Alliance action sparks union outcry by Guy Dixon
Source : Globe & Mail
December 19, 2003
News this week that Halifax production company Salter Street Films was closing shop is another example of the need for federal regulators to protect Canadian television drama, argued a coalition of unions representing actors and film production crews.
"The whole broadcast landscape had completely changed, and it changed sort of within a week," said actor-producer Paul Gross, perhaps best know for his role in the nineties series Due South and who is an active campaigner for the unions. "There are now very few production companies left. They are all very small, and they are all undercapitalized."
Word that Toronto-based parent company Alliance Atlantis was closing Salter Street, after having bought it in April, 2001, sparked a round of angry comments from production unions, which warned that Canadian drama is in a severe crisis. Gross and union representatives have also recently met with Prime Minister Paul Martin to state their case.
Maureen Parker, executive director of the Writers Guild of Canada, said that "Alliance Atlantis got start-up money from Canadian taxpayers, and today it only wants to finance American production. Clearly, the government has to step in and direct the [Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission] to protect taxpayers' interests by ensuring that some Canadian production survives."
Many ultimately blame a change in regulation by the CRTC in 1999, in which it redefined drama and variety shows as "priority programming" and lumped them together with long-form documentaries, regionally produced shows and entertainment magazines, which are less expensive to produce and have proven popular with viewers.
"I don't exactly blame Alliance Atlantis for where they're at, because there are a lot of things that have contributed to it. One of the biggest reasons is the CRTC," Gross said.
The regulatory change effectively killed the market for Canadian TV drama, productions unions argue, and has led companies such as Alliance Atlantis to leave the business of producing Canadian dramas, after having received help by government funding for productions in the past.
Alliance Atlantis is currently conducting a wide review, announced last week, of its production business as it moves away from high-cost, low-profit-margin dramas and more toward the broadcasting and movie-distribution side of its operations. It's doing this because the market for prime-time TV series, made-for-TV movies and art-house films is in a "permanent downturn," the company said.
The market for Canadian drama abroad is also facing stiff competition from homegrown shows and from specialty cable channels, Alliance Atlantis said. The popular crime-drama CSI programs, however, which it co-owns and co-produces with CBS and which are produced in Los Angeles, are not being included in the review. Underscoring the prominence of CSI, Alliance Atlantis produced 78 hours of TV dramas in fiscal year 2003, of which 43 hours were CSI. This compares with 326 hours of TV dramas in fiscal 1999, its biggest year for production.
"Nobody is more disappointed than us that this is the only sensible thing to do," said Alliance Atlantis chief executive officer Michael MacMillan. "We've been making TV shows for 25 years, and it was how we started the business. I was a cinematographer for our first couple of dozen films. We were a company that began as hands-on filmmakers and producers really. This is our heritage business."
However, with the downturn in the market for Canadian shows, the company is shifting more to becoming a "financier or commissioner of original drama that others in Canada are producing, instead of us producing it," he said.
The latest report issued yesterday by the CRTC said that only 11 per cent of English-language viewers watched Canadian drama and comedy shows in 2002, roughly the same level as in the previous two years.
This compares with an increase to 48 per cent among French viewers who watched Canadian-made drama and comedies, up from 43 per cent in 2000.
