Statement by Telefilm Canada regarding the Federal Budget 2012 

Montreal, April 4, 2012 – Telefilm Canada is currently finalizing its cost savings plans following the official budget announcement made by the Government on March 29, and in light of changes that have taken place at Telefilm in the last few months.

In its budget, the Government announced that Telefilm would be required to achieve cost savings of $10.6 million, which represents a 10% reduction in both its administrative and program budgets, over a three-year period.

For year 1, this entails cost savings of $2.7 million – savings that apply to both our program and administrative expenses.

At the request of the Government, our initial 5% and 10% cost savings scenarios were prepared last summer. Since then, we have made significant headway in our Program Redesign project: we completed the redesign of our Development and Promotion-related programs, and started the work on our Production and Distribution programs.

We also launched a private donation fund and a micro-budget production pilot program.

And we held multiple stakeholder consultations from which we collected valuable feedback to help us build a new Telefilm.

While all this doesn’t change the fact that we need to work with a reduced budget, it’s important to update our plans to implement the best scenario possible. Two important criteria will guide our final decisions: the need to focus on our core services and the necessity to decrease administrative expenses wherever possible.

Needless to say, the overall objective is to mitigate impacts on Telefilm, its clients and its employees. We want to use a balanced approach in terms of where reductions will be made so that we can maintain our capacity to deliver on our corporate plan.

Any changes will be implemented taking into account clients’ production cycles, as well as we will propose other funding sources whenever possible and develop transition plans in collaboration with our clients.

As soon as we have more concrete details, we will let our clients know as soon as possible.

For further information

Click here for an FAQ pertaining to Telefilm’s new budget.