It's actually a combination of the two.
Let me just outline it as best I can. I'll take a British Columbia production as an example.
If you're producing a British Columbia film, you're required to submit applications to Creative B.C. for eligibility certificates, which will give rise to provincial tax credits at the end of the day. You're also required, on the federal level, to submit a similar application to CAVCO. That will be a lot of consistent information and a different application form, with costs to be incurred as well.
If you're interim financing your tax credits, as part of the financing you'll be required to have that interim finance in place. Typically, from what I see, it will be from one of the chartered banks here in Canada. One of the chartered banks, whichever it is that is providing the financing, will reach out to someone like me and ask me to go in and vet the budget and all of the assumptions behind that budget in order to provide a formal comfort letter outlining and supporting the calculations of the potential tax credits that this producer would be able to generate based on their production budget.
Following the completion of the production, there's also a need to apply it back to Creative B.C. and the federal government in CAVCO for completion certificates for those productions. Again, it's another application. It's another set of documents that focus more on the completion documents of the film, whereas the initial applications are based on budgetary information and assumptions related to the intended production of the film. Along the way, there's a lot of administration. There's obviously time that transpires between the time those applications are made and when they're finally processed. Moreover, a lot of time goes by in the eventual accessing of the tax credits, because tax credits are not paid to the producers until the filing of a corporate income tax return and the assessment of those returns by the CRA. That can occur a long time after the production is wrapped up, completed, and shown or distributed in the international marketplace depending upon how much time goes by. There's a lot of administration for the producer. You can imagine that in the case of a producer, very few of them can work on one production at a time. They may work on that one production during the time of production, but they're constantly developing new productions.
Ultimately, once a production has been wrapped up and delivered, that administration is still there while the producer is continuing to move on to produce or develop more productions for the future. There's a lot of administration, and that is the red tape that I'm referring to. To the extent that we can reduce the amount of red tape or work more quickly and cohesively as a group of organizations working towards the common good of developing the Canadian industry, then we'll be that much better off.