TOMAS BORSA
Arts Writer

As part of the Government of Saskatchewan’s newly unveiled 2010-11 budget, $2.4 million has been pulled from the television channel SCN, ending its 20 year reign as Saskatchewan’s home-grown source for local media.

According to Tourism, Parks, Culture and Sport Minister Dustin Duncan, “There is no longer a role for government in the broadcast business,” adding that the decision to cancel Saskatchewan’s only self-made television outlet was based on “efficiencies” outlined in the budget, which will reduce total spending by $121.3 million. SCN’s assets will be transferred to SaskTel this spring, with the signal being terminated sometime in early May.

The channel was created in 1989, and began broadcasting in 1990. During its tenure it served as the province’s primary platform for indie film producers to have their work broadcast. With the announcement comes speculation that most, if not all, of those producers will have their contracts terminated. Meanwhile, other arts and cultural organizations were equally hard hit by the budget, and were told to make do with a piddly $2.47 million, down roughly 40 per cent from a current total of $4.5 million.

In defence of the funding cuts, Duncan described SCN viewership as “very low” and pointed to a recent poll from the Bureau of Broadcast Measurement, which found that only four per cent of television viewers watched SCN for at least 15 minutes during any given week. In sharp contrast, a third-party poll found that between 2004 and 2008, viewership for SCN jumped from 25 to 50 per cent of the Saskatchewan population. Former SCN CEO Ken Alecxe highlights the fact that “losing SCN means (losing) our capability to portray ourselves as a province through television. It means we lose a lot of opportunities to trigger film production in Saskatchewan.”

The loss of SCN has also effectively eliminated Aboriginal and student-produced films and television series from Saskatchewan’s airwaves, something USSU vice-president external affairs Chris Stoicheff said he feels will greatly damage cultural exchange and contribute to a “significant impact” for the province of Saskatchewan.

The 2010-11 provincial budget contains the line, “Our government made a commitment to balanced budgets, and this promise is being kept.” I can only imagine the scale used in “balancing” this most recent budget was borrowed from the set of the Holy Grail.

Richard Gustin, another former executive at SCN, speculated that the loss of SCN means that many indie-film producers will now be forced to pitch their ideas to larger networks located in Vancouver or Toronto. The costs of travel, which to a budding film-maker might translate to several months of pay, could discourage local media production altogether.

Minister Duncan justified the cut by explaining that “Now, people, whether it’s through cable or satellite, can get up to three, four, 500 channels. There’s so many more specialty channels that are out there”¦ and many of our Saskatchewan producers have been very successful in getting on those specialty channels and major networks like CTV, CBC and Global.”

Now that SCN is gone, the loss of this important broadcast platform could also mean that many of these producers simply relocate to other provinces, where many major networks are headquartered and where tax credits for aspiring film makers are still competitive and encourage creativity.