OTTAWA – Gordon Ritchie had a lot more success negotiating the Canada-U.S. Free Trade Agreement than he has had trying to inch Canada’s broadcasters toward a Terms of Trade agreement with producers.
Ritchie, the Canadian Film and Television Production Association’s (CFTPA) principal advisor as it seeks an agreement on the terms under which producers sell content to broadcasters, was a panelist discussing the state of the negotiations at the CFTPA’s annual conference this week in the nation’s capital. He says he’s been “surprised and disappointed” by the months of stagnant talks. “Absolutely nothing has been agreed at the bargaining table.”
But, Ritchie adds, “This is not a despairing report,” noting that most of the progress in the tough FTA negotiations occurred in the last week of talks. He still hopes to achieve a deal between the producers and broadcasters, but says the CRTC had wanted something in place by the time conventional broadcasters filed applications for license renewals. That deadline has passed. Broadcasters simply have not shown “a sense of urgency” and “must think the CRTC’s deadline can be tested,” he said.
Norm Bolen, a consultant and former senior executive with Alliance Atlantis Communications, agrees, noting that broadcasters always know they hold the power in an uneven relationship and can pass on any producer who won’t sell the rights they are demanding. There were no broadcasters on the panel.
Bolen says that once he had convinced AAC that it was in its own interests to see Canadian programming as an opportunity rather than a burden, the Cancon proved him right, accounting for more than half of the Top Ten slots on some AAC channels.
Negotiating deal terms every time an independent producer comes along is inefficient and, in the end, harms the whole industry because, he continues, “the independent sector will continue to be under-capitalized…and will end up as a service sector. That’s where we’re going….Do we want a production sector that’s broken and without the ability to build? Producers are at a terrible, terrible disadvantage without Terms of Trade,” said Bolen.
Ritchie concurs. “ACTRA deals don’t dictate the deal to be done with every individual actor, but they do set the floor and set some parameters….The current economic setting makes it more important to set the floor or else you have a race to the bottom” with producers ending as a service sector that doesn’t provide independent thinking and creative for Canadian programming.
