Yahoo News Writers Guild of Canada Claims Members Pay Tumbled Amid Hollywood Production Boom
The Writers Guild of Canada claims its members have seen their average pay slide by 22 percent over the last five years, when adjusted for inflation, in a submission to Canada’s broadcast and telecom regulator.
“These numbers demonstrate the dire straits that Canadian screenwriters find themselves in. The 22 percent drop in Canadian screenwriter earnings has been devastating to our members. Out of work writers are switching careers. Others are leaving the country. Our domestic industry is dying,” WGC president Alex Levine told the CRTC as the media regulator looks to bring Hollywood online players for the first time into its regulatory framework.
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The WGC did not quantify the fall in writer earnings over five years in dollar terms, but did tell The Hollywood Reporter the median earnings for unionized screenwriters was $28,284 in 2019, before the impact of the pandemic. The guild also stated that rising inflation has pushed up foreign and local production budgets in Canada, and living expenses, forcing local writer earnings down as a consequence.
More recently, the Writers Guild of America strike and a potential SAG-AFTRA labor action has had a ripple effect in Canada where Hollywood’s production shutdown has left many of the country’s soundstages dark or filled with homegrown film and TV shoots dependent on scripts by WGC members.
Even so, WGC president Levine, in his CRTC submission, appealed to the federal government to invest in more homegrown film and TV production as domestic broadcasters look to scale back on their own obligations to subsidize Canadian content development and production.
He said the guild’s own data suggests the current boom in Hollywood TV production in Canada creatively driven from Los Angeles benefits local crews and acting talent hired for production shoots, but not WGC screenwriters. “These series aren’t Canadian, they aren’t written by Canadians, and they don’t have an authorial Canadian voice. We need to make sure Canadian shows get produced too. We can’t just be a branch production plant for Hollywood,” Levine said.
His intervention to the CRTC came as the media regulator holds a series of hearings, including ones to establish a new framework to ensure foreign streaming giants subsidize local film and TV production in the wake of Bill C-11, or the Online Streaming Act, becoming law.
The CRTC is also weighing requests by domestic broadcasters to reduce their own spending obligations for local content in the wake of reduced overall revenues due to the pandemic, continued cord cutting and an ad industry slowdown. In the run-up to passing Bill C-11, American video and audio streamers convinced Ottawa to create a two-tier Canadian industry where foreign players will be allowed to use fewer local creators, like directors and screenwriters, than traditional broadcasters already have to as part of their regulatory obligations.
The CRTC during upcoming hearings will also have to decide how regulated U.S. digital giants will define what does and doesn’t count as “Canadian” for local content they invest in, especially as it applies to user-generated content on YouTube, TikTok and Facebook or as part of a streamer’s local spending obligations.
That has raised a red flag for the WGC president as he looks to ensure U.S.-backed local content offers work to guild screenwriters.
“We can’t have foreign service production count as ‘Canadian content’ through window dressing. Canadian content must be Canadian-written. And the status quoisn’t enough. The government and the CRTC need to actually grow this industry, and make sure that Canadian screenwriters have pride of place within it. Otherwise, screenwriting is finished as a profession in this country,” Levine argued in his submission to the CRTC.
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