Canadian Bacon - History of Canadian Filmmaking (Part Eight)

“Arthur Dent: What happens if I press this button?
Ford Prefect: I wouldn't-
Arthur Dent: Oh.
Ford Prefect: What happened?
Arthur Dent: A sign lit up, saying 'Please do not press this button again.”
― Douglas Adams, The Original Hitchhiker Radio Scripts

Service Productions

By 1997, service productions flooded into Toronto and Vancouver—floating factories, as media scholars Charles H. David and Janice K called them. Productions that were financed by a non-Canadian-owned and controlled company that retained copyright and creative control.

According to a Canadian Media Producers Association report, Canada spent $ 5.27 billion on foreign production volume in 2021 alone. Many modern Hollywood films set in New York, Seattle, and Chicago were actually filmed in Canada. These productions loved Canada’s bland architecture, which was all nondescript and modernistic, safe designs. With this safe design, any city could double for any other, and nondescript buildings created perfect plates for post-production crews to add to, remove, or expand the urban landscape.

In ‘97, more tax credits would be rolled out across the provinces: Manitoba invested in Indigenous filmmakers, offering tailored credits and a Special Loan program, and Ontario’s Ontario Film & Television Tax Credit (OFTTC) was launched the previous year, with 21.5% back on eligible labor costs. Saskatchewan would also join in ’98. British Columbia cooked up the D.A.V.E. credit by 2003.

Some of the other Tax credits for the film industry that were created to assist the Canadian film industry and its various sectors included The Canadian Media Fund (CMF) (F. 2010), which provided funding for developing and producing Canadian content, including animation, and Ontario Creates an agency of the Ontario government that supports the development and production of content in Ontario, and The Quebecor Fund for funding for developing and producing Canadian content.

Heritage Minister Sheila Copps would also launch the Canadian Feature Film Fund, administered by Telefilm Canada. The fund increased feature-film funding to $100 million per year. The objective was to boost the audience for Canadian films, noting that they still accounted for only 2% of annual box-office revenue. The goal was to increase the percentage to at least 5% in five years.

Usually, when a province decided against the tax credit system, reduced it, or attempted to withdraw from it, negative consequences followed. Alberta attempted to exit in 1998 and began reducing its film incentives. Within two years, the industry there had collapsed from $160 million a year to a measly $12 million. The lesson with tax incentives is simple: You either compete or concede to the competition.

There were some downsides to these various subsidies offered by the Canadian federal and provincial governments. These subsidies, meant to encourage indigenous media production, were often diverted to U.S. productions in Canada through policy loopholes. Shell companies are quite often created to say a “company was Canadian” and qualified, even if all this company was was a name on paper. A public example of this is the various 100+ shell companies registered at 130 Bloor St, Toronto, over the past fifteen years. These Companies share the same directors(founders), seemingly disappear and reappear with changes in the tax credits. This information can be found publicly on the website OpenCorporates.com. Look up the address and observe the remarkable amount of VFX and production studios founded per year, per founder. https://opencorporates.com/officers?q=Peter+Mantas

Production of local and international coproduction television shows would take off, featuring a wide variety of shows such as Da Vinci's Inquest(1998-2005), Stargate SG-1(1997-2007), Made in Canada(1998-2003)The Red Green Show(1991-2006), Franklin(1997-2004), Hawkeye(1994-1995), Rupert(1991-1997), and Are You Afraid of The Dark(1990-1996).

Hollywood North

Now it was official: Hollywood North had become Canada. The nickname originated in the 1980s and was first used in the Canadian film industry, particularly for its Toronto and Vancouver locations. The nickname gained further popularity in the 1990s and 2000s due to the introduction of tax incentives. By the 2000s, it was a brand.

With a surge of international productions across the country, the Canadian Audio Visual Industry experienced greater stability, as job and labor needs increased in specialized sectors of the film and TV market. The 1990s and 2000s. Would see a boom in Canadians working in post-production, animation, and visual effects. Since there wasn't a sustainable film and TV industry to serve them, Canadian artists and technicians moved into the only sectors available to tell their stories. For most workers, this meant computer graphics, software, VFX, animation, serialized dramas, documentaries, and comedies.

The 2000s brought greater global success to Québécois filmmakers, including Denis Villeneuve and his films Sicario (2015), Dune (2021), and Blade Runner 2049 (2017). Kim Nguyen, Denis Arcand, and Jean-Marc Vallée were other Quebecois directors who gained international acclaim.

Other local and accredited filmmakers from Canada include Winnipeg director and Order of Canada recipient Guy Maddin, James Cameron, who needs no introduction, and Toronto New Wave directors Bruce McDonald, Patricia Rozema, and Jason and Ivan Reitman of Ghostbusters fame. David Cronenberg, often called the Baron of Blood for his pioneering contributions to body horror, is one of Canada's best-known directors whose films, such as Videodrome (1983) and The Fly (1986), have profoundly influenced world cinema, particularly the horror genre.

Some of the most famous international films and TV shows produced by Hollywood North thanks to the tax credit system included The X-Files(1993-2018), Deadpool(2016), Interstellar(2014), The Handmaid's Tale(2017-2025), Fargo(2014-2024), Schitt's Creek(2015-2020), The Shape of Water(2017), and The Umbrella Academy(2019-2024). This is just a small count of the many. Most, if not all, of these productions are distributed and owned by exhibitors in the United States. Proving that even when Canadians have helped produce successful domestic films or TV shows, their legitimacy as actors and filmmakers has inevitably been tied to our affiliations with Hollywood, the center of the motion picture universe.

However, starting in the late 1990s, Hollywood and the rest of America started to notice a problem. Several American-owned production companies, such as Netflix, Warner Bros., Paramount, and other distributors, were starting to send work elsewhere. Particularly in Canada, rather than complete all of the work for a production in America. These productions were called “runaway productions.’’

American-developed and financed productions were now able to assume a Canadian national identity for tax purposes and keep production levels low. With the steadily increasing value of the American dollar, runaway productions increased, and suddenly, everything was Canada’s fault. Protests filled LA and various other production hubs in America for years. Suddenly, it was unfair to work with Canada. But it wasn’t Canada’s fault that the jobs were gone; rather, it was the policies enacted to boost the nation’s struggling industry and the capitalist companies that profited from them.

In 2004, the Canadian public poured close to $1.5 billion into U.S. studio and network coffers while virtually ignoring productions developed in itsown backyard, and $1.9 billion in U.S. shoots came north and helped stimulate an entire cultural sector, not to mention the salaries of American talent and, in many cases, crew who came north. Canada was doing its part to keep not only its citizens employed but also international workers in the state of the industry it was forced to deal with.

Canada has always been a body double for popular US cities, and this fact has been urking Americans for good reason. Everyone has the right to see their country portrayed on screen correctly and without stereotypes. However, once again, the reasons for disguising Canadian cities as American ones were that filming permits were harder to obtain in certain areas and that costs could be lowered by spoofing.

Because of these industry cost-cutting measures, there will always be CanCon in American content.

Service Country or Specialists?

American cinema still rules the box office today. In 2014, English-language Canadian films accounted for only 1.5% of sales. In 2019, U.S. films accounted for 91% of the box office. Only 3% of English-language Canadian films brought in $3—1 million compared to $888 million from English-language non-Canadian films. These were pre-pandemic numbers, when people still attended theaters regularly.

In recent years, the industry has folded inward like a snake eating its tail. The Canadian film industry hasn’t fully escaped the clutches and stereotypes it has created for itself or has been led into. Tax credits have increased, while provincial and federal institutional grants and programs for developing a local film industry have declined.

Canada remains a satellite country for U.S. filmmakers. Other countries are following Canada's tax credit strategy and instituting similar tax credit policies, including US States such as New York, Louisiana, and Michigan, which compete significantly with Canadian production centers. While these tax credits may be generating substantial revenue, they lack long-term viability. The Canadian film industry needs to develop a new approach to foster economic growth in film production, promise more stable job opportunities, and recognize the economic potential of Canadian filmmaking.

Service productions hire many individual workers, Canadian producers, writers, actors, and crews, including Canadian post-production houses and sound stages, who rarely interact with independent distribution companies. Canadian workers are now, en masse, contributing to productions over which they have no effective creative control, or to films that do not contribute to Canada's cultural development. In other words, most films filmed in Canada today have nothing to do with Canada.

All these jobs created don't necessarily mean stability either. The boom of service productions threatens Canadian labor conditions. Regions in Canada that offered tax credits report significant pressure to relocate filming outside Union zones, and to extend workdays far beyond what is considered acceptable.

Can Con

So why hasn't there been another attempt to promote Canadian film and build an economy by creating a self-sustaining architecture? Well, answering this question comes down to why no one invests in Canadian content. AKA Can Con.

CanCon—refers to the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) requirements, derived from the Broadcasting Act of Canada, that broadcasters must produce and broadcast a certain percentage of content that was at least partly written, produced, presented, or otherwise contributed to by persons from Canada. CanCon also refers to cultural and creative content of Canadian origin, which is an incredibly broad and conflicting term.

Current Canadian content percentages are as follows: radio airplay is 35% (with partial exceptions for some specialty formats such as classical), and Broadcast television is required to be 55% CanCon annually or 50% daily. Some stations must air a larger percentage based on the "promise of performance" information they provide when submitting their license. Such as the CBC, and it is sitting slightly higher at 60%. However, these CanCon requirements only apply to broadcasters in Canada, including radio and television stations, cable and satellite specialty channels, and Internet-based video services.

By regulation in the 1980s, 60% of programming from 6:00 a.m. to 12:00 midnight had to be Can-Con (Canadian Content) on the airwaves and in television stations. Private broadcasters in Ontario generated $436 million in revenues from the sale of airtime for TV commercials. The regulated nature of the Canadian broadcasting system was to ensure the exhibition of Canadian productions across the country. However, Can-Con, which aired, was primarily composed of commercials, compared with Canadian television or films produced in Canada.

CanCon, which aims to promote and protect Canadian culture, has faced criticism for being overly restrictive, potentially hindering creative freedom, and occasionally leading to unintended consequences. Sometimes, content produced in Canada isn’t even Canadian enough to qualify for CanCon. Such as Bryan Adams' ballad "Everything I Do (I Do It for You)" in 1991, which spent eight weeks at #1 on the Billboard chart. Even though Adams performed the song and co-wrote the lyrics and music, the nation's enforcer of Canadian content broadcast regulations said the song wasn't Canadian enough. It wasn't until Adams became popular in the United States that his music was deemed “Canadian enough” by the CRTC.

Sometimes a production won’t be considered CanCon unless it leans into Canadian stereotypes, as in the case of SCTV (Second City Television), widely regarded as the Canadian equivalent of Saturday Night Live, which aired from 1976 to 1984. The show was a pioneer of Canadian comedy, and a given episode could include Canadian news broadcasts, sitcoms, dramas, movies, talk shows, children's shows, advertising send-ups hawking fictitious products, and game shows. It was a show that launched various Canadian actors into stardom, spawned spin-off series, and created jobs for hundreds.

However, the most popular sketch in the program's eight-year history was created because of CanCon requirements. Even though the show was created, produced, directed, and starred by Canadians, the American versions of the episodes were two minutes shorter than the Canadian ones (to allow more commercials), leaving a two-minute gap that didnt meet the minimum content requirement for the Canadian market. Intended as throw-away filler. Bob and Doug McKenzie, the dim-witted, beer-chugging, and back bacon-eating brothers, were featured in a recurring Canadian-themed sketch called "Great White North," initially developed by Rick Moranis and Dave Thomas as a response to this absurd request to make the show “more Canadian”.

One of the reasons why the definition of CanCon is vague is that there is a general fear that stating specific production requirements, such as requiring that the writer, director, and producer of Canadian content be Canadian, would declassify other productions with mostly Canadian crews but with few Canadians in specific positions in the production process.

For example, if production required a Canadian director and a writer to be considered, but the entire crew, excluding those two roles, consisted of Canadian workers, this would constitute an imbalance. If the requirement were to have specific department work done in Canada, it could also discredit large sections of the Canadian film industry: those behind the camera, those who make the magic happen, and the post-production crews and VFX artists.

The way CanCon handles Canadians' intellectual property is one of contention. For a production to be considered CanCon and for its producers to guarantee worldwide rights, all producers must be Canadian. This results in regulations requiring domestic IP ownership and prohibiting foreign enterprises from making Cancon. But this is also a massive problem. For example, if Netflix, an internationally renowned streaming service, is interested in becoming the exclusive source of funding and production for a revival of a Canadian show such as Trailer Park Boys(2021-2026), the new sequel would not be considered Cancon. For a show to qualify as Cancon, foreign businesses would need to relinquish ownership of the intellectual property.

This simple policy has led to a significant decline in Canadian content creation. Since foreign companies hold a majority of the industry's funds, they also hold the power over who ends up with the rights to that production's IP. Whoever holds the rights to a show's intellectual property controls the brand, its direction, and whatever money is made from it. Because of this simple fact and the state of the world being in late-stage capitalism, there really isn't any big investor itching to create Can Con other than Canadians themselves.