Diana Whalen

Community Featured 

Blue Mountain / Birch Cove Lakes Supporters Fight Back

Ron Foley Macdonald 0 Comment , ,

Following a calamitous HRM presentation meeting concerning the proposed Blue Mountain/Birch Coves last week, the Ecology Action Centre organized a response gathering at Dalhousie University on Wednesday Night, June 29th.

Smoothly run with flashes of passion and humour, and bursting with precise information, the meeting was the antithesis of the previous disaster where no-one was allowed to ask questions and the 300-plus crowd tried to cram into the 85-seater hotel conference room.

The Dalhousie Lecture Hall, with a capacity of 700, was about half full, an astonishing number concerning it was a week full of graduations and looming vacations. EAC Wilderness coordinator Ray Plourde acted as master of ceremonies, blending a talent for disgorging facts and figures with some old-time revivalist oratory that had the audience delivering several standing ovations.

With a table full of allies including The Halifax Field Naturalists, The Halifax North West Trails Society, and Fusion Halifax, Plourde implored the crowd to become ‘Blue Mountain/Birch Cove Lake Park Rangers’ in order to save the imperiled Wilderness Zone from a private sector development that may be looming in the near future.

A July 4th deadline for comments to the City will be followed by a mid-month council meeting that could approve the dismemberment of the park. Time is still of the essence and yet opposition to development is still being rallied.

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Featured Film News Politics 

Marc Almon – The Happy Warrior of #NSFilmJobs

Paul Andrew Kimball 1 Comment , , , , , , , , , , ,

I first met Marc Almon back in 1998 when he was the proverbial bright-eyed and bushy-tailed president of the Kings College Independent Film Society and I was the Program Administrator for the Nova Scotia Film Development Corporation. Marc had applied for a small operating grant for the society, and while I was inclined to recommend it my boss was less enthusiastic. So I arranged a meeting in which I asked Marc to basically tell me how he wanted me to sell the proposal to my superiors. I left that meeting thinking this was a kid who was going to be a successful film producer someday if he pursued it as a career, because he was passionate and because he was a natural at making the best case for why he and his group deserved the money. Needless to say, they got their grant, and when I attended their annual screening of the short films they made with it some months later, I wasn’t surprised in the least that Marc and KIFS had managed to pack the Rebecca Cohn Auditorium.

As it turns out, Marc did indeed pursue a career in filmmaking, and by 2015 had emerged as one of the top up-and-coming young film producers in Canada. He produced the critically-acclaimed and award-winning feature film Blackbird by director Jason Buxton, and had a number of other projects in development.

And then all hell broke loose in April, 2015, when the Liberal government of Stephen McNeil released a budget that contained massive cuts to the Nova Scotia film industry, including the closing down of Film and Creative Industries Nova Scotia and the slashing of the film tax credit to levels that were simply unworkable for producers. As the chairperson of the fledgling industry association Screen Nova Scotia, Marc was thrust into the spotlight for all the wrong reasons, as he led the fight to save the film industry from complete disaster even as he tried to keep his business going and get his own productions financed in a world where the old financing model no longer existed.

It’s a testament to Marc’s ability as both a producer and a leader that he managed to succeed in both tasks. While the film industry in Nova Scotia isn’t what it was prior to the Liberal cuts, it also isn’t gone altogether, and that’s due to the efforts of Marc and his colleagues at Screen Nova Scotia. In terms of his own business, Marc managed to recover from the setback of last April and found a way to pull together the financing to get the feature film Nineteenseventysomething made, directed by Bruce McDonald and written by Daniel MacIvor (the film is currently in post-production, and Marc plans to debut it at this year’s Atlantic Film Festival).

Marc’s term as chairperson of Screen Nova Scotia came to an end last month, so I thought it would be a good time to sit down with him and reflect upon the hectic events of the past couple of years. Here is that conversation.

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Community Editorial Featured Film Politics 

How The Liberals Swiftboated the Nova Scotia Film Industry

Paul Andrew Kimball 3 Comments , , , , , , ,

The public relations campaign waged by the Liberal government of Stephen McNeil against the film and television industry in this province over the past year has been a textbook example of Swiftboating.

It began when then Finance Minister Diana Whalen made a pre-budget speech to the Halifax Chamber of Commerce on March 25, 2015. In her remarks, which warned of austerity measures to come, she singled out the film tax credit in particular as a program that was “under review” (usually a political euphemism for “on the chopping block”). According to Whalen, the program “costs taxpayers $24 million dollars a year. With it, Nova Scotia tax payers pay up to 65 percent of the eligible salaries for film and television projects. Now by contrast, our payroll rebate program for other industries are capped at 8 to 10 percent for eligible salaries. Surprisingly, within the rules, there is no requirement to film in Nova Scotia. It may be called a tax credit, but it isn’t used to offset taxes that are owed. 99 percent of the money is being paid directly to companies that don’t owe taxes in Nova Scotia.”

In one speech, Whalen had portrayed the film and television industry as a group of money-grubbing fat cats who cost the Province $24 million based on a super-rich subsidy and that had no obligation to even film or pay taxes here. She might as well have included a picture of Scrooge McDuck lounging in his money bin with “Nova Scotia Film Industry” plastered all over it.

The problem was that her statement was a gross distortion of the facts. Nova Scotians deserve better.

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Haven TV series starring Emily Rose, Lucas Bryant, Eric Balfour, Richard Donat, John Dunsworth, Adam Copeland, Glenn Lefchak, Nicholas Campbell, Kate Kelton, Emma Lahana, Bree Williamson, Christopher Shore and Colin Ferguson - dvdbash.com
Community Featured Film News Politics 

Liberal Government’s Film Industry Cuts Hit Rural Nova Scotia Hardest

Paul Andrew Kimball 1 Comment , , , ,

I posted my article “Why The Film Industry Controversy Matters To All Nova Scotians” in the Film Nova Scotia group on Facebook, and a reader posted the following comment, which I think is worth a response because it touches on a popular misconception about both the Nova Scotia film and television industry in general, and the areas in which it has the most impact.

“I applaud the effort here,” he wrote, “but I don’t think it’s the correct argument to make (although it is accurate) – at least not to the constituents that matter. After the decision on the tax credit cut, the government popularity *INCREASED* in most rural Liberal ridings. That’s because the government paints film makers as, more or less, ‘godless, scruffy city living hipsters that only work 11 weeks a year.’ That perception, widely held in rural ridings, is never going to change – at least not in a time frame that is useful to us… Add to that the perception that people in the industry make too much money (based on zero data, but still a belief that is widely held among rural Nova Scotians) and you get no sympathy. Combined with the anti-Halifax sentiment, rural Liberal voters are always going to side with the government. The only way to move the government is to change the perception in the ridings where they are most vulnerable. TO do this, we can’t argue trust, or government failure etc. The only thing that may work is to argue directly at the self-interest of the people who vote Liberal in Liberal held ridings.”

In broad strokes, this perception seems accurate. Almost all of the Nova Scotia film and television production companies that form the core of the industry, for example, are based in Halifax, or nearby. The equipment rental companies, such as William F. White, are based here as well. The unions all have their headquarters in Halifax. Film and Creative Industries was located in downtown Halifax before the Liberals closed it down last April, as is the head regional office for Telefilm Canada, the National Film Board, the CBC, and so on.

But dig deeper and you see that this perception is fundamentally flawed, because it overlooks the key factor in determining the overall benefits of the film industry to the Nova Scotia economy – where productions are filmed, and the effects that they have in that area.

Indeed, the negative effects of the Liberal government’s actions in dismantling the 20-year old film funding structure and government film agency last April will be most strongly felt not in Halifax, but in the rest of the Province, and work directly against the goal of revitalizing and diversifying the economy of rural Nova Scotia.

In other words, we are all in this together.

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