Screens Stop Here!: Tax Credit Thinking and the Contemporary Meaning of "Local" Filmmaking

I live in Halifax, Nova Scotia, a place, like others, that cultural policy has built and reimagined many times over. Consider Halifax's central landmark, a harbour fortress called the Citadel. Initially conceived as an eighteenth-century British colonial strategy to ward off French, and later American, "intruders," its present day iteration is as a Canadian national historic site and tourist attraction. Now owned by Parks Canada, the site attempts to entice the same "visitors" that it once repelled. After paying an entrance fee, each visitor to the site receives a narrative that strategically situates colonial militarism in the nation's historic past, and that can be delivered in one of Canada's two official languages. Conceptualized as a living artefact of policy, the Citadel is not simply a historic site. Arguably, it remains an active fortress that strategically defends the nation-state's quasi-official discourse about Canada's prehistory. Each day, the explosive sound of the Citadel's noon gun resonates throughout the city and the surrounding municipality. In doing so, the site's policy reverberations continue to assert themselves, literally and figuratively marking the present time in place.¹

Often, however, policy reverberations produce inadvertent effects. In what follows, I explore the idea that provincial tax credit policies, which have incentivized the development of regional film industries, have also altered the landscape and discourse of regional filmmaking to such an extent that these policies are becoming difficult to defend. I offer this theory as a way of interpreting last year's abrupt and emotionally charged changes to Nova Scotia's film incentive programme as well as the dominant rhetorical position that industry advocates used to protest the changes. Both sides of the debate have employed a discourse to defend their positions that I am calling "tax credit thinking." This is to say that both sides have overwhelmingly aligned the purpose of regional filmmaking with industrial-economic over cultural-artistic goals. With mounting reports from across North America arguing that provincial, state and municipal tax credit programmes do not recuperate their investments, that they create volatile industries and tenuous employment conditions dependent on the continuation and competitiveness of their subsidies, "tax credit thinking" is becoming an increasingly risky line of defense for industry advocates and film workers. It might be the case, in fact, that this line of defense is putting regional film industries in jeopardy. Ironically, one of the most significant effects of regional film incentive policies might turn out to be that they have created the very conditions, discourses and measures of success that are beginning to dismantle them.

NOVA SCOTIA, FOR EXAMPLE

2015 may well be remembered as the year that the screen industries went dormant in Nova Scotia. While some policy decisions have gradual effects, the provincial Liberal government's 9 April announcement that it would be eliminating the Nova Scotia Film Tax Credit (NS FTC) on 1 July had immediate and seismic effects. Right away, the loss of the 20 year-old incentive programme that, at its height, subsidized up to 65% of a film's qualifying labour costs through a refundable tax credit, was held responsible for film projects pulling out of the province.² In August, citing a "sharp decline" in production, two of the three major equipment providers announced that they would be closing their Nova Scotia offices. John DeBoer, COO of SIM Group, justified the decision to Playback saying, "[t]here hasn't been a slowdown of work . . . there is absolutely no work in the film industry . . . and we see very little coming down the pipeline."³ In September, a Halifax editorial coinciding with the 40^th Atlantic Film Festival argued that the impact of the cancelled programme fundamentally "disrupted a production ecosystem that evolved over decades," a delicate and interrelated tripartite of production incentives, infrastructure, and skilled workers.⁴ Having observed an "accelerated" exodus of film labourers in the months following the government's announcement, the writer, himself a film worker and educator, argued that while much of the discourse had been focused on lost "dollars and lost infrastructure...