Program Administration

In 2017-2018, marked the 12th year the Canada Media Fund (CMF) and Telefilm Canada worked together on program administration. The Services Agreement with Telefilm for the administration of CMF Program was first established in 2005-2006.

The CMF Program Administrator | Telefilm Canada (CMFPA) received 2,010 applications in 2017-2018, 2% more than the previous year (1976). Of the total number of applications received, 1,310 were funded, down 5.4% from 2016-2017. The CMFPA also reviewed final costs of more than 800 files, processed about 2,400 disbursements and validated that more than 900 conditions not attached to a disbursement were respected.

There were 73 value-added digital media components for production submitted as part of the television component and not as a separate project in 2017-2018.

Number of applications approved in 2017-2018

In the Convergent and Experimental streams combined, the CMFPA team provided pre-application consulting services for more than 270 projects so that producers could verify the eligibility of their projects prior to submitting an application. 

In 2017-2018, CMFPA continued to implement a number of process improvements to efficiently manage the CMF’s funding programs, including the deployment of Dialogue for the vast majority of Convergent programs (was deployed for Experimental in 2016-2017). 

In 2017-2018, the Administrative Service Levels targets were largely not met, essentially due to the change of system from eTelefilm to Dialogue and to administrating oversubscribed first come first serve programs. Both the CMFPA staff and the applicants needed to adapt to a new way to proceed with applications throughout the lifecycle of the projects. Also, the files evaluation process is quite different in the two systems, and the turnaround times cannot be measured as they were in the past. The table below provides turnaround times that don’t take into account the new processes, and thus, may be not as accurate as in the past. CMF and CMFPA will work to review the turnaround times approach in 2018-2019 and to provide a more accurate portrait going forward. 

Turnaround time (days) - 2017-2018