September 26, 2026
Three weeks ago I wrote a post about a big rethink on the financing and marketing of Canadian audio visual content going on behind the scenes at Heritage Canada.
That caught the attention of my good friend Richard Stursberg.
Richard has spent his entire career in communications, broadcasting, film, television and program production.
During the 1980s he was Assistant Deputy Minister Culture and Broadcasting and found himself in the middle of the US-Canada free trade talks. He’s written about that in The Tangled Garden: A Canadian Cultural Manifesto for the Digital Age (2019, Lorimer).
Out of government, Richard was Executive Vice President of AT&T Canada, President of the Canadian Cable Television Association, CEO of the satellite TV companies Starchoice and Cancom, Chairman of the Canadian Television Fund (now the Canada Media Fund), and Executive Director of Telefilm Canada. Basically, that makes him an expert-by-experience on CanCon funding and marketing.
He achieved his greatest notoriety from 2004 to 2010 as the iconoclastic head of English services at the CBC. Afterwards, he served as President of the writers’ organization PEN Canada from 2017 to 2021.
Richard has written several books, my favourite read is the irreverent The Tower of Babble: Sins, Secrets and Successes Inside the CBC (2012, Douglas & McIntyre). He’s written countless articles including MediaPolicy guest columns here and here.
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By Richard Stursberg
A month ago, the Department of Canadian Heritage released seven discussion papers on the future of the Canadian audio-visual sector. Those who received them were apparently required to sign non-disclosure agreements. It’s not clear why.
The papers are, by and large, thoughtful, clear and forward looking. They seem to indicate that the department is contemplating at least three radical changes to the way that film and TV have been financed and regulated in Canada over the last half century.
The first suggests that the current definition of Canadian content should be changed. The department wants to explore “…how tax credits and funding programs could explicitly recognise cultural characteristics of content (stories, settings, language, underlying works)”. This would be a radical departure from the existing points-based system, which defines as Canadian anything made by Canadians.
The second is equally radical. It proposes that success measures for production financing would be based not just on “production volumes, but by cultural impact and audience connection”. The department is signalling that making shows and movies that nobody watches is no longer acceptable.
Third, there is a proposal to collapse the major financing agencies – Telefilm, the Canadian Media Fund and the National Film Board – into one undertaking. The rationale for this is presumably to simplify production financing, and focus it more clearly on projects that have “…cultural characteristics and audience engagement”.
These are three very good ideas. They are not difficult to do and their impact in terms of revitalising Canada’s audio-visual sector would be positive and profound.
Let’s consider them one-by-one.
The traditional definition of Canadian content is based on a ten point system that measures the number of Canadians in creative positions working on a project (the director, writer, lead actors, etc.). If a show has enough of them and is made by a Canadian production company, it can qualify for taxpayer funded financial support. Over the years, this has led to chronic abuse. Shows and films were made that were explicitly set in the United States or in some neutral place that could be easily seen as the United States.
This was done to make them attractive to US audiences and, thus, easier to both finance and generate a profit. This has been done repeatedly over many years.
The most recent and egregious example is Schitt’s Creek, the CBC hit comedy that won endless Emmys. It was made by Canadians and financed by the Canadian public. It was agreed from the outset of its production that it would never mention Canada, as though it was embarrassed to be associated with the country. Nobody watching the show would ever know that it was Canadian. Its contribution to Canada’s brand, whether as a country or as a fine producer of TV shows, was effectively zero.
The UK has a very different approach. To qualify for financial support, TV shows and movies must meet a “cultural test”, based not on who makes the programs or movies, but on whether they are distinctively British. It has not compromised the quality of British products or reduced their export. British exports of cultural exports per capita dwarf those of Canada.
There is a lesson in this. Successful exporters of films and TV shows do not hide the sensibilities or characteristics of their countries of origin. They make them explicit. The same has happened with distinctively Canadian products. Bell Media’s Heated Rivalry, for example, is as Canadian as can be imagined, and has sold into practically every territory in the world.
The second proposal is an essential measure. For years, the most important financiers of Canadian movies (Telefilm) and TV shows (CBC) have been largely indifferent to audience performance. In 2000, Telefilm was required to get 5% of the Canadian box office in exchange for an injection of $100 million from the federal government. In 2005, it made 5.3%. Since then, it has been downhill. In 2024, Canadian films took 2.8% of the domestic box office and 1.7% in 2025. This is largely because Telefilm has substituted a focus on Canadians as a whole to the tastes of much narrower audience segments.
The same has been true of the CBC. In the first 10 years of the 21st century it revised its programming strategy to focus on making distinctively Canadian shows for the widest possible audiences. It commissioned Little Mosque on the Prairie, Heartland, Battle of the Blades, and a host of others. Its prime-time schedule eclipsed Global’s with its all American offer. Since then, like Telefilm, it has catered to smaller and smaller audience segments, and seen its ratings collapse.
This has not been the case at Bell Media’s Crave. It has pursued a strategy of commissioning Canadian shows – Shoresy, Letterkenny, Heated Rivalry – that are unapologetically Canadian in their sensibility and sense of humour. The result has been big hits for their service, with ratings eclipsing many of their American shows, and often becoming their most popular offerings.
In Canada, like all other countries, success with audiences is intimately tied up with making shows that reflect its history, preoccupations, characters and style. How could it be otherwise?
Finally, the third proposal, to collapse and simplify Canada’s production financing infrastructure, is also an excellent idea. It is far too complicated, bureaucratic and expensive. A few years ago, my colleague Stephen Armstrong and I, using 2017 numbers, modelled the administrative costs of the current arrangements. We estimated that they cost the government $30 million a year and a comparable amount for producers. Given inflation, the total costs today would likely be closer to $75-80 million today.
The system is also replete with bureaucrats making decisions on what gets financed and what does not. Captured as they have been for many years by political correctness, they have focussed, as mentioned earlier, on narrower and narrower audience segments. The results can be seen in the failure of most films and TV shows to connect with Canadian audiences.
The department is right to want to collapse the funding agencies, but it has not gone far enough. The better course would be to collapse them and transfer the resulting savings into the existing tax credits. They are simple to administer, administratively inexpensive, and do not involve bureaucrats substituting their judgement for the market. This would make the system much easier to navigate, and more responsive to the government’s desire to finance movies and TV shows that emphasise “Canadian cultural characteristics and audience engagement.”
The Department of Heritage’s new approaches are to be applauded. They will, however, be resisted by all the existing interest groups – the producers, the guilds and all the bureaucrats at the funding agencies. This will make it hard to achieve a political consensus to move forward. The Department would be wise to open the conversation by eliminating the non-disclosure agreements and encouraging Canadians without vested interests to participate.
