Mr. Speaker, I am going to take just a little different approach to this than my hon. colleagues who preceded me on both sides of the House.
I think that we have to look at this in reality as what it is and not be ashamed of it. It is an infrastructure program for the film industry. We should not be ashamed of that. If you look at every film industry in the world, save the United States or India perhaps, there is a good deal of government intervention in the film industry of one kind or another.
We are trying with this particular bill to make the intervention that we have in our film industry work a little bit better.
The film industry in Canada, as other members have mentioned, because we are so close to the United States with its ever pervasive influence in our culture, is particularly important because our sense of identity as Canadians, as we all know, is very much wrapped up in the reflection of what we see of ourselves when we are watching television. Much of our sense of Canadianism or what it is to be a Canadian we take from what we see on TV every day.
In the expanding universe of television of 500 channels of the future, when you see people up north living a nomadic or semi-nomadic existence in the barren lands of Canada watching Detroit television, you think: "My God, what kind of vision are we reflecting of ourselves as Canadians". Television and film production to Canadians reflects the kind of people that we are or would want to be. That is of particular importance.
We have to break this bill into two separate issues. One is television and the production of film for television. The second is the production of feature films. All of the infrastructure money in the world or loan guarantees in the world is not going to make one iota of difference in the feature film industry if you cannot get your feature films on to the screen and all of the screens in Canada are controlled by Odeon and Paramount out of Hollywood.
We have to look at this in two very distinct and very real approaches, one being feature films and the other being television. Canadians have had a good deal of success in producing television indigenously here in Canada.
I draw hon. members' attention to this interesting fact. We have the CBC in English Canada and Radio-Canada in Quebec. In Quebec the CBC has far more viewership per capita than the CBC in English Canada despite the fact that we spend more money on television in English Canada with the CBC. I submit that the reason for that is the French CBC has far more indigenous programs, far more programming that originates in Quebec.
In English Canada if you look at CBC's primary productions on any evening, what is it? It is a repeat. I know I am getting into the CBC thing again, but prime time viewing on CBC is all rehashes of American programming.
If we really want to do something about feature films and particularly made for TV production in Canada, our national carrier in English Canada should be carrying a lot more Canadian originated TV production.
That leads us to the question of public money, financing and how you get it to how do you get money into the hands of entrepreneurs that want to do a movie for TV or feature film. I am 100 per cent behind our caucus position. We do not have the right to take money from future citizens of Canada, children yet
unborn, to give to people today so that we can live better today than we should.
As an hon. member mentioned earlier, when we start weaning our economy from government dependence, we have to wean our economy slowly. We have to wean the whole economy, not just one sector, away from dependence on government grants and handouts.
This industry is no different than any other industry. It has to work on its own independent of government financing. How does it go about doing that? One way would be to relax the rules whereby people could get public equity participation in a movie.
Imagine how difficult it would be with an intellectual property if you go to a bank and say: "I'd like to finance this movie". When you show the script, you are asked: "Where's the bricks and mortar?". You say there are no bricks and mortar.
The information highway, computer programs and software are not bricks and mortar either. Somehow we have to allow our entrepreneurs to get money from people who are putting hordes and hordes of money into RRSPs to invest in ideas in this country.
The only way we are going to be able to do that is to relax the rules in our corporations act so that people are able to invest in a movie production. Yes, it would be extremely high risk but the rewards would be there.
I do not think we can say this is all one way or all another. I agree 100 per cent with my colleague who said earlier that we should not be using government money to finance any private venture. The minute you start using public money in a private venture it is no longer a private venture. It is a public venture.
On the other hand it is particularly important that we in Canada support our cultural industries particularly our made for television movies because TV is so much a pervasive part of our day to day lives. We see ourselves reflected back from TV with a sense of value as to what it is to be a Canadian.
If everything we see on television is imported from some other part of the world it is going to be even more difficult to get a sense of Canadianism, to be together as a nation.
I would like to see us import more of the films done in Quebec and dubbed into English and vice versa. Perhaps that would be a way to start getting some communication going back and forth.
This is in some ways a difficult bill for our caucus to wrap itself around because of the involvement of public and private money but I think on balance it is worthy of support. Again, it is not new money. It is a realignment of present moneys. Telefilm must be more sensitive to the regions and more accessible to producers outside Montreal and Quebec, Toronto and Ontario, but I understand that it is working in that direction.
We need access to big screen television for our feature films. We have got to break the monopoly of Paramount and Odeon to get our feature films on to our own screens.