• by Gord Hotchkiss , Featured Contributor, March 5, 2024

If you happen to be Canadian, you know that one of our favorite pastimes is watching Hollywood movies and TV shows and picking out the Canadian locations standing in for American ones.

For example, that one shot from the otherwise amazing episode 3 in “The Last of Us”, establishing a location supposedly “10 miles west of Boston”? It was actually in Kananaskis, Alberta. Waltham, Massachusetts is 10 miles west of Boston. I’ve been there and I know, there is nary a mountain on the horizon in any direction.

“Loudermilk,” which is now streaming on Netflix, was a little more subtle with its geographic sleight of hand. There, Vancouver stands in for Seattle. The two cities are quite similar and most people would never notice the substitution, especially when the series uses stock footage of the Seattle skyline for its establishing shots. But if you’re Canadian, you couldn’t miss the Canada Post truck driving through the background of one shot.

Toronto is another popular “generic” Canadian city. It stood in for New York in “Suits” and the fictional Gilead in “The Handmaid’s Tale.” Ironically, this brings us full circle, because the location where the handmaid Offred lives is supposedly a post-revolution Boston. And, as we now know, if you go 10 “miles” west, you end up in Kananaskis, Alberta. Don’t wreck the Hollywood magic by reminding us that Toronto and Kananaskis are separated by 1,725 actual miles.

The ability of Canadian locations to stand in for American ones is a critical element in our own movie and TV industry. It brings billions of production dollars north of the 49^th parallel.

But it’s not just locations, it’s also people. Canadians have long flown “under the radar” as substitutes for Americans. I, and many Canadians, can reel them off from memory over a beer and a Hawaiian pizza (yep, that culinary cockup is Canadian, too -- sorry about that). The original Captain Kirk? Canadian. Bonanza patriarch Ben Cartwright? Canadian. Perry Mason? Canadian. Hell, even Barbie’s Ken is Canadian -- eh?

But AI could be threatening this quintessentially Canadian activity. And that’s just the tip of the proverbial iceberg (another thing often found in Canada).

If you happened to watch the recent Screen Actors Guild awards, you probably saw President Fran Drescher refer to the threat AI poised to their industry. She warned us that, “AI will entrap us in a matrix where none of us know what’s real. If an inventor lacks empathy and spirituality, perhaps that’s not the invention we need.”

If you’ve looked at OpenAI’s release of Sora, you can understand Drescher’s worry. Type a text prompt in and you instantly get a photorealistic HD video: a nighttime walk through Tokyo, mastodons in the mountains, pirate ships battling in a cup of coffee. And this is just the beginning.

But like many existential threats, it’s hard to wrap your mind around the scope of this one. So, in an attempt to practice what I preach and reduce the psychological distance, I’m going try to bring it home for Canada -- while understanding that the threat of AI to our particular neck of the woods is a small fraction of the potential damage it might do to the industry as a whole.

First of all, let’s understand the basis of the Canadian film and television industry. It’s almost entirely a matter of dollars and cents. We have lots of talent up here, we have sound stages; but most importantly, we have a beneficial exchange rate and tax incentives. A production dollar goes a lot further here. That, and the ability of Canada to easily stand in for the U.S. are really the reason why Hollywood moved north.

But if it suddenly becomes cheaper to stay in L.A. and use AI to create your location, rather than physically move to a “stand-in” location, our film and TV industry will dry up almost instantly. Other than Quebec, where homegrown productions have a loyal francophone audience, there are relatively few films or TV shows that acknowledge they are set in Canada. It’s the curse of living next to a potential audience that outnumbers ours 10 to 1, not to mention the ravenous worldwide appetite for entertainment that looks like it’s made in the U.S.

Even the most successful Canadian sitcom in history, “Schitt’s Creek,” had a location that was vaguely non-specific. The Roses never said their Rosebud motel wasn’t in Canada, but they also never said it was.  (Here’s a tidbit for TV trivia fans:  the motel used for the exterior shots is in Mono, Ontario, about 50 miles northwest of Toronto.)

So, if AI makes it easier and cheaper to CGI a location rather than move your production to Canada, what might that mean for our industry? Let’s put some scope to this. Just before COVID put the brakes on production, film and TV added $12.2 billion to Canada’s GDP and provided work for 244,500 people. I don’t want to minimize the creative efforts of our homegrown producers and directors, but if Hollywood stops coming north, we’ll be lucky to hold on to one-tenth of that economic spin off.

As I said, the Canadian perspective of the impact AI might have on film and TV is a drop in the bucket. There are so many potential tentacles to this monster that it’s difficult to keep count. But even in the limited scope of this one example, the impact is devastating: over $12 billion and a quarter million jobs. If we zoom out, it becomes enough to boggle the mind.