Beating resentment: Vancouver Vs. Toronto and Ottawa: the CBC is often accused by producers in West Coast Vancouver of only producing and airing programming made by (and for) Canadians in Toronto and Ottawa.

In On Location--Canada's Television Industry in a Global Market (University of Toronto Press, 2005, C$24.95), author Serra Tinic presents a "study of television production in Vancouver, British Columbia," in an effort to make readers reconsider the connection between a culture's location and its identity. Canada is "a regionally fragmented nation informed by diverse immigrant experiences and settlement patterns," whose inhabitants feel more connected to their local region than to the nation as a whole--particularly since urban centers in Canada are geographically (as well as culturally) far apart, and the political (and policy-making) centers of the country are in Ottawa and Toronto.

Tinic noted that feelings of resentment from Canadians who reside outside Ottawa and Toronto play out across the airwaves: the government's Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) is often accused by producers in West Coast Vancouver of only producing and airing programming made by (and for) Canadians in Toronto and Ottawa.

Early policy makers were aware of the potential divide the country's expanse could create. In 1929, the Canadian Radio Broadcasting Company (CRBC) was created at the recommendation of the Aird Commission--a royal commission on Canadian broadcasting that was named after its chairman, Sir John Aird--and "Canada quickly developed [an] extensive broadcasting distribution network." According to the CRBC's goals, "programming was to originate in the provinces" while the "national broadcasting office in Ottawa was intended to serve only as a disseminator of programming." Unfortunately, after building distribution facilities throughout the country, "scant funds [were] left over to develop regional production centers." Ottawa then oversaw the organization and programming of the nascent CBC, the CRBC's television successor, thus "beginning the centralization process that the Aird Commission had tried to prevent."

Canada's population of only 30 million people makes it difficult for local producers to recoup costs on indigenous programs if aired only within Canada. The fact that international sales have always been important for Canadian producers--coupled with television production being a "particularly mobile industry"--has paved the way for Vancouver to earn the nickname "Hollywood North."

In the 1980s, the British Columbia Ministry of Small Business, Tourism and Culture introduced the "Super Natural British Columbia" tourism campaign, designed to entice tourists--and foreign film producers--up north. The campaign emphasized Vancouver's "diversity of locations available in a coastal province that also contains a glacier mountain range and a dry, rugged interior region." By the 1990s, the "Super Natural" of the campaign referred to the U.S. TV production in the area: nine of the top ten American supernatural series were shot in Vancouver, including The X-Files, Highlander and Stargate.

Tinic argued that Vancouver's popularity as a shooting location for U.S. productions did not harm Canada's own television and film industries. In 1997, C$700 million (U.S.$615.5 million) was spent by the television and motion picture industries in Vancouver, C$100 million more than the year before. And even though only 20 percent of the 200 productions made in that period was domestic, the staff" and crew that worked on the productions were Canadians.

The result was a large number of Canadians who gained on-the-job training and experience on U.S. productions, who then were able to finance independent Canadian productions or co-productions with funds largely derived from their U.S. production salaries.

Tinic pointed out that before British Columbia became a popular site for U.S. productions, "local producers were dependent on the transitory whims of central-Canadian broadcasters and policy makers;" she added that there were far fewer domestic productions before Hollywood entered the B.C. production scene.

Though Tinic admitted that there are financial benefits to "Hollywood North," she lamented that "foreign productions ... erase any sense of 'place' by selling producers 'an industrial setting rather than a cultural and historical site'," noting that "pre-production work consists of finding sites that can stand in for other places, usually someplace in the United States."

Tinic described the three main types of international joint ventures into which Canada enters. The first, formal co-productions, allow programs to qualify as domestic content in both countries, which make them ideal for countries that have state regulations on a minimum of domestic product that must be aired, as well as for those countries whose government provides subsidies and tax incentives for domestic product. Both countries contribute relatively equal financial and creative investments--Canada need only invest 30 percent of the total production budget in order for a project to qualify as domestic.

Co-ventures are less restrictive in terms of financing, but have more difficulty qualifying for domestic subsidies and tax incentives in Canada.

In the third and less beneficial type of international joint venture, called twinning packages, two countries produce similar projects and fund them independently from one another. Once production is complete, each country agrees to air the other's program and the two are promoted together.

Though some might think that, because of its geographic closeness and (some) cultural similarities, the U.S. might be the ideal co-production partner for Canada, most agreements in these countries tend to exist between independent producers, since there is no formal co-s production treaty between the two countries. And because the U.K. does not have a domestic content quota system, most agreements between the U.K. and Canada are in the form of twinning packages. It is with France that Canada shares the most co-productions for Anglo-Canadian content.

Tinic compared Canada's cultural broadcasting crisis--programming that reaches the farthest corners of the country but does not represent the majority of viewers--to that faced by the European Union. There, national cultural communities are now being united under a policy of "television without borders" that aims to defend "against global (read: American) media intrusion ... Where Canada could not succeed in uniting two linguistic and cultural communities, Europe will try to unite several," a prospect that Tinic seems to think is destined to fail.