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 stayed stable at $13.4M and exceeded the mandated target of 10.0% of overall French funding by 4.5 percentage points. The Francophone Minority (FM) Program contributed $10.7M and $2.7M came from the Performance Envelope (PE) program. 16 out of 33 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 rebounded to a five-year high of $19.7M, or 10.9% of English-language funding for 2018-2019.  22.8% of this funding support came from the Anglophone Minority Incentive. 66.4% was committed from the PE program and the remainder of funding came from the English Point of View (POV) and Aboriginal programs.

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 $11.2M was committed from the FM program for production and development in 2018-2019.

The FM program for production supported 19 convergent projects. Total budgets rose to a five-year high. Television hours rose only slightly, pointing to larger production budgets. The average television budget per hour went to $235K per hour compared to last year’s $223K. Children’s & Youth received 41.4% of funding, Drama received 37.0% of funding, Documentaries received 15.1%, and Variety & Performing Arts 6.5%. A total of $487K was committed out of the FM program to support development of 13 projects.

The CMF, including the FM program, provided 33.6% of television project financing and 73.0% of digital media financing. Broadcasters matched (33.9%) the 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 2, and AMI-télé licensed one.

ANGLOPHONE MINORITY INCENTIVE

26 projects received Anglophone Minority Incentive (AMI) support totaling $4.5M. The 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 54.0% went to Documentary, 40.3% went to Drama, and 5.7% went to Children’s & Youth projects. Television budgets were at a five-year high. Big-budget dramas and documentary series drove budgets up in 2018-2019.

Broadcasters provided 5.7 percentage points less than the CMF share of financing in Anglophone Minority Incentive projects. Distributors provide significant contributions.

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