MONTREAL – Quebec’s film and television producers’ association today lambasted Quebecor’s proposal to re-direct its television program development money from the Canadian Television Fund (CTF) to its own self-directed Fonds Quebecor.
Claire Samson, president of the APFTQ, told a news conference Tuesday that the plan, outlined Monday by Quebecor president and CEO Pierre Karl Péladeau, is unacceptable in every regard and should be firmly rejected.
“Quebecor has clearly shown its intentions to reserve its new fund exclusively for its own broadcast properties,” she said, which goes against the whole idea behind the CTF’s creation.
Péladeau’s plan, she said, is an invitation to the other major distributors (Shaw, Rogers, Bell ExpressVu, and Cogeco) to ignore their legal obligations to the CTF and create their own fund to serve their own broadcasting needs.
Quebecor Media’s cable subsidiary, Vidéotron, like Shaw Communications, has stopped making its monthly CTF payments (worth about $6 million a month).
Péladeau’s alternative, outlined Monday, would increase program spending this year from $19 to $30 million, and by 20% a year in the following two years, for a total of $109 million over three years. However, it would all go to the Fonds Quebecor, for the exclusive use of Quebecor’s varied broadcast platforms.
“What would happen to those [other] TV enterprises?” Samson said. “What will happen to Télé-Québec, the Astral networks, Global, and the TV5’s of this world? They will be sidelined, deprived of all direct financial aid from the distributors who will meanwhile get richer by distributing their services.”
Anyone not linked to Quebecor, she said, “would be punished for having the audacity and brazenness to dare to offer an alternative to the empire, to dare to offer to creators, producers, artists and artisans from here other means of access to the Canadian broadcasting system”.
Péladeau had argued that the proposal would allow the industry “to face the challenges of the digital revolution” and result in an increase in the quality and volume of production.
He also said it would allow independent producers to become “experts in production” instead of “experts in financing” because they would come under the wing of JPL Productions, another Quebecor subsidiary, which would be the primary producer and clearing-house for sub-contracted productions.
Samson said producers were “sickened” by those comments, which she said show contempt for the skills of producers who have helped make Quebecor’s TVA network profitable.
The Quebecor proposal, she said, is “totally outlandish. And to push it even further, he wants Quebec tax credits made available to his production subsidiaries, to which we firmly object.”
Samson said that over the past 20 years, the existing support system has helped produce a successful, diversified Quebec television industry whose top-rated programs are almost exclusively home-grown creations. The Association itself represents about 130 independent Quebec film and television production houses.
Glenn Wanamaker is Cartt.ca’s Quebec Editor and is based in Quebec City.
