Film Tax Credits are for Wusses

Originally published in Terminal City Weekly in Vancouver, in November of 2001.

“Today, despite all the broadcast hardware, the studios with their cameras, the control rooms with their millions and millions of dollars of snazzy equipment, despite the satellites in the sky, the armies of TV and film crews stretched out from coast to coast, the glitzy award shows, the weekend conferences of entertainment lawyers, accountants and network development officers, despite all the investment from federal and provincial governments and all the tax benefits which yearly flow to private corporations I find our Canadian broadcast system in English Canada has three dominant features: censorship, racism and an appalling lack of innovation.”

You can find the rest of what Daryl Duke, chair of BC Film, a guy with a star on Granville Street, said in a Spry lecture a couple years back in Montreal, but the central point is clear (the lecture is pasted below, since it’s currently offline).

Last week’s panicky headline in the Vancouver Sun, “BC risks losing half its film business, insiders say,” is more than just a random attack on the Feds, a symptom of the absence of an NDP tax-and-spend target for the local right-wing rags. It’s one of those surface-level inquiries into our economy that characterize the converted-to-globalization discourse that our whole society seems mired in, despite breakthroughs in Seattle and Quebec City.

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