No apology required

The hype over "runaway" production is fraying our patience here in Canada - may even have worn a hole clean through. But one of the saddest ironies in all this brouhaha is the way Canadians insist on apologizing for making Americans want to run here in the first place.

We know prominent advocacy groups such as the Directors Guild of America are flagrantly exaggerating how much money American producers spend in Canada. A long list of analysts in a long list of analytical capacities - Canadian and American - including powerful u.s. producer lobbyist Jack Valenti, have exposed the wrong-headedness of the arguments coming forth from the dga and others.

Most recently, the Directors Guild of Canada has pointed up the flaws in a recent study (by Monitor Company) released by the dga; the dgc has argued, via a systematic review done by PricewaterhouseCoopers, that although the Monitor study says us$2.8 billion was spent in Canada by American prodcos, the figure was more like us$573 million for 1998. Says dgc president Allan King: "Once you look at the actual production numbers, which have to be submitted to qualify for tax credits, you discover that the real numbers are far, far less than the u.s. estimates."

To date, Playback has dutifully carried much of the to-and-fro. We've noted fewer studio productions are being made, more money's going to new media, our exchange rate is very low, big-budget fare mainly stays in the u.s., we pay for 10% of u.s. av output but produce only 2%-3% of the us$50 billion dollars worth being made. . . . We could add that "unnamed" officials from the U.S. Embassy in Ottawa have been telling the media that Canada is "rightly entitled" to compete for Hollywood or other production, just as states other than California compete for it.

But enough. All of this apologizing sadly serves as a yellowed, dusty mirror of this culture in the morning. Canadians seldom regard it as their right to out-perform, or out-negotiate, foreign rivals in creating product for, or contributing to, "English" cultural industries; if we do, and find ourselves winning jobs Americans consider rightfully theirs, we take great pains to placate rhetorical complainants, as if we can't believe we deserve to win even the tiny fraction we do bring home.

A recent story in an American trade journal concedes that "while there is no doubt that Canada has lured many u.s. productions north of the border with favorable exchange rates and generous tax incentives. . . it may be too early to hit the panic button. State and industry employment data show that the number of jobs in California's film and tv industry has more than doubled during the past 11 years."

In a global market place, to the well-positioned go the spoils. Finally, from the lighter side, a paraphrase from a recent "animated" e-mail from Vancouver: if the dog is eating from the cat's dish, do you penalize the cat?