it on.

We have to stop this nonsense that CBC, with the filters in Toronto, are all-consuming. Half of the problems I'm seeing here, as an old guy, as a journalist who spent 14 years in Montreal, who was in Toronto, and who spent two years in Ottawa...

The problem here is the country is not talking to ourselves. We can put our products on television, but we're going to have to put it on CBC. We're going to have to force them to give up some hours a day so that we can just do simple things.

Newfoundland picks theirs. The guy out there puts his name on it, and we get to watch it across the country. Canadians will very quickly tell you, by what they're watching and what they're not watching, what they want to see. You will see the cream of the crop come forward. You will see producers and directors fight like hell to get stuff on that time slot. Just give them some time that we already have.

Instead of fighting over bureaucracies and what they own in their own little Fort Knoxes, open up the doors; kick the doors down. Give us some space to put this Canadian content on. It's a no-brainer. At the ranch it would be a no-brainer, anyway.

The Acting Chair (Ms. Sarmite Bulte): Thank you, Mr. Pritchard.

Ms. Ashton.

Ms. Cheryl Ashton: What I would like to see from the Department of Canadian Heritage is, again, a continuum of services. If cultural industry and trade, cultural human resource development, and cultural finance and international marketing could be handled under one department, we would be well on our way to developing a pretty extraordinary system.

Right now, as executive director of NSI, I have to go to Human Resources Development Canada for part of my funding and to Heritage for part of my funding. We're in the process of developing some international marketing courses, because the next wave is for Canadians to co-produce with other partners in other countries, and that's yet another department.

For the most part, Heritage understands us. Industry and Trade doesn't. It's a completely different language. I have to explain our human resource development in terms of another kind of industry. If one super-department could be created, it would be pretty interesting.

The Acting Chair (Ms. Sarmite Bulte): One of the things we've talked about as we've crossed the country is the problem that when we're trying to define a cultural policy, it's too interdepartmental. We've heard that again today: we have Finance, Industry, International Trade, and HRDC.

When we were trying to define a cultural policy, in part of the policy, we tried to make each department, when they're putting their programs into place, think about how they will affect cultural policy. When we brought that up in Saskatoon, their concern was that it not just go to a department again, because then nothing will happen with it.

I'm hearing you say, “Take it to one department”, and we're saying help us with this.

Ms. Cheryl Ashton: There would have to be some training within the department, but I think a better line of communication would be established. Canada Council would know what Telefilm was doing.

• 1635

Right now I don't think there is a way for the officers at Canada Council to talk to the people at Telefilm. Why would Telefilm know who's interesting and who isn't if they've never dealt with them before? But if there were some dialogue from the Canada Council officers who are dealing with regional development, then perhaps they could share that information with the next level.

The Acting Chair (Ms. Sarmite Bulte): Mr. Muise, Mr. Sauvageau, and then Ms. Folkmann.

Mr. Mark Muise: You asked my supplementary.

The Acting Chair (Ms. Sarmite Bulte): Oh, sorry.

Mr. Mark Muise: It was super. That's what I wanted to know.

The Acting Chair (Ms. Sarmite Bulte): Monsieur Sauvageau.

[Translation]

Mr. Benoît Sauvageau: I'd like to put a question to the intervenors who seem to be experts in programs. Various departments were mentioned including the Department of International Trade. Strangely enough, I heard that the Department of Public Works was financing certain events aimed at promoting Canadian culture. Did this department finance any of your programs?

[English]

Ms. Cheryl Ashton: Personally, no, but that's a very good point, because there are many opportunities for Public Works to become involved with my particular programs.

[Translation]

Mr. Benoît Sauvageau: Your current programs?

[English]

Ms. Cheryl Ashton: Sorry, I'm not...

Ms. Helen Folkmann: I don't think I have my translating device on right, and I can only half understand what you're saying. I was trying to address what you had brought up, and perhaps this can answer you as well.

Heritage Canada as a whole can take a very good look at what Canada Council is doing. Again, I'm a big fan, because Canada Council is able to look at the artistic excellence of an idea, and that's it. That's very important, because it's purely interested in the cultural—and I hate the word—product. It's purely interested in expression, and that is very important.

The difference between Canada Council and Telefilm is that while that is of importance to Telefilm—and I'm sure that way back before it was even called Telefilm, that was what it was supposed to be doing, that was one of its mandates—it's gotten mixed up in marketing, and that's where artistic excellence may not necessarily be as important.

Maybe Canada Council is lucky, because all it has to deal with is artistic excellence. Also, the people who are looking at it are not looking at marketing and are not attached to stockholders and all that stuff. The people who are looking at it and supporting it are artists, other artists who can recognize the idea behind it. It's purely cultural.

What Canada Council has done, particularly in the last year—and this is important—is they have made a really concerted effort to present the work that they support, not only to the country, but internationally. So now there is a lot of new support for presentation; they call it dissemination in the council.

As a result, we have a cinematheque here in Edmonton called Metro Cinema, whose primary mandate is to show alternative, non-commercial Canadian and international films. It's the only cinema left here in the city where you can see that work. Everything else is privately owned or has American distributors attached to it. They had never been funded, up until last year by Canada Council. Now they are. Thank you. That's a really important thing.

The other thing the council has done—and the committee may have heard this this morning when they were dealing with the arts—is they're supporting other groups in the performing arts and supporting their presentation to the Canadian people. That's really important, because ultimately we are the ones who should be seeing what we are doing. That's going to do an awful lot to bring about this dialogue that my neighbour is talking about.

It's the presentation, but it's a presentation that's focused on the excellence, the artistic part of it. It's the cultural part of it, and again, that's what Dale Phillips also brought up. That's very important.

• 1640

Where you get the unhappy mix and where you get these weird things such as cable funds and all this other stuff is where it has the whole market thing in there. That's where things get very confusing.

Just before we started, I had to ask Joanne if there was some time for some short films. She said, “Well, we don't really have a spot. Where would we put it?” I can't argue with that. I know what her concerns are. She's not just dealing with cultural concerns. She's dealing with stockholders or shareholders, and she's dealing with all those other things.

The Acting Chair (Ms. Sarmite Bulte): Thank you.

Let's have Mr. Bélanger, Ms. Levy, Mr. Phillips, Mr. Rollans, and Mr. Balcon.

Mr. Mauril Bélanger: Thank you, Madam Chair.

I want to explore this notion of the licences and the system of supply and demand. You'd think that with a greater demand, the supply would come. Because there are multi-universe channels and so forth, you'd think that naturally the independent producers, if not anyone else, would come out and start producing.

I gather what's skewing this is the licence mechanism, and I'd like to hear a little more, in particular about CanWest Global. What's its role there? Is it just trying to compete with the big guys and going for the American market essentially? That's one thing.

Mr. Pritchard, I must admit to a certain amount of sympathy with what you're saying, and I come from Ontario.

[Inaudible—Editor]

Mr. Garth Pritchard: —

Mr. Mauril Bélanger: No, no. I totally disagree with you there. I think what you're doing is Quebec-bashing, and I don't agree at all.

[Inaudible—Editor]

Mr. Garth Pritchard: —

Mr. Mauril Bélanger: Let me finish. Let me finish, please. You can rebut.

The reality, from where I sit and from what I see, is it's not Quebec; it's Montreal. And it's not Ontario; it's Toronto. They have the bulk of those, and by saying it's Quebec, you're casting aspersions on the whole province.

In my backyard, I have a number of independent producers who are as pissed off as you are, because they can't get anything. Yes, it was a schlemozzle this year, and I hope Telefilm is going to learn with this fund. Although there was resistance to the fund initially, now there's a tremendous amount of support for it and people would like to see it increased and so forth.

That fund is a very young enterprise, and I hope they will learn—and they are learning—from their mistakes. They've not corrected it totally, and we should keep pushing so that they do.

What I've heard from the independent producers—both francophones and anglophones, by the way—in Ottawa, my backyard, is that they get crumbs, if anything, because it's bulked in Montreal and Toronto. So I'd invite you, when you next vent, to refer to Montreal and Toronto, not Quebec and Ontario.

Thank you.

Mr. Garth Pritchard: May I say something?

The Acting Chair (Ms. Sarmite Bulte): A quick rebuttal, yes.

Mr. Garth Pritchard: Yes, very quickly.

The situation is very simple: it's unfair.

Mr. Mauril Bélanger: I'm not disagreeing with you.

Mr. Garth Pritchard: There was no point of view except to tell you the facts as they came from their own figures. When you get 1,650 versus 78, the math isn't there, and you get mad and angry people.

In Alberta, we will make changes, sir. We will make changes. The Prime Minister is not coming out here, because he doesn't have it figured out. Either get in or get out. Get out of the bloody way and we'll just go right to the south. We can sell in the south. This system is not working for us.

Mr. Mauril Bélanger: Fair enough. You can threaten all you want.

Mr. Garth Pritchard: It's not threatening. We're just—

The Acting Chair (Ms. Sarmite Bulte): Gentlemen, please, one at a time.

Mr. Mauril Bélanger: I'd just ask one thing. Instead of casting aspersions on entire provinces, I believe... If I'm wrong, I'll apologize for it, but my sense of things is that the industry is dominated from Montreal and Toronto.

Mr. Garth Pritchard: Yes.

Mr. Mauril Bélanger: Okay. Let's reflect that in our vocabulary; that's all I'm suggesting.

Mr. Garth Pritchard: I got my teaching in English. Understand ours. I have never once, sir, since I have tried to get any of this fund, been able to get one penny, yet my last five productions have been on national television, CBC, with rave reviews. Yet the system has never, ever given me a penny. That's how Alberta works. Figure that out.

Mr. Mauril Bélanger: That's not fair.

The Acting Chair (Ms. Sarmite Bulte): Ms. Levy.

Ms. Joanne Levy: Oh, my. I feel as though I'm in the highly unusual position, as a Canadian broadcaster, of defending Telefilm and defending some of my colleague broadcasters, some of my competition, such as CanWest Global. But I would welcome an opportunity to have a discussion with you about licences and that whole realm of things, if you want to renew that.

• 1645

I just want to say there is no doubt that there is a place, we know it, for the Canada Councils of the world, which provide especially young filmmakers, beginning filmmakers, cross-over artists, and those sorts of individuals with a wonderful opportunity to further their artistic expression. But at the end of the day, there does have to be a viewer. You can paint yourself into a corner in your own room and it might be quite wonderful, but if nobody else gets to see it, it can't be very satisfying to the artist.

Certainly if there is a way to help to promote the Metro Cinemas of the world and so forth... I know that at A-Channel in Alberta, in both our stations in Calgary and Edmonton, we spend a big chunk of our time and we have whole entertainment departments that report to our news programs on the events going on in our communities. We've won awards for it and we've had lots of comment on it, because we were the newcomers.

We don't mind whether it's alternative cinema at Metro or whether it's a competitor's product showing at Local Heroes or whatever. We've made a really big commitment to promoting, and that's a big part of whatever you want to do.

On the Telefilm side, to elaborate, Telefilm has always had two mandates: a cultural mandate and an industrial mandate. They have to try to meet both of those. It is sometimes very difficult for them to hear us in the west. Fortunately we are much better served most recently out of the Telefilm office in Vancouver, but it hasn't always been easy to get the product placed.

But everybody wants to know at the end of the day that either there's a distributor on board who's prepared to take a feature or whatever to theatrical exhibitions so that people can see it, or there's a broadcaster on board who can promise to show the production in prime time.

So yes, Telefilm has a double mandate, but it's been extremely important in the development of the production industry in this country.

The other aspect I wanted to raise is, please don't think that all broadcasters are ever going to be all things to all people. We at Craig Broadcast Systems have carved out a niche. We responded, particularly in the Alberta application, to the call, to the policy pronouncements, and to the complaints that there wasn't enough opportunity for long-form drama to be seen by Canadians; this was an underserved category.

We responded by saying, “Right, we will carve out a niche for ourselves that is primarily long-form drama. We will show it in prime time. We will show the big blockbuster American movies, but we will also show Canadian movies.” When we did that, in our last ratings period, there was really no difference in the ratings between the Canadian movies we showed and the American movies we showed.

We have tried to make our viewers aware that if they come to us at 8 o'clock on a weekday evening, they will see a good movie. We'll promote it so that they know what it is and they know where to find it. But we will probably never do short drama, because that's not our niche. We believe that if there is a market for that out there, there's a broadcaster who, perhaps with incentives, will be encouraged to show that short drama.

As for some of the things that have arisen, particularly out of the feature film review and so forth, I should be happy that they're saying they want to put more money into feature films and all the rest of it. I'm delighted with that. I am less delighted with the notion that there should be a regulation that all broadcasters in the country should show Canadian movies in prime time. I don't want that to happen. I like my niche. I like the fact that we do that and somebody does something else; they develop series or they develop some other aspect of culture.

• 1650

There is room in this country of ours for diversity, and I would encourage you to realize that it's incentives that will guide where people go.

You had a question about licences. I'd be happy to respond if you want me to now, or perhaps later.

The Acting Chair (Ms. Sarmite Bulte): Probably afterwards, because we're running out of time and I still have a number of speakers on my list.

Mr. Phillips.

Mr. Dale Phillips: Thank you.

I don't want to leave this meeting without saying this. Canada has done a spectacular job and has done virtually everything right in terms of cultural policy, for the 30 years I've been in the game. When I started in the late 1960s, there was virtually nothing. When we started making films in the west, we were holding the camera upside down, and we didn't know it until we got the film back from the lab. Things have come a long way.

So I want to congratulate the various incarnations of the department that's now Canadian Heritage, previously Communications, previously whatever. But because the infrastructure we've built and the policy we've set in place have been around for almost as long as I have been, it's probably not a bad idea, from a simple constitutional point of view, just to have a look at them all and see how they fly in the current context, looking at questions about the future and so on.

I raise this because it was a bit of a challenge put yesterday by a couple of people in the context of a smaller meeting with Laurier LaPierre, who is chairman of Telefilm Canada. The prospect arose that maybe a bunch of Canadian people who like to complain a lot should get together at the Banff Television Festival and figure it all out. They have a whole week to kick the can.

The very fact that this meeting is happening, the very fact that now board members of Telefilm Canada are listening... Maybe what it's telling us all is that maybe it's time to stand back and have a look at the policy, have a look at the directions, have a look at how we fold things together and do it for the future, and do a good job of it.

So if I take anything from today's meeting that's really encouraging, it's the fact that you're listening, and I thank you very much for that.

The Acting Chair (Ms. Sarmite Bulte): Thank you, Mr. Phillips.

Mr. Rollans.

Mr. Glenn Rollans: I may be doing this backwards. I talked a little bit about specific measures early on and the priorities of the Association of Canadian Publishers being direct funding programs, the loan guarantee program, and a tax or structural measure. I want to go back and talk very briefly about general points.

I am with Dale on appreciating where we are with programs and policy at this point. If I can put it this way, the first and last point I want to leave you with is that the programs in existence now have been very successful. The position of Canadian letters in 1999 is dramatically different, in a world context, from what it was in, say, 1967 or 1970.

The programs we have have been successful, such as the book publishing industry development program, the programs of the Canada Council, and the programs of the Association for the Export of Canadian Books. I can't say enough in support of all of those as a bundle. They all have different applications in the industry and they're all important, and we appreciate them. We encourage you to carry that appreciation into any discussion that may attack it.

The other broad points I want to make are partly about positioning or sharing. In the recent past, say in the past decade, there have been a number of reviews of cultural funding Canada-wide, and each time there has been a review, there's been an adjustment point where Alberta programs are given a bump in funding. The cultural industries agreement, which was a joint federal-provincial program, managed that kind of envelope, ending in, I think, 1994 or 1995. The Alberta Cultural Industries Association is managing an envelope of funds that resulted from the multimedia agreement between the federal and provincial ministers two and a half years ago.

• 1655

I can't speak officially in support of an enveloping approach, but an approach that does look at population across the country and cultural funding in relationship one to another is a very sound approach.

Alberta's book publishing industry is active and self-sufficient, and we like to think that where support comes, it comes because we're strong rather than because we're weak. But we do see regional disparities in funding, and it is primarily a result of funding streaming to where the largest cultural installations are, in the metropolitan centres.

I want to end my remarks by talking about books in position against or with other cultural industries. As an industry, we look at ourselves as the original knowledge-based industry and as the intellectual bricks and mortar. It's not universally true, but we believe other cultural industries take the same approach to books. In the past half decade, we've seen a real love affair between policymakers and new media. At the same time, as book publishers, we've been creators of new media and we've been active clients of or partners with new media.

Books tend to be the source of content, both in the electronic media of the past—television and radio—and in film, which is not an electronic medium, but a hotter medium than books. And we seem to be now the source of most content in the future multimedia and electronic information publishing, as opposed to artistic creation. It's essential for the success of all those industries that the position of book publishing is at the front of the list along with those other industries, rather than in a second or third position as we go forward into the next century.

That's also an important social step. I've been interested in the comments about the possible markets for books and the markets we do sell to. Book publishers tend to sell in country stores, national parks, hardware stores, garden centres, bookstores, schools, colleges, and universities.

Looking at accessibility of technology, there's a strong social argument for making sure that books have a role, that new books have a role, and that Canadian books have a role—Canadian-authored and Canadian-published books—in any area where social and information policy is a priority for the federal government, particularly in schools, but also in parks, in politics, and in public discussion. Where a book can travel to this point, a computer and a multimedia product can't. That includes travelling to disadvantaged members of Canadian society who don't have the price of admission to a movie theatre, say, or to a computer for access to the Internet, or to electronic products.

So we look at ourselves as an industry that is making money returns to the country as well as cultural returns, and that goes back to my original message about positioning through Heritage to Finance and Industry at the federal level as a priority for us.

Thanks very much for the chance to talk to you today.

The Acting Chair (Ms. Sarmite Bulte): Thank you, Mr. Rollans.

Mr. Balcon, finally.

Mr. David Balcon: I'll try to be brief as we close.

On the whole issue of culture, had you been on the other panel—and I know part of the committee will be in Montreal tomorrow—one of the first statements might be, “What does the federal government have to do with culture? It's a provincial affair.” I don't think you've heard that on your western tour, but certain provinces have been more committed to the cultural development of their respective indigenous cultures than others.

I get a bit uncomfortable here in Alberta, because while during the 1970s and 1980s we were quite aggressive and the province invested quite a lot in setting up structures for culture under Horst Schmid and Mary Lemussurier, two of the more active culture ministers, that's waned in the last 10 years.

Unfortunately one of the issues that Mr. Pritchard and some of the others around the table face is the fact that our province has not taken the interest in the cultural industry sector that many of us are involved in, the film and video area. So we've seen the equivalent of, for easier analysis, the 7% federal sales tax, or before that the 13% tax on cable and telecommunications services...

• 1700

We've seen almost as much money go out of this province as we experienced in the National Energy Program days; it drove Albertans insane to see what you guys did to our energy exports. We have subsidized the cultural industries in the rest of Canada and Telefilm to the tune of several billion dollars. I don't know the exact number. I did the number 10 years ago for AMPIA, but I haven't done it since. Ten years ago, $2 billion was transferred over 15 years in taxes that didn't come back.

So part of the blame has to be on our own provincial government for not supporting and taking a lot of the role that they did earlier on. People at the table, Dale Phillips and others, have lobbied momentously to get us a tax credit to some degree, which in effect is actually better than the tax credit that a lot of other provinces have, even though it's two or three times the size.

It's important that the provinces be involved in a larger review of their roles in the cultural sector, because we are that unique beast that is federal and provincial, and we can't do it alone. I laud your activities, and I hope my own province at some point will re-examine the role of indigenous cultures here in Alberta. If we don't do that, we're not going to be able to tell our stories. Search and rescue will only happen off the coast of California, not off the coast of British Columbia. It's a very important issue, and we have to be all in it together.

The Acting Chair (Ms. Sarmite Bulte): Thank you, Mr. Balcon. You've also raised something we've heard around the table: it shouldn't just be the provincial level but also the municipal level.

Mr. Lord.

Mr. Doug Lord: If I may jump to the defence of the provincial government, they have recently established the Alberta production fund, which commits $5 million a year for a three-year period, so there is some progress in that area.

The Acting Chair (Ms. Sarmite Bulte): Thank you, Mr. Lord.

Mr. Mauril Bélanger: Is that for independent television production?

Mr. Doug Lord: That's for film and television production.

Mr. Mauril Bélanger: Thank you.

The Acting Chair (Ms. Sarmite Bulte): Unfortunately we're out of time. I still have my own questions that I'd love to ask. Maybe I'll just leave them with you, and if you want to, you can always get back to the committee.

Hearing Ms. Folkmann speak about the great role of the Canada Council in focusing on the artist, which I concur with, I'm glad to see that there's the side of dissemination as well. But in the film industry, how do we get the marketing? It can be the marketing of documentaries that win Genie awards, not just the marketing of films, and yet people say, “Oh, we don't need that. All we need is just to make sure we have enough people producing products, and it will get out there.” I've heard this. But the fact is, after the Genie awards, where The Red Violin won all these awards, well, isn't it amazing that the box office goes up that weekend? Again, Mr. Pritchard, that was broadcast through CBC, so some of these things...

How do we package that? How do we put that in the policy to ensure that happens? It's not just The Red Violin; it's also the documentary about Chiapas that won. That should be out there, a story about Chiapas through Canadian eyes, speaking to Canadians. That's a question I have.

Ms. Folkmann, thank you for teaching us about the gap between the $60,000 and the $1 million. One of the purposes of this type of round-table and travelling across the country is to listen and learn and to give you an opportunity to inform and educate us as policymakers and lawmakers. We can't know everything, and it gives us a firsthand opportunity to learn from the experts, who are all of you.

I say that because I want you also to not look at this meeting here as the end of a consultation. I see this as the beginning of a consultation that should be ongoing, not just as we travel across the country, but also as your concerns arise. You've met the committee and you have a list of committee members. Come to us with your concerns.

Mr. Lord and Mr. Phillips, you started by asking why there aren't exemptions. I'm not one who believes things can't ever be changed. That's why I'm interested. Where are we going to get that money? Or rather, not where are we going to get the money, but who will distribute it? Telefilm? Canada Council? Is it going to be peers? Is it going to be first come, first served? Help us with the solutions. What is the most effective solution?

We talked about the cable fund a lot, but one of the things the feature film policy talked about was the Feature Film Fund, and we didn't talk about that at all.

• 1705

There's a great concern among the independent producers who live in my riding about the removal of the foreign tax credit. They don't want it removed, because they take advantage of it, since they don't qualify for the 10-point CANCON.

I wish we had another two hours or another two days. We could talk forever.

I want to thank you, on behalf of all the committee members, for taking the time from your busy schedules to come here to educate, inform, and entertain. That's the most effective way. And please, let's keep the dialogue going. We may not always agree on things, but we can't find the solutions if we don't know first what the problems are.

Thank you very much. The meeting is adjourned.