It’s no secret within the Canadian television industry that the Canadian Television Fund has violent mood swings. The fund (which is essentially a $285,000,000.00 subsidy for Canadian TV, regulated by the CRTC, and administered by Telefilm) provides grants to “quality” Canadian programming, helping complete the budget of pretty much every Canadian TV show worth watching. And it’s known for having two very different and contradictory aims: firstly, to promote programming that speaks to the Canadian experience, that exhibits our Canadian heritage, and that portrays the diverse histories that compose Canadian culture — and secondly, to promote shows that will make money, especially internationally. The pendulum of the CTF’s priority swings from one to the other from year to year, and it’s a bit of a crap shoot when pitching to the CTF whether you should come in with a show about rich sexy teens or tenacious fin-de-siècle sodbusters.

All of that will probably change with the new system proposed yesterday by the CTF: splitting the fund into two streams, which will have two different stated mandates, as opposed to a single paradoxical one. As Rita Trichur of the Toronto Star reports:

“The CRTC’s main recommendation … is to split the television fund’s support into private- and public-sector streams, each with its own board of directors. The private-sector stream would be directed at private broadcasters like CTV and Global. It would be funded by the contributions of cable and satellite companies, which amounted to about $165 million for the 2007-2008 financial year. Funding would hinge on ‘audience success.’

“The public-sector stream, funded by the $120 million provided by the Department of Canadian Heritage, would be reserved for the Canadian Broadcasting Corp., educational broadcasters and other not-for-profit players.”

As Ms. Trichur writes, the response from many in the industry has not been warm. Critics of the proposal say that there’s really no reason to do this, and it undermines a system that was working perfectly.

But if the system was working so perfectly, why did large corporations like Shaw — all of which are forced to contribute 5% of their gross broadcasting revenue towards the fund (a cost passed on to you and me) — want out? Could it be that they are forced to surrender their revenue to fund projects that nobody watches? Lots of the projects which the CTF funds are targeted towards niche markets, and while every niche market deserves its own programming — and in a long tail model they will have it — funding should be proportional to the size of the audience. It makes sense (from a Heritage Ministry point of view) to create programming for every demographic imaginable, if possible, but it doesn’t make sense to spend the same amount of money on a show that reaches 4 million viewers as on a show that reaches 40 viewers. The CTF warps the relationship between audience and budget by overemphasising things like Canadianness at the expense of things like watchability.

The CTF has to pick and choose which projects it funds, and quite often this means a “one or the other, but not both” mentality prevails — and which priority should win out? Supporting culture and ensuring that niche market needs are met, or producing programming Canadians will actually enjoy — programming that can compete with American TV? The answer is impossible to declare; both deserve to be supported. To fund only programming that speaks to niche markets is a waste of money, and misses the fact that the majority of Canadians don’t relate to stories about Mounties in the nineteenth century or life on the reserve in the 1930s. Are young, modern, urban dwellers less Canadian? Conversely, programming only to the tyrannical majority would mean that the young, modern, urban dwellers would be the focus of every show and niche markets would be ignored, which defeats the purpose of subsidising Canadian content in the first place. And the whole point of the CTF is to give a fighting chance to shows which enrich our unique culture, but which are not otherwise financially viable; shows that are commercially successful arguably have no real need of subsidy in the first place, whereas shows that play against the homogeneity of the lowest common denominator need all the help they can get.

The two cannot be reconciled, and to try to accomplish two goals with a single fund is an exercise of paradox. Canadian television has earned its reputation for being too rooted in the past, too fixated on heritage and too irrelevant and unrelatable to the majority of viewers who have FOX and ABC on the adjacent channels. It’s with good reason that the top-rated shows in Canada are consistently American. The balancing act is so delicate as to be impossible; far better to have both, without promoting one at the expense of the other.  The middle ground has not, thus far, been terribly successful.