Canadian Content In The 21st Century

This report reviews the definition of Canadian content as it applies to film & television production and its relationship to public funding. After an introduction on the review and a summary of stakeholder comments, chapter 2 puts Canadian content into perspective with respect to how it is currently administered & defined, and what it represents in terms of production activity. It also analyzes in detail the degree to which the current definition, more specifically the ten-point creative system, responds to today's realities. It provides information on how some foreign countries promote & determine their national content, and highlights major weaknesses in the current Canadian content system. Chapter 3 proposes fundamental changes to the Canadian content policy infrastructure in three key area: how a Canadian-content production is defined, how Canadian content is administered overall, and how to encourage the greater use of Canadian creators. Chapter 4 examines two areas believed to be integral to the Canadian content system: international treaty co-production and theatrical distribution. Chapter 5 considers the particular challenges faced by Aboriginal & minority communities within the Canadian film & television sectors. Annexes include a list of recommendations, summaries of stakeholder input to the review, and results of a creative & technical cost analysis of various types of productions.

This action plan aims at providing Canadians with a national framework for building an Information Highway that meets Canadians' needs, a framework that will facilitate Canada's transition toward an information society and knowledge economy. The action plan is made up of four strategic thrusts: building Canada's information highway; growing Canadian content; realizing the economic and social benefits for all Canadians; and, getting government right.

This report presents the findings of a review undertaken to provide advice on the mandates and future role of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, the National Film Board, and Telefilm Canada. The review committee examined these cultural institutions with regard to their past accomplishments, their present performance, and the changing world in which they will operate over the next decade, while taking into account current budgetary constraints. The institutions apprised the committee of the measures they envisage to make themselves more effective, efficient, and productive, and the committee examined a number of solutions for reducing the cost of providing their services. In addition, the committee considered whether all those services continue to be essential, whether the institutions themselves are still indispensable, and whether and how they need to change. Finally, the committee proposes a set of policies and a redefined role for those institutions for the next decade.

A nation is given shape in large part through the cultural activities of its builders. Historically, nationalists have turned to the arts and media to articulate and institute a sense of unique national identity. This was certainly true of Canada in the twentieth century. Canadian Content explores ways in which nationhood was defined and pursued through cultural means in Canada throughout the last century. As a framework for the study, Ryan Edwardson distinguishes between three phases of Canadianization: support for the arts and cultured mass media during the colony-to-nation transition; the 'new nationalist' empowerment of multi-brow culture and the call for state intervention in the mid-1960s and 1970s; and the 'cultural industrialism' initiated by the federal government under Pierre Trudeau in 1968. Examining each phase in its turn, Canadian Content looks at Canada as an ongoing postcolonial process of not one but a series of radically different nationhoods, each with its own valued but tentative set of cultural criteria for orchestrating and implementing a Canadian national experience. Considering the relationship between culture and national identity, this study offers an idea of what it means to be Canadian, and suggests just how adaptable, problematic, and ongoing the pursuit of nationhood can be.

How Canadians Communicate, Vol. 1 is a timely collection that chronicles the extraordinary changes that are shaking the foundations of Canada's cultural and communications industries in the twenty-first century. With essays from some of Canada's foremost media scholars, this book discusses the major trends and developments that have taken place in government policy, corporate strategies, creative communities, and various communication mediums: newspapers, films, cellular and palm technology, the Internet, libraries, TV, music, and book publishing. This volume addresses many issues unique to Canada in a broader framework of global communications. Specifically, it looks at new media communications in Aboriginal communities, the changing role of the state in cultural institutions, the conglomeratization of the media, the threat of American and global communications to Canadian voices, and the struggle to retain and reclaim local and national identities in the face of globalization. With articles from academics and professionals across Canada, How Canadians Communicate, Vol.1 provides the most current perspectives on communication in Canada in a rapidly changing world of technology and global communication.