This Sunday, I’m being lazier than usual. Part of that’s procrastination. This is the day I clean out the garage so there’s somewhere to park the car come winter.

Where does all this crap come from?

Where the hell is it supposed to go?

So, in lingering over a second cup of coffee, I listened to CBC Sunday Edition instead and heard a reprise of one of their old shows. (Guess somebody’s being lazy over there too). But their repeated program had a special meaning for me, because of the reaction I’ve gotten to the post below this one.

Yesterday, I wrote about an idea I had to shake up the Canadian TV business, maybe revitalize it and perhaps in the process help save the jobs of a lot of other Canadians who work as far from creative pursuits as it’s probably possible to get.

A lot of people thought I was being funny or just shit disturbing. But I wasn’t. I was deadly serious.

And in wondering why I’d gotten that reaction, I realized that a lot of people in Canadian show business don’t think such things are possible. Whether through personal experience of a cratering industry or by buying into the lies of the networks or the welfare state mentality of our Arts bureaucracies, they’ve come to believe that they really don’t have much power or influence or the ability to change anything.

But we can.

If you search through this site (I’d find all the links for you but, like I said, I’m being lazy today) you’ll find stories about me as an actor who’d barely started his career and had no noteworthy credits helping to break the stranglehold American Equity had on Canadian actors, literally preventing us from “telling our own stories”. You’ll find others about the founding of the Writers Guild of Canada, which now fights hard for Canadian writers but was little more than a dream 30 years ago.

Those weren’t sudden aberrations in the lives of the people involved. They were part of a continuum that has bound the needs of creative and working people for about as long as anybody can remember.

There was a time when playwrights like Clifford Odets filled Broadway theatres with plays that demanded his audiences consider the lives of the blue collar workers whose rights they mostly ignored. Woody Guthrie did the same in music and John Steinbeck added those working voices to some of the greatest books in American literature.

Later, that torch was picked up by screenwriters like Dalton Trumbo, Rod Serling and Paddy Chayevsky.

Change can happen and people who do what we do can be a great part of it.

But somewhere along the way, we were co-opted into thinking we weren’t working people anymore. We were elevated to an “Artist” class, a somehow “better” caste where we could sip at the free bar in a roped off tent and rub shoulders with people, who in another time would have been courtiers to Louis XVI and now have titles denoting the ruling families of various Arts Councils, innumerable Arts Funds and Telefilm.

Those people want us apart from our true audience and stabled to serve the needs of political agendists and social engineers, not entertaining working families and making their days a little easier to bear by way of a hot serving of popular entertainment. 

The Sunday Edition show this morning was about a one-of-a-kind concert that took place in 1952 in Blaine, Washington at the Peace Arch Border Crossing, familiar to anybody in the lower mainland of British Columbia. American singer, Paul Robeson, a well known activist and outspoken Black performer had run afoul of one “Red-scare” group or another.

But because they couldn’t actually prove he was a Communist or a threat to the nation, his country had opted to silence him. And while domestic Media conglomerates were as compliant then as they are now, Robeson’s detractors also had to make sure he didn’t find a platform somewhere outside their borders.

And so, Robeson had been forced to surrender his passport and was not allowed to travel outside the country.

But on a sunny May afternoon, Canadian locals of the Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers union arranged for Robeson to sing off the back of a pick-up truck parked under the Peace Arch, accompanied only by a piano.

And 40,000 people turned up to listen – as well as remind their governments that Art has meaning to all people, not just those with smooth hands and a little more money than others.

Our audience, the people who really need us, doesn’t live in windowless rooms in Ottawa or linger near the shrimp tray. They work for a living. And in helping them, we help ourselves.

Enjoy your Sunday. I’ll be in the garage.

Read more »

So, it’s Saturday and I’m reading the morning paper – happy to be at the end of a week where it became clearer that not much is going to happen in the Canadian television business until this whole “carriage fees” issue gets settled and the Canadian Media Fund issues its new guidelines for funding programming here.

So – like April.

We’re basically in tread water mode until April.

Oh, there’ll still be some stuff getting made. And we’ve now got no excuse for not working on that script we’ve been meaning to write if we had time. But until everybody in broadcasting knows:

A) how much of somebody else’s money they have to spend

and

B) how many Americans they can have showrunning or writing or starring in or directing their “Canadian” shows

…nobody is committing to anything major.

For the next 6 months, the only people getting a regular pay check in the Canadian TV business will be the bureaucrats who oversee our operations. Why the government has to keep paying them when there is little or nothing to oversee is an argument for another day.

However, getting back to that morning paper. I found a story that not only offered a solution to our problems but might also help out tens of thousands of our fellow Canadians facing imminent unemployment.

The illustration above, comes from a story in the National Post, available free here and for $2 on your newsstand – most of which either goes to bankruptcy lawyers or Goldman-Sachs. So, if you could help them out by buying the hard copy, that might save a couple of jobs too.

The gist of this story is that the $787 Billion American stimulus bill signed into law by President Obama this summer is literally killing a lot of Canadian companies.

Across the USA, products marked “Made in Canada” are banned from import and use in projects using that stimulus money. Even if they’re the only version of the product available and especially if they’ve already been part of the work already done. To qualify for the cash to finish these projects, some cities and states are cancelling orders and even being forced to rip out the Canadian goods they’ve already installed.

The “Buy American” rule in the Stimulus package was a well meaning but not well considered one. Yes, it guaranteed that US Tax dollars were spent creating American jobs – except where companies like Goldman-Sachs, who got us into this mess, used it to pay off people in their foreign subsidiaries – but it also transferred the suffering both offshore and to American companies that had previously been managing to somehow keep the lights on.

One Canadian company, for example, is laying off workers because it can no longer sell into the US. But the American companies that once supplied it with raw materials are also laying off workers because the Canadian company is no longer buying.

Now, Canada could retaliate with its own “Buy Canadian” policy, but that would likely just make things worse.

Unless…

Unless we could find a way of hurting the Americans just enough to make them rethink their policies, while not hurting ourselves that much in return.

Now what industry that we both share could do that?

Show Business.

Right now, Canadian TV networks spend $700 million purchasing American programming. Virtually all of that programming is already available to us from the American networks delivered by Canadian cable and satellite. What if Canadian networks were told they couldn’t spend that money anymore?

That’s $700 Million pulled out of the US economy in the click of a remote button.

Would the American Industry retaliate – maybe.

But total sales of Canadian programming to US networks is a fraction of our spend. And a lot of it goes to US nets who are selling little into this country in the first place and really need the low priced programming we supply.

We might not get hurt at all.

And how badly would we feel any damage if even a small percentage of that $700 million was invested in new Canadian programming to fill up the now gaping holes in the Canadian networks Prime Time schedules?

The domestic production industry likely wouldn’t suffer. It might actually see a job creating boom in new production.

Would advertisers pull their sponsorship from Canadian networks?

Not likely. There are already rules prohibiting them from buying ads on cross border stations and they still need to get the message out about the goods and services their clients offer.

Would Canadian networks suffer?

Absolutely not.

Haven’t they been telling us for weeks how important local TV is to them and how it must be saved?

Here’s their chance to finally save Local as well as compete head to head with American networks instead of just rebroadcasting the same old shows. Here’s their golden opportunity to build future revenue streams through a library of original programming they’ll be able to sell on DVD and iTunes and market to countries with less stringent trade rules than the US.

And if Canadians have so warmly embraced “Flashpoint”, “Battle of the Blades”, “Corner Gas”, “Trailer Park Boys”, and countless clones of American reality shows – why wouldn’t they just as warmly embrace more of the same?

Meanwhile, let’s add a surcharge on American films coming into the country or even on movie tickets if the film is American. Practically every other country in the world has done that without worrying about choppers of Marines massing on their borders. We almost did it a couple of times. 

Will it reduce the number of people going to see American movies in Canadian theatres? Of course not.

Will it cause studios to pull their films from distribution here?

Are you nuts? Have you seen how much money they make in non-domestic markets that already ding them on every imported film or for a few cents on every ticket dollar – or both?

And in the world of theatre and concerts – are the promoters not going to be willing to pay a little more to get those money machines over the border? Are the people regularly paying $100 or more to see “Jersey Boys” and “U2” going to flinch at another buck or two that’s then rerouted to support Canadian theatres and bands?

Nope.

Suddenly, by limiting our “trade war” to just one small industry, we’ve potentially created a job boom here.

And how does that help the Canadians who now make sewer pipes and industrial pumps who are losing theirs?

Well, a little bit might get spent on some infrastructure projects here. But more importantly, you don’t take almost a Billion dollars out of Hollywood without somebody picking up the phone to call the guy whose campaign they helped to finance.

And then the guy who needs to get re-elected puts down his basketball and calls his Canadian counterpart and says, “What’re you doing to me?”

And then the Canadian guy makes sure his hair’s in place and answers, “What’re you doing to me?”

And then they figure something out.

And then Canadian companies start selling their pipe and pumps to California and California companies get to bid on projects here.

And maybe that means that us guys in Canadian Show Business who won this little skirmish don’t get to keep all we’ve gained and Global gets “House” back and CTV has some cop show with initials for a title every other night.

But us show biz types would still be far better off than we are now.

And some of those people whose jobs we helped save might have realized we’re their neighbors and work for a living just like them and they might decide to sample what we have to offer instead of the same old stuff.

Couldn’t that work?

Read more »

I’m sure the television business isn’t all that different from any other line of endeavor these days. Everybody’s just scrambling to keep up. 

This week the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation revamped its news services in an attempt to reach a wider audience, a younger audience, Hell, any audience.

Our leading private network continued a process of trying to make itself the lead story and center of attention by embedding on camera personalities in the Olympic torch run.

And the once hard-charging Canwest broadcast system, reduced to creditor protection status, was in court scrambling around the remaining pieces of its empire in an effort to hang on to what little hope of recovery it has left.

Meanwhile, independent producers and industry creatives are in a constant state of flux, working countless permutations and combinations that might get a show on anything from conventional television to an iPhone app (and maybe somehow on something in between).

Our world feels like it’s speeding up, pushing us to run faster, work longer, embrace technologies we don’t even know how to operate, let alone understand and try to still pay at least lip service to every email, text, instant message and tweet that comes flying at us.

I have Facebook friends I would never want to have a cup of coffee with and follow folks on Twitter that I not only don’t know, but don’t even know who they are --- for the simple reason that I need to understand a little of what they understand, because their insights into what’s going on might (even slightly) inform my own.

Yesterday, I asked an overwhelmed guy in a tire store for a particular brand of snow tire. He’d never heard of it. I pointed out the sale ad in his company flyer. He showed it to his partner, who wondered when the heck those had come in. Only the kid in the back who changes the tires knew where they were piled.

A couple of months back, I decided my father didn’t need to deal with the creaking desk size PC that allows him time to have a nap between when he turns it on and when it’s finally ready to work. I took him to a computer store to look at laptops priced at a fraction of what his old unit had set him back. As the salesman rattled off all the things one of these babies could do that he and his old machine had never dreamt of, I watched him physically tune out.

“Are you all right?”, I asked.

“This is all science fiction,” he answered, “and I’m not Buck Rogers.”

Well, none of us are Buck Rogers. But we can’t stop the world and get off either.

We are living in exponential times.

I don’t have any solutions to our dilemmas, but I think getting a handle on how fast it’s all moving can at least make us realize we’re not alone, not somehow incapable of understanding and, perhaps most of all, less afraid of change.

Maybe what follows will help.

Maybe not.

But take it on board and then try to enjoy your Sunday.

Read more »