Official Minority Language Support

A key mandate for the Canada Media Fund (CMF) is to support official languages in minority settings. The CMF achieves this objective through a number of programs.

The Francophone Minority Program (FM) is designed to encourage the creation of projects that reflect the realities experienced by French-language communities living outside the province of Quebec. 

*All programs included

Funding to Francophone production outside of Quebec has risen to a five-year high at $13.4M and exceeded the mandated target of 10.0% of overall French funding by almost 5 percentage points. The Francophone Minority (FM) Program contributed $10.7M and $2.7M came from the Performance Envelope (PE) program, Convergent Digital Media Incentive (CDMI), and Northern Incentive. 10 out of 30 francophone minority language projects did not have FM program support. 

The Anglophone Minority Incentive (AMI) was established in 2013-2014 to create a predictable source of official minority language support for the English market in Quebec. 

*All programs included

Funding to English-language production in Quebec has fallen to $13.6M, or 7.4% of English-language funding for 2017-2018, after two years in the $18M range.  31.0% of this funding support came from the Anglophone Minority Incentive. 63.1% was committed from the PE program and the remainder of funding came from the English Point of View (POV) program.

FRANCOPHONE MINORITY PROGRAM

This program is part of the CMF’s Convergent Stream; thus, projects funded through this program must include content to be produced for distribution on at least two platforms, one of which must be television and the other, digital media. Funding from this program is allocated according to a selective process, using an evaluation grid. A total of $11.3M was committed from the FM program for 2017-2018.

The FM program for production supported 20 convergent projects with 20 Rich and Substantial digital media components in 2017-2018. Television hours funded fell to 149 from last year’s high of 229. Total budgets also fell from last year by $3.0M to $35.9M in 2017-2018. The average television budget per hour was stable at $223K compared to last year. Drama received 37.8% of funding, Children’s & Youth received 36.5%, Documentaries received 21.1%, and Variety & Performing Arts 4.6%. A total of $500K was earmarked out of the FM program to support development of 14 projects.

The CMF, including the FM program, provided 32.8% of television project financing and 67.5% of digital media financing. Broadcasters provided a larger share of financing (36.6%) than CMF for television projects. Broadcasters, CMF, government sources, and producers provided all of the financing for digital media projects. Radio-Canada licensed 9 projects and TV5 and UNIS licensed 6 projects, while TFO licensed two and produced one in-house, Bell Média licensed 3, and APTN licensed one.

ANGLOPHONE MINORITY INCENTIVE

21 projects received AMI support totaling $4.2M. AMI was formulated to supplement PE funding for television projects at a maximum of 15% of the budget or $0.9M, whichever is less. A total of 50.9% went to Documentary, 43.8% went to Drama, and 5.3% went to Children’s & Youth projects. Television budgets fell by 33.1% from last year’s high to $42.1M. There was only one drama series funded in 2017-2018, which had a negative effect on the production budgets for 2017-2018.

Broadcasters and CMF provide similar levels of financing in Anglophone Minority Incentive projects. Distributors provide significant contributions.

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