Film Tax Shelters are for Wusses "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. 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. The article pines for a particular loophole in income tax laws that is being eliminated this January 1, a loophole which could "cost" millions of dollars for film producers and thus edge Vancouver out of the running for foreign service productions. The article eventually admits this loophole was accidental, but never takes the logical step of criticizing the government for leaving it open so long. Instead, the Sun "insiders" (losing the "s" would have been more accurate) warn of impending doom for the Vanvouver film scene. A more thorough critique of the economy would seem more useful. First of all, foreign service production is big business and big employment, but has always been fickle for BC'ers. The entire service industry is predicated on our submission to lower pay, lower standards, and lower creative control than American production - by definition. Like Guatemalan shoemakers, we are threatened with a pullout if we get too uppity. We bring in raw materials - Yankee actors, scripts, Kodak film stock, chemicals, Panavision cameras, etc - and ship out a value-added product: the finished film (if we're lucky, post-production is handled here on Sony and Mac editing equipment with Fuji tape). By contrast, in the forestry industry, we are forced to sell off raw materials, only to buy the finished products back with value added (Switzerland has a sustainable forestry policy and creates many times more jobs per tree than Canada). The point is, eternal-growth, competitive economics is based on a race to the bottom. Our unions are forced to negotiate with a huge handicap - the unknown quantity of foreign unions' counter-offers. ACTRA recently gave up the fight to be paid the same as their US counterparts. Also, the very existence of our service production undermines American unions, much like every industry. When SAG went on commercial strike last year, we were only too happy to snap up those jobs - cheaper than SAG. Offering tax breaks to corporations to set up shop in our territory is a stopgap measure with no sure payoff - they can move on a moment's notice when better offers come up. Moreover, various regions of Canada compete with one another to offer the lowest tax rates for production. What if the various production centers - American, Canadian, New Zealand, Australian - got a coalition together to *raise* taxes evenly? Then the citizens of the affected regions could share the benefit of big-bucks production, without tipping the scales one way or the other, instead of all the profits zooming off to Hollywood (or Bay Street). Crazy talk, I know. What if SAG and ACTRA struck together for equal pay - indexed to the exchange rate? Is it good for our economy to let Canadian actors fake US accents, earn a plane ticket to LA, get cast as "Canadians" for tax purposes and shipped back to Vancouver a couple of days a year? Why don't we manufacture cameras, lenses, film, videotape, monitors, lights, and so on in Canada? Why don't we write the scripts and have homegrown and still-resident Canadian star actors? A smooth transition to a national economy - rather than flailing for scraps - could more than make up for film jobs lost by progressive policies. Such a transition seems a distant and faint hope, given the choices our parties offer. A minor tax change, in the midst of a tense war of words between Ottawa and Washington, the impending erasure of our border, and a global war of terrorism against fascism, seems hardly worth calling out the jesus-fonts.