The phone call comes from Los Angeles, and the electricians, set decorators, prop people and a host of others show up for work. Right now, the film industry is booming in British Columbia, with about 80 current productions.
When Premier Clark, Glen not Christy, and I as his then-minister responsible, with the help of then-finance minister Joy MacPhail, announced the first tax credits, it led a year later to a $1-billion industry. The Vancouver Sun reported that I proclaimed: “It’s a billion, baby!” in what they called a “lame Austin Powers accent.” Whatever!
We became the third-biggest film industry in the world after Hollywood and New York. Now it’s a $2.7-billion industry.
Surely this is a pretty bright picture? Well, we have two problems.
We clearly have overdependence on foreign productions. Talk about branch plant. It’s even branch plant without many plants.
The phone calls could stop tomorrow if the Canadian dollar went up and up, if the state of Georgia or even the City of New Orleans came up with bigger and better tax credits, or worse still, that guy in the White House introduced a “border adjustment tax” that could add, say, 300 per cent on Canadian products and resources crossing the border. The guy’s vindictive enough.
This leads us to the second problem — the decline in independent Canadian production. Over the years, while foreign production boomed, independent B.C. production has declined. So B.C. has to give more support to enable our creators to create and own their original intellectual property, and commercialize it in the global marketplace.
We are lacking resources partly because the industry has been centralized in Quebec and Ontario (funders, gatekeepers, broadcasters), which is exacerbated by the lion’s share of funding going to Toronto and Montreal, which has curtailed B.C.’s domestic industry.
The previous provincial Liberal government, while keeping tax credits, failed to help the home-grown producers. Today’s independent B.C. producers need seed money for the most competitive projects, something that happened in the past under the Glen Clark government.
B.C. has all the elements to build a successful and sustainable film industry: solid producers, critical mass of highly skilled talent, entrenched film infrastructure, attractive locations, same time zone as L.A., film schools, etc. What B.C. needs is more support.
Here are some ways to do this.
First: We can try to leverage funding (through a reformed Creative B.C.) from Canada’s newly announced Creative Hubs program, to incubate B.C. storytellers and directors, and produce and bring to the global market some made-in-B.C. stories.
Second: When federal Heritage Minister Mélanie Joly recently announced a deal with Netflix, which is to invest $500 million over five years in Canadian production, a lot of people were skeptical. I see this as an opportunity. I believe the B.C. government should actively lobby Netflix to base its Netflix Canada production studio in Vancouver, so stories that get produced out of Netflix Canada will employ B.C. writers, directors, creators, etc.
Third: Joly is very fond of talking about the new digital age where companies such as Netflix, Hulu, Spotify and Amazon are taking over from traditional networks such as CTV and CBC. I think Vancouver is in a very interesting time.
We do not have the presence of traditional film distributors and broadcasters in B.C., which has held our industry back. Knowledge Network here hasn’t been much help, either.
To quote Earl Hong Tai, the former director of Telefilm’s western operations: “What Metro Vancouver is beginning to have is an ecosystem that includes tech companies (Amazon, Microsoft), video-game companies (EA), and now possibly a major film production studio (Netflix Canada?). This to me looks like what the new creative economy will become, where tech meets film, and content can be re-purposed for various distribution platforms.” That sounds as if it could be a compelling pitch — creative hub, job creation, knowledge economy, clean industries, etc.
There is, of course, another reason to promote Canadian independent production. It’s called the survival and development of Canadian-owned and -created culture, essential in my view to the survival of Canada itself. Is it not about time we told more of our own stories on film?
So, if that phone call doesn’t come as often or maybe not at all from L.A., maybe it will come from Vancouver, Surrey or Kelowna. Our film workers can still get out of bed, but this time go to Canadian productions.
Ian Waddell is a former New Democrat MP and B.C. MLA and minister of culture.
