Good afternoon.

I would like to thank you for the opportunity to appear before you today as part of your study on the funding of the Canada Council for the Arts, or CCA.

During this appearance, I will put the organization and its members in context, as well as the relationship in the media arts between industry and independent creation. I will also address some of the issues related to the funding that the council can provide to the Front des réalisateurs indépendants du Canada and its members. In conclusion, I will talk about the advances and adjustments needed to foster the vitality of media arts in the Canadian francophonie.

I'm going to start by giving you a little background on the Front des réalisateurs indépendants du Canada, known as the FRIC.

The FRIC was created in 2004 with the support of the Fédération culturelle canadienne-française, or FCCF, the National Film Board, or NFB, and the CCA. It is a national service organization that brings together francophone media artists from official language minority communities, or OLMCs. These artists work in documentary, fiction, experimental video and digital arts, in different formats and on different platforms, whether television, the Web or others.

The FRIC currently has 64 members in three main regions: Acadia, Ontario, and the west and north. It has had only one part-time employee, four days a week, for more than five years. The annual budget of the FRIC ranges from $120,000 to $165,000.

I would like to point out that, starting this year, the FRIC will for the first time receive programming funding from Canadian Heritage, which will allow the organization to consolidate. We would like to take this opportunity to thank the Department of Canadian Heritage for its support. The funds were obtained thanks to new investments in the 2018-2023 Action Plan for Official Languages. However, this portion of the organization's funding cannot cover professional development, or development and creative activities, which are more within the purview of the CCA.

I will now turn to the funding provided by the CCA to the FRIC.

The FRIC may submit grant applications for projects to the CCA. Since its inception in 2004, the FRIC has received funding for eight projects. However, as it did not receive project funding between 2013 and 2018, the FRIC is unfortunately not eligible for programming funding and will therefore not be able to benefit from the increase in the budget envelope of the CCA.

In terms of the relationship between the industry and independent creation, I would say that it is very difficult to develop original content independently in the Canadian francophonie outside the industry without a producer. Since OLMCs do not have the same levers as artists in Quebec, television is the best way to enable the creation and promotion of works in francophone communities. If there were no television industry in OLMCs, there would simply be no Franco-Canadian content on screens, or there would be very little.

According to the CCA, the artist must have full creative control over his work. In the industry, however, it is the producer and broadcaster who have the final say on production. As a result, for a long time, directors from OLMCs were not recognized by the council and its peer committees, since they worked mostly with the industry. This situation has caused a lot of discontent and discouragement over the years. Several FRIC members decided to abandon these efforts, after many refusals from the CCA. It is also for this reason that the number of projects submitted was and remains very small.

These are the results of applications made by artists to the CCA between 2015 and 2018. In 2015, the CCA accepted two requests. In 2016, no applications were accepted because none were filed. In 2017, three requests were selected; in 2018, only one.

I will now talk about media arts funding at the federal level.

At the federal level, you must be a corporate entity to propose the design or creation of a project, whether it be to the Canada Media Fund, for television or the Web, or to Telefilm Canada. Only CCA funding is available to artists.

Although there is a strategic fund for OLMCs at the Canada Council for the Arts and some incentives offered by Telefilm Canada, it is only the Canada Media Fund that has an envelope strictly reserved for Franco-Canadian minority production. The impact of this fund is tangible, and the television industry among OLMCs is doing quite well.

For example, I would like to talk about the situation of feature-length fiction and documentary films, which the CCA and Telefilm Canada are funding. We have just celebrated Telefilm Canada's 50th anniversary in 2017. The FRIC conducted a census to determine the number of fiction and documentary feature films created by OLMC artists with the support of Telefilm Canada. We found that, in 52 years, 13 feature-length fiction films were made and produced, and no feature-length documentaries were made. It's really very little.

Since 2017, there appear to have been significant improvements made by the council, particularly with respect to the eligibility of FRIC members for funding. The problem with this inherent duality of FRIC and its members, the relationship between industry and independent creation, seems to be a thing of the past in terms of artists' eligibility for funding. It is very encouraging to see that this first barrier has been removed. However, there still seems to be an inequality in the composition of peer review committees. The reality is that, most of the time, the peers who form the committees are almost all Quebeckers and do not know the reality and artists outside Montreal very well, or not at all.

I will move on to the relationship between industry and independent creation.

We are in a very complex era for the creation of media arts content, whether in terms of funding, distribution or otherwise. With digital and multiplatform broadcasting, the container no longer seems to matter: it is the richness of content that is essential. The industry should no longer be a barrier to content creation for the CCA.

In this regard, FRIC welcomes the new CCA program, in partnership with CBC/Radio-Canada, which aims to support artists and arts organizations in the digital age by providing an innovative way to access Radio-Canada's digital platforms. We hope that this program, which is a step forward, given that Radio-Canada is part of the industry, will meet our expectations and those of francophone creators, and that it will open the door to greater collaboration between the two sectors.

The new CCA funding model is still in its infancy, and that is why we believe that immediate action is needed. First, the commitment to increase CCA funding to 2020 must be maintained. Then, a rigorous consultation and engagement exercise must be put in place this year with the stakeholders involved in this funding, to evaluate the current approach and make the necessary adjustments to the new funding model.

There is therefore still a long way to go to ensure the full development of media arts in the Canadian francophonie. We are more convinced than ever that collaboration is the key to success.

Thank you.

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