Collected Data
"Asked for further comment, the CRTC referred to a letter CRTC chairman Jean-Pierre Blais sent to the national president of ACTRA on Aug. 31 that also stressed the international marketplace."
In announcing the decision, the CRTC acknowledged the concern that the change could result in “fewer opportunities for Canadians,” but added that non-Canadian actors and creators “may increase a project’s attractiveness and visibility in international markets.”
It also said some stakeholders say the change will give producers “creative flexibility” in developing Canadian productions with “international market appeal and the potential for international investment.”
“American writers won’t guarantee better content,” Mr. Heaton said. “And to say that Canadian programs [need] help [in] the international market is confusing when we have so many examples of successful Canadian shows already.”
Heritage Minister says she will not reverse Cancon rules for TV industry
"what is so very bad about customised culture? Isn’t getting more of what we know we like a good thing? But, I wailed, good broadcasting and great art offer a kind of serendipity that expands your horizons rather than keeping you in an eternal feedback loop."
I now realise that customised culture, which is very nearly ubiquitous today, is a mutation of what Adorno and Horkheimer wrote about in their classic Frankfurt School text Dialectic of Enlightenment seven decades ago. Their contention was that the freedom to choose, which was the great boast of the advanced capitalist societies in the west, was chimerical. Not only do we have the freedom to choose what was always the same, but, arguably, human personality had been so corrupted by false consciousness that there is hardly anything worth the name any more. “Personality,” they wrote, “scarcely signifies anything more than shining white teeth and freedom from body odour and emotions.” Humans had been transformed into desirable, readily exchangeable commodities, and all that was left to choose was the option of knowing that one was being manipulated. “The triumph of advertising in the culture industry is that consumers feel compelled to buy and use its products even though they see through them.” The Frankfurt School is relevant to us now because such critiques of society are even more true now today than when those words were written.
Why a forgotten 1930s critique of capitalism is back in fashion
"The future of Canadian culture cannot lie in eliminating the Canadians who create it. Unless the goal is to have our highly experienced talent (and our young up-and-comers) respond in the way some are now saying they will, by leaving Canada."
The changes to the commission’s policies on CIPFs are significant and sweeping. Chief among them is the elimination of the requirement of a licensed-broadcaster trigger for CIPF funding, the reduction of the number of Canadian certification points required to access CIPF funding, the eligibility of co-ventures, and the approval to allow script, content development and promotion/discoverability initiatives to qualify for funding.
The elimination of the requirement of a broadcast licence or development agreement from a licensed broadcaster is restricted only by a criteria that producers “must demonstrate that the production will be available on a platform accessible by Canadians” (thus eliminating the possibility that a property commissioned by and aired exclusively on a U.S.-only service would qualify for CIPF funding).
In its decision, the CRTC wrote that eliminating the requirement will give producers more flexibility to distribute their projects on whichever platform they choose by removing distribution exclusivity. In a familiar refrain under Jean-Pierre Blais’ CRTC, the Commission said it will “allow producers to take more risks” since the projects would not have to fit the traditional TV parameters, as well as giving them more bargaining power and creative control.
CRTC overhauls indie production fund framework
Read the full decision here.
Not everyone is happy.
Greg David;
“This is hugely disappointing,” says WGC Executive Director Maureen Parker. “That the CRTC, a public authority charged with regulating Canadian broadcasting, would effectively denigrate Canadian showrunners and screenwriters and suggest our country’s creators cannot deliver international success is shocking. It’s also verifiably untrue.”
The CRTC decision is not, however, an isolated instance of what the WGC views as an entirely misguided outlook. It’s an increasingly pervasive view that suggests Canadian tax dollars should not be put towards productions created by Canadians. This unfortunate notion — that reducing the presence of Canadian talent is the ticket to more international funding — is taking hold.
CANADIAN CULTURE AT RISK: THE ATTACK ON CANADIAN CREATORS
John Doyle;
Reaction was swift from the self-described “creatives” in the Canadian industry. Outrage, anger, despair and more outrage. Using Facebook and Twitter, some are claiming they will walk away from the industry. Others are saying they’re heading for Los Angeles because employment opportunity in the Canadian business is now considerably diminished. Some of this reaction borders on hysteria. Some of it is anchored in a kind of happy-clappy nationalism beloved of children, not thinking adults.
First, however, the decision is truly appalling. It suits a commercial industry that is already heavily protected, arrogant and uncaring about investing in a medium from which it profits vastly. Second, the CRTC decision comes, suspiciously, without the usual public and industry debate. It looks like a major favour being done for outlets who want to dodge responsibility. Third, it arrives when a Liberal government, one that loudly proclaims its support of Canadian culture, is in power.
CRTC’s Canadian content changes are terrible, but no one cares
Having read his writing, Mr Doyle shouldn’t be so quick with those quotes around creatives.
"“It’s terrific,” Mr. Keate said, reiterating that property values will go up, not down, in a heritage conservation area, a point made in a city consultant’s report."
A luxury neighbourhood of grand old homes and lush greenery is being designated as Vancouver’s first-ever heritage conservation area in an effort to halt a tide of demolitions and assuage fears that the city is being wrecked by a brash new group of home buyers who do not care about its history.
Vancouver designates First Shaughnessy a heritage area
Let me get this straight; a weathly, historically white neighbourhood, with little historical value is being saved, but Chinatown, an area of rich cultural and historical significance for the Country, not just the city, is being torn down down and rebuilt.
That pretty much sums up Vancouver for you.
"A Liberal government would invest $380 million in new money into the country's cultural and creative industries"
During a campaign stop in downtown Montreal, Trudeau told supporters and members of the Quebec arts community that culture and creative industries generate jobs and help to strengthen the economy.
Justin Trudeau promises increased funding for the arts, CBC/Radio-Canada
"There are all sorts of obvious, extreme harms that come from being a nation at permanent war."
But perhaps the worst of all harms is how endless war degrades the culture and populace of the country that perpetrates it. You can’t have a government that has spent decades waging various forms of war against predominantly Muslim countries — bombing seven of them in the last six years alone — and then act surprised when a Muslim 14-year-old triggers vindictive fear and persecution because he makes a clock for school. That’s no more surprising than watching carrots sprout after you plant carrot seeds in fertile ground and then carefully water them. It’s natural and inevitable, not surprising or at all difficult to understand.
Arrest of 14-Year-Old Student for Making a Clock: the Fruits of Sustained Fearmongering and Anti-Muslim Animus
"Television quotas are an idea that is wholly anachronistic in the age of abundance and in a world of choice"
The national broadcast regulator said Thursday it was cutting the quota for the ratio of Canadian programs that local TV stations must broadcast during the day from 55 per cent to zero. That's a recognition that stations have sometimes been broadcasting the same program episodes many times over the course of a day, or even over years, simply to satisfy the old Cancon rule.
CRTC eases Canadian-content quotas for TV
I’ll wait until smarter people review, but I have a bad feeling about this.
Broadcasting Regulatory Policy CRTC 2015-86
"Only the driven few can sustain it long enough to claw their way through the mountains of mediocrity."
Keen unapologetically calls the previous arrangement an "industrial meritocracy." He feels this hierarchical meritocracy is being destroyed and there is nothing to replace it. This will result in a cultural Dark Age where the talented cannot earn a living creating culture. The only avenue left for creators of content that can be copied and distributed digitally (music, digital art, writing) is to find wealthy patrons to support their work.
Is the Web Destroying the Cultural Economy?
Read: "The Great Swindle" by Roger Scruton
The fake intellectual invites you to conspire in his own self-deception, to join in creating a fantasy world. He is the teacher of genius, you the brilliant pupil. Faking is a social activity in which people act together to draw a veil over unwanted realities and encourage each other in the exercise of their illusory powers. The arrival of fake thought and fake scholarship in our universities should not therefore be attributed to any explicit desire to deceive. It has come about through the complicit opening of territory to the propagation of nonsense.
The Great Swindle by Roger Scruton from Aeon Magazine.
I went to art school. I don’t agree with everything in this essay but the section quoted above made me smile.
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