When the Film Development Corporation began back in 1997, production activity in this province was a little over $1 million, and in our best year, 2005-06, as I said in my presentation, we reached $27 million in production activity. Just to put that into perspective, with the exception of one $4 million feature film, the rest of that was CBC productions. So it's huge for this industry in this province.
For a long time, we've been used to recognizing that for bigger productions the national CBC had to give that broadcast licence. What has happened in the past, with the TransCanada Development Fund, is that the local CBC has been a huge partner in developing our projects for pilots and so on. That seems to be gone of late, because there's a national focus now in CBC with more of a reality-based approach as opposed to one focusing on dramatic series and period pieces and so on. So that's very discouraging for us. We're not asking for an entitlement; we're asking for fair and equitable access to competition.
If you look at the past, most of our productions have done very well nationally and internationally. We recognize that a Newfoundland story is no good if it's not of interest to the rest of Canada and also the rest of the world. But we'd like that process, so that can be determined.
I think back to 1998 or 1997 when the CBC's budget was drastically reduced. What has happened is that there's been a huge focus on raising revenue that they otherwise didn't have to raise. So there's a huge focus now on advertising, and then there's a huge focus on how you get that advertising. So I think we have to go back to thinking that CBC is a national broadcaster, and it should behave that way, and focus on what it's supposed to do for a distinctive Canadian voice. And that's the whole purpose.
The other thing that's problematic is the change in the Canadian Television Fund. Since they introduced performance envelopes, we've seen immediately the change to the centralization of productions, something that John just talked about in terms of that lovely little circle in Toronto.