(Montreal) The provincial Minister of Culture, Mathieu Lacombe, announced the creation of a committee which will look into the future of Quebec’s audiovisual industry.
Posted at 10:22 a.m.
Updated at 11:46 a.m.
Stéphane Blais
The Canadian Press
The new committee, called the Working Group on the Future of Quebec Television and Film Production, will have the mandate to analyze and revise the financing system and the functioning of the industry.
“The challenge is more structural” and the financing model “dates from a time when the internet did not exist,” indicated the Minister of Culture during a press conference Monday morning in Montreal.
The former president and CEO of SODEC, Monique Simard, and the founder and president of Urbania, Philippe Lamarre, will co-chair the committee.
“Imagine a system to support creators, producers and broadcasters so that the best stories from here reach their audiences, where they are, particularly those of tomorrow. This is the mission that we are giving ourselves with this working group,” explained Philippe Lamarre during the press conference.
The co-presidents will surround themselves with experts of their choice and Monday morning, Monique Simard indicated that the committee’s work “begins this afternoon”.
She explained that the committee “will obviously have to take into account the speed of changes in which our world is evolving” and “how generations appropriate these technologies, how it shapes their consumption habits”.
Define the structure of a new industry
The committee must “explicitly identify the procedures, programs, regulations and, where applicable, the laws to be modified or introduced.”
Minister Lacombe explained that the experts will look at “television, cinema, the financing structure, therefore tax credits, subsidy programs” and on copyright, in particular.
“If we started from a blank page today in the digital world, how would we write these programs? How would we define the structure of the audiovisual industry? », asked the minister at a press conference.
The committee will have to submit a report in May 2025.
Mathieu Lacombe recalled that the proliferation of digital distribution platforms, mainly American, the transformation of production methods and changes in consumption habits of cultural products have “had major consequences on our relationship to culture” and that it there is “urgency to act to mobilize the audiovisual industry”.
According to the Ministry of Culture, “audiences for national production are in decline and significant losses have been observed for several years, just like the number of hours of youth production, supported by the Canada Media Fund, which has fallen by 43% in 9 years, going from 712 hours in 2013-2014 to 404 hours in 2022-2023.”
Still according to the ministry, which cites the Economic Report on the Screen Content Production Industry in Canada 2023, “original French-language productions are two to four times less funded than English-language productions, depending on the genre. “.
