Good afternoon, members of the finance committee. My name is Kelly Lynne Ashton, and I am the director of policy of the Writers Guild of Canada.
Thank you for inviting the Writers Guild to appear before you today. We are the national association representing more than 2,000 professional screenwriters working in English language film, television, radio, and digital production in Canada.
I am here today to share the Writers Guild's thoughts on how the government can strategically support the audio-visual sector as a way of creating highly skilled jobs across Canada. We understand that the government is still concerned about economic recovery, but properly targeted funding can stimulate recovery and insulate sectors from the impact of international economic failure.
The film, television, and digital media sectors are economic drivers and growth areas of the economy. The recession hit our sector as it did everywhere, but we have been able to quickly rebound and are almost at pre-recession levels of employment. In fiscal 2010-11, the film and television sector generated 128,000 direct and indirect full-time equivalent jobs and generated $7.46 billion of GDP. The video game industry itself currently employs 16,000 people and is growing rapidly.
The bottom line is that the film, television, and digital media sectors are opportunities for highly skilled employment that is better positioned to weather recessionary storms than some other sectors. People will always want entertainment.
Screenwriters are the catalysts for those jobs. In film and television, it all starts with the screenwriter's blank page. The screenwriter expends the hours and hours of effort that result in the script that producers take to broadcasters to solicit investment. That script then generates dozens of jobs on the production crew, from entry-level production assistant jobs to highly skilled jobs as editor or director of photography. If a television series is successful and is renewed for multiple seasons, those scripts have generated hundreds and hundreds of jobs, allowing talented people to learn and be promoted into more senior jobs, and will have ensured that those talented people stay in Canada.
The film, television, and digital media sectors currently benefit from government support through the Canada Media Fund. We are grateful for that support and for this government's making the CMF permanent. However, the CMF mandate has been expanded from just television to include convergent media, digital media such as video games, and third-language production, all without additional funding. There are calls for more support to be directed to digital media, but in the absence of additional funding for CMF, such support cannot be accomplished without sacrificing support for television production.
Television still captures a larger audience than digital media, by a large margin. A lot of viewing on digital platforms is of television programs. Funding television benefits the largest number of Canadians, providing them with high-quality domestic audio-visual entertainment. Enhanced funding to the CMF would support the production of more television programs and more digital media content, such as web series and video games. This would also mean more jobs for Canadians.
Another useful tool for job creation would be to extend the film or video production tax credit to digital distribution. To qualify for the tax credit currently, productions require a theatrical distributor or broadcaster. This excludes digital distribution, an important growth area of production.
Extending the tax credit would provide much-needed additional financing for web series, an increasingly popular form of entertainment created by both emerging and experienced talent as a way to reach audiences directly. As a labour-based tax credit, it supports a domestic talent pool and helps small, creator-owned businesses to flourish. Web series have low barriers to entry into international markets for Canadians, as there are no shipping costs or duties, and talented Canadians are taking advantage of these opportunities to reach global audiences.
Finally, we must address the government's cuts to Telefilm, the CBC, and the heritage department itself. We understand that each department must do its part to reduce government spending and pay down the debt. However, we have concerns about what repeated and escalating cuts to cultural institutions will mean for our industry.
Telefilm and the CBC have worked hard to cut infrastructure and staff and not just content, but if the budget cuts continue, there is no avoiding a serious negative impact on content. Telefilm's entire budget, for English and French, is $104 million. That is the cost of one average Hollywood movie; yet in Canada it leverages financing for 50 or more movies. Further cuts to Telefilm's budget will put our domestic film industry at risk.
As for the CBC, its budget woes are well known. They have cut 650 jobs and sold off assets and have tried to protect Canadian programming on prime time. Further cuts to the CBC, the biggest broadcaster of Canadian drama, will undermine not just the CBC but the entire independent production sector.
Finally, cuts to the Department of Heritage will make it harder for its staff to conduct research, meet with stakeholders, and provide the kind of valuable insight into the industry—