EXCLUSIVE: After nearly three months, the Writers Guild of Canada has returned to the negotiating table with Canadian producers this week — this time with an unprecedented bit of power in their hands.
Last week, Canadian scribes approved the first strike-authorization vote in the union’s history after nearly six months of talks aimed at renewing the existing Independent Production Agreement with the Canadian Media Producers Association.
“We’ve never been in a situation where we’ve even had to call for a strike,” a Canadian writer told Deadline. “That’s an American phenomenon. We’re used to adversity, but the idea we had to do this is pretty troubling for most of the membership.”
While their U.S. counterparts are still recovering from last year’s work stoppages, Canadian writers and producers are now faced with a difficult turning point in their own contract negotiations.
Fears of a potential strike have been growing since talks broke down at the end of last year when producers and writers struggled to reach compromise on major financial and work-related issues. The hope on both sides is that there is still a path toward a deal, but neither party is quite sure how to handle the threat of looming picket lines.
“Given the lack of progress at the table, we do feel frustrated,” one Canadian writer and showrunner said, adding that they hope the 96.5% approval for the strike authorization “shows a determination to stand firm in our commitment to achieving a fair deal for screenwriters.”
Should the WGC call a strike, those picket lines won’t pop up immediately. Instead, the union would need to inform the Canadian federal government, and the labor action would begin 15 days later.
The strike authorization, approved by the highest turnout in WGC history with 70.2% of eligible voters involved, has certainly rocked an already uncertain Canadian production industry. The solution still seems relatively unclear, but both writers and producers are still crossing their fingers that there is a deal to be made.
“I do think that CMPA must have looked at the results and realized the writers are serious and acted in unison,” the writer said. “I’m not sure they realized that before. This shows them we are willing to take action if they won’t come back to the table and negotiate in good faith.”
The previous IPA ended on December 31, 2023, but was extended in the interim in hope of a new deal being struck. In December, the parties agreed to a conciliator and have been negotiating through mediation since in an attempt to “bring down emotional temperature,” another source tells Deadline.
Deadline understands that, prior to this week, the WGC and CMPA had not returned to the table since the writers presented their most recent counterproposal in February.
“People are hoping there isn’t a strike. They understand that strikes are very dramatic and people can get adversely affected, [including] crafts services and related industries who have tremendous hardship imposed on them. Writers in particular are very sensitive to that and won’t have approved the strike lightly,” a U.S.-based producer who works on Canadian co-productions told Deadline.
Some of the issues Canadian writers are facing are similar to those that their U.S. counterparts faced last year, including minimum staffing requirements for writers rooms and increases in compensation to adjust for shorter contracts.
Others are completely different. For example, residuals are not a factor in these talks, because unlike the AMPTP, the CMPA does not represent Canada’s networks and streamers. Instead, the CMPA negotiates on behalf of indie producers, which drive much of the local content creation in the country.
Writers in Canada believe animation is particularly vulnerable at this time, as it is considered “easy to target” with changing technologies, including AI. In addition to AI protections aimed at preserving the medium, the WGC is also demanding animation writers achieve script-fee parity with live-action writers.
While they haven’t endured a strike of their own just yet, Canadian production workers did experience some “chilling effects” from last year’s Hollywood labor action, one source explained.
As Canada has become a hot spot for U.S. productions from Vancouver to Toronto, Montreal and more, the so-called Hot Labor Summer that saw almost 175,000 WGA and SAG-AFTRA members take to the streets across the country forced runaway productions north of the border to shut down, too.
Last year, the WGC — which represents 2,500 professional English-language Canadian screenwriters — threw its support behind U.S. writers during the Writers Guild of America’s historic 148-day strike, asking its own members not to accept any work that fell under WGA jurisdiction.
In an effort to distinguish its specific concerns, the Canadian union had also called attention to the struggles of its own screenwriters, particularly regarding compensation. In a July report, the guild revealed that during the past five years, the aggregate earnings of its Canadian citizen members have declined by nearly 22% when adjusted for inflation.
Artificial intelligence, on the other hand, is a bit of newer territory for Canadian writers and producers. Deadline hears that neither party entered negotiations in October particularly worried about the technology, but concerns have grown on both sides over the past few months as the tech has rapidly proliferated across all aspects of the global media industry.
“Everyone is afraid of AI on a certain level,” the U.S.-based producer told Deadline. “Everyone wants to preserve their way of making a living in the face of extreme change. All of those things are happening at once, which means people get afraid of how they are making their living going forward. Fear is a very human emotion.”
Hollywood has been ablaze with discussions of AI after it became the hot topic during the WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes. It was a key sticking point in both unions’ negotiations with the U.S.-based studios, and it continues to rear its head in ongoing talks between those studios and the below-the-line workers who began bargaining in March.
However, while U.S. labor unions zeroed in on AI, one writer source tells Deadline that those discussions “didn’t register for Canadian writers” at the time.
“We don’t want our work product to be used by producers to train AI, and we want rules and regulations in place to limit AI use and keep writers working in the early development stage,” another source with knowledge of negotiations tells Deadline, explaining that, so far, both parties are unable to find “common ground” on that demand.
In that context, the offer on the table from the CMPA is “substantively in line with the WGA deal,” we hear. However, that U.S. deal does not include an outright prohibition on using writers’ materials to train AI systems.
Since last week’s strike-authorization vote, Deadline hears that negotiations have restarted but are “going slow.” It is unclear what progress, if any, has been made on the remaining issues.
Added the U.S.-based producer: “A shutdown of producing is good for no one. You have fears for production that you’ve worked on for years. If it blows up because of a strike, you maybe not be able to put it back together. Producers are equally nervous about their livelihoods being endangered.”
Since the WGC’s current contract has already expired, there is no deadline for negotiations to wrap before a strike would occur. Instead, it will be up to the writers to decide when and whether to walk away from the table.
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