A panel session at the Banff World Media Festival in Alberta, on Monday.Kristian Bogner/Banff World Media Festival/Supplied
Attending this week’s Banff World Media Festival, I couldn’t get the traditional Jewish song of Dayenu out of my head.
It wasn’t because I was undergoing some kind of religious awakening – though the festival’s heavenly vistas high up in the Rocky Mountains offer a close-to-God experience – but because Dayenu, as warbled during the Passover holidays, translates to “it would have been enough.” As in: It would have been enough if the many producers, distributors, directors, writers and studio executives attending the film and television conference had to contend with the devastating effects of corporate consolidation. It would have been enough if they had to deal with the rapidly changing effects of artificial intelligence. It would have been enough if they had to manage with ever-higher production costs. It would have been enough if they had to reckon with economic malaise among consumers.
But on top of all those nerve-racking concerns – dayenu! – the industry walked into the 47th edition of Banff smack in the middle of a trade war.
Just two weeks ahead of the festival – a confab which is best described as the Davos of the North American media world crossed with a four-star summer camp – the federal government pulled the rug out from under the country’s screen sector in the decade-long fight for the Online Streaming Act.
Earlier this month, Ottawa ordered the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission to review its recent policy regarding Bill C-11. As it stood, the CRTC would have tripled the contributions of foreign-owned streamers toward the production of homegrown content – projects developed by other companies, not just streamers, as well as local news – from 5 per cent to 15 per cent of their Canadian revenues.
Miller rejects claims Ottawa ‘has sold out Canadian culture’ over Online Streaming Act
While a 2024 legal challenge launched by the industry group Motion Picture Association – Canada, which represents the interests of the major Hollywood studios, has complicated the situation, the new pullback represents a tacit admission of defeat from Ottawa toward big U.S. tech interests. And it is one that arrives in the midst of larger, intensely fraught trade negotiations between Ottawa and the White House regarding the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement.
Although Canadian Identity and Culture Minister Marc Miller, who attended the opening days of the festival, has pledged to go back at the streamers to secure a different, smaller revenue contribution – one that would in all likelihood place Canada far behind the likes of such fellow middle powers as France (which successfully compelled the streamers to contribute 20 to 25 per cent to fund European content) and Australia (10 per cent) – Banff delegates arrived on the ground shaken and confused.
“To reduce any of the obligations on the American streamers to be here, to benefit from the system and participate in it, would be a huge mistake,” Kyle Irving, co-owner of the production company Eagle Vision and chair of the Canadian Media Producers Association, said during a panel on the state of the industry. “That’s really what this fight is all about – us retaining a piece of what’s ours for the long term. We’re either going to be a bunch of factory workers or we’re going to be factory owners and workers.”
Meanwhile, Ottawa’s short-time solution of an annual $600-million stimulus into the country’s audio and audiovisual sector – announced without a timeline and without details as to how the fund would be divided – left attendees feeling more anxious than satiated.
“The development timeline, the investments that producers have to make are done against an uncertain future,” Fathom Film Group chief executive Ann Shin told the crowd. “If we had rails on the road and we knew what to expect for future cash flow, we’d be better able to take those risks.”
For some of the larger outfits attending Banff, certainly, there was a sense that things were business as usual.
Broadcasters push back on Ottawa’s plan to roll back foreign streamer contributions
The world of Canadian unscripted content, for example, is bigger than ever, with international partners eager to take advantage of this country’s increasingly skilled crews and evolved infrastructure. You couldn’t go five minutes without hearing someone talk about the triumph of Heated Rivalry, though no one seemed quite sure how to replicate its organic success.
The CBC, too, tried to stay as sunny as possible, with executives steering clear of the C-11 tensions altogether, preferring to pepper their panel appearances with an array of buzzwords and the odd metaphor of the network being a “gallery of media” with “infinite space” for productions. (Also going unmentioned: How it will mitigate the loss of Hockey Night in Canada.)
But for the many smaller producers without the weight of the CBC, or the ambitious international footprints of, for example, Blink49 Studios (which came into Banff riding a wave of new deals), there was a profound sense of the ground falling out from underneath their feet.
“All people wanted for the Online Streaming Act was to actually have a decision, to move with it, and then know what we’re doing. It’s not like we’re doing something that other countries aren’t,” said Jenn Kuzmyk, executive director of the festival. “Everyone wants certainty, because then we can move forward.”
Yet in Banff, there was a distinct lack of clear communication from delegates who have the power to help move things forward.
At the start of the festival, there was a friendly bet between some members of the press contingent over whether Vicky Eatrides, chair of the CRTC, would show up to deliver her keynote address, given how swiftly Ottawa upended the authority of the quasi-judicial tribunal. And given the bland speech-cum-history lesson Eatrides ended up delivering, perhaps she should have simply stayed home.
Editorial: Ottawa orders up a rewrite for Cancon funding
Meanwhile, the opening-day conversation between the Culture Minister and Canada Media Fund CEO Valerie Creighton engendered more confusion than clarity on the issue. (Although Creighton’s cheeky introductory video delivered the best Heated Rivalry joke of the entire festival.)
Even the streaming executives on the ground, who could have used the festival to take a victory lap, simply desired direction one way or the other.
For an industry on the edge in so many other ways, no one needed another reason to feel unsettled. But on the second day of the festival, news broke about yet more consolidation with Fox buying streaming pioneer Roku, a development that was quickly followed by a report in The Wall Street Journal looking into concerns about how the U.S. Department of Justice conducted its recent approval of Paramount’s bid for Warner Bros. Discovery.
“The margins are real, the declines are real, the job losses are real. The conversations feel much more urgent,” said Adam Cunningham, the London-based CEO of Allied Global Marketing. “Not being a Canadian, I don’t have a level of authority to give an opinion on the Online Streaming Act, but it is a terribly complex position right now.”
Typically, the stealth advantage of the Banff festival is how its intimate surroundings – the entire event is held inside the luxuriously comfy environs of the Fairmont Banff Springs hotel – allow for spontaneous and sometimes serendipitous connections. Often this means that even the industry’s biggest advocates for C-11 end up running into executives whose corporate interests are aligned in the opposite direction. At the end of the day, though, it felt as if everyone was united by one prime directive: to keep working.
On the second-last day of the festival, John Weber, president and CEO of the Toronto-based production company Take 5, was asked during a panel about what the pros are of working with Netflix. His one-word answer: “Employment.” Dayenu, sir. Dayenu.