That's very kind of you. My apologies for being verbose.
I was going to suggest that there are good reasons for supporting feature films beyond the cultural ones, which I think we have discussed and we all know about. If you do a cost-benefit analysis, approximately 70% of the budget of every film is spent on labour, which in turn is taxed at source. The films themselves often find the greater part of their revenues outside Canada, thus generating export revenues. They are a tremendous source of environmentally friendly and well-paid jobs. Finally, Canadian films in Canada provide Canadians with a Canadian option, as opposed to only being exposed to American movies, which, were it not for Canadian films, would definitely be the case.
However, Canadian films are the orphans of a very well-designed system of cultural support for the Canadian media. What I mean by that is this. In television production and in digital production today, there are quotas. Every broadcaster in Canada, whether it's a network or specialty or pay television, has always had and continues to have Canadian content obligations.
There has never been such a thing for feature films. There has never been any quota of any sort, nor am I advocating one today, but the foundation upon which the very prolific Canadian television production industry was built—and I was very much a part of it for a very long time—is based on a series of regulations overseen by the CRTC that are designed to create a marketplace, a domestic marketplace, for Canada to have homegrown productions. There is no such thing for feature films. Even in broadcasting there have never been specific regulations requiring any broadcaster to designate airtime and specific dollars to theatrically released feature films. There are in other countries. Certainly in France there's a great deal of that, but not here, and there never has been.
In the absence of these kinds of regulations and legislated support systems, Canadian films have been on their own. In English Canada, they have a particularly great mountain to climb. The advantage Quebec has is that it has its own language. English Canada shares a language with our neighbour to the south.
I have some concrete suggestions in lieu of regulations and quotas. One of them is that the tax credit that's currently equally available to feature films and to television productions be increased for feature films, so that if a television production is eligible for x percentage of its spend in tax credits, feature films should be eligible for double x, and by feature films I mean specifically films designed for and released in movie theatres.
I will also urge the government to entertain the notion of increasing the budget of Telefilm Canada, which, as I mentioned earlier, is less than the budget of one Hollywood movie. Doubling that budget perhaps would equal close to the budgets of two Hollywood movies. I think it would be a very wise and cost-efficient investment, both commercially and culturally.
Finally, I would also suggest that the money spent on the marketing of Canadian films, especially when spent in Canada marketing Canadian films, be eligible for the same tax credits as the production of Canadian films, because the marketing dollars are just as important as the production dollars in order to actually accomplish the mission and get films to people and people to films.
Those are my specific suggestions. Thank you for giving me the extra time.