We have very strong cultural industries in Canada. The film and television industry is very robust. Last year, there was about $8.6 billion of production activity in Canada, and about $4.6 billion was Canadian content production. All of that production is underpinned by very strong public policy measures: everything from Canadian content quotas through Canadian programming expenditure requirements, broadcasting regulations, rules that govern cable television. We have public agencies, Telefilm; the public-private agency, the Canada Media Fund.
All of these agencies and policies and measures are what underpin our strong cultural industries. Frankly, many of them are a violation of the kind of normal rules that you have in trade agreements.
Our co-production treaties, by their very nature, violate the most favoured nation provisions. Our content rules violate national treatment obligations that are typically contained in trade agreements. It's fundamental to have an exemption for the cultural industry so we can continue those.
What we're saying is that it's time to move away from that negative concept of “an exemption” to something that's more positive, that says we should be having more forms of international collaboration in the cultural industries, around diversity of cultural expressions. The UNESCO convention can provide that positive approach and move us away from the negative exemption approach.