Mr. Chairman, and committee members, thank you for the opportunity to appear today. We would like to thank the committee for launching the review of the Canadian feature film industry.
My name is Peter Leitch, and I'm president of North Shore Studios and Mammoth Studios, and the chair of the Motion Picture Production Industry Association of B.C. With me today from our industry association is Shawn Williamson, president of Brightlight Pictures.
Canadian feature films make a significant contribution to the growing creative economy in Canada. The industry facilitates well-paying jobs for the extensive creative talent that we have from coast to coast in Canada. The Canadian film industry not only contributes significantly to the Canadian tax base, but it is well documented in the value of the creative sector in building better and more liveable communities. This is an innovative industry that is constantly changing, and our engagement with it allows us to participate in the trillion-dollar global creative content sector.
The support of the federal government through its tax credit programs for both Canadian content and service work, the majority of which comes from L.A.-based studios, and through the Canadian feature film fund, which is administered through Telefilm Canada, continues to be critically important to building the feature film industry in Canada. Total production activity related to Canadian content in films alone was in excess of $375 million, and this sustained 8,100 full-time equivalent jobs. Foreign film production in the same year—in British Columbia, for instance, probably 80% of the work that we do is service-based foreign content work—accounted for $857 million and just over 18,000 full-time equivalent jobs.
We fully support the recommendations on changes to the current programs as presented by the Canadian Media Production Association.
Critical issues that we feel would improve the opportunity to build the Canadian feature film business in B.C. would be, first of all, the elimination of the grind against the provincial tax credits. Targeted provincial incentives, which may vary from province to province, should not impact different levels of tax credits across provinces, and this would not be the case if the provincial credits were not deducted prior to calculating the federal credits. The second thing would be restoration of the funding of Telefilm Canada from the 10% reduction to stimulate additional film production and create additional jobs.
Another point is that advances of tax credit funds for qualified productions would be a tremendous benefit to those producers who need to borrow against these funds to support their productions prior to receiving the credits. This would be of minimal cost to government, but would have significant benefits to Canadian producers.
I'd now like to introduce my colleague, Shawn Williamson, to carry on the discussion.