Toronto shouldn’t bend over backwards for American movie shoots / TVO Today

It happened again. I walked into my lobby and saw a piece of paper posted by the elevator. It was an announcement indicating that a film crew had received an exemption from the law to film right outside my window. The third time so far this summer. My front yard is, for all intents and purposes, a makeshift film studio. I didn’t register for this.

Now, I think there are a number of ways I can deal with this. I can email my city councilman and city officials to ascertain why Toronto is willing to allow a film crew to work until two o’clock in the morning on a inside the House shooting the movie in a very residential area. Or why, if I dare to open the window of the living room, I must have the flowing smell of diesel generators. Or why movie crews should be allowed to block the sidewalk in front of a large elderly building for days. I did all of these last time.

With the risk of getting involved in motivated reasoning, I’ll take a different tactic here. Instead of appealing to your hearts, I will appeal to your wallets. Movie subsidies are a bad deal. While there may be a value in having clear Canadian stories filmed in Canadian settings, we don’t have to follow Hollywood studios looking for reduced-rate production costs. We are not so pathetic.

Toronto is not a small city trying to put itself on the map. We are a global city with more than $ 400 billion in annual economic output. We have the second largest financial sector in North America, third largest technology center, 700 head office, world-class higher education. In short, we have a large diversified economy that can play in the big leagues.

Let’s look at the film industry. The city claims that, in 2021, we expected $ 2.5 billion in spending on film, television and digital media. This may sound impressive if we were to talk about a mid-to-midseason city. But it’s less than 1 percent of Toronto’S GDP!

Of course, a few billion dollars is a few billion dollars. Who are we to say no to cold hard money? Here it gets dark. Companies aren’t coming here to film just because we’re willing to let them camp at the front entrances of nursing homes. They are also able to qualify for tax credits that the city estimates can add up to 35.2 percent to production costs. That $2.5 billion looks a lot less impressive when we’re footing a good portion of the bill.

But wait! It may be true that local taxpayers are on the hook for a piece of production, but there are economic spinoffs, right? Of course, but this is true for any public expenditure. The multiplier effect, as economists refer to it, is not some magical property associated with movie spending.

The problem is how much spending benefits the local economy. It is fairly standard practice for project promoters to raise extremely generous ratings. In fact, a 2019 study of the impact of U.S. movie subsidies sought to answer the question of how much the programs contributed to job creation. The answer was clear: “not much.”

Even if you assume that film tax credits languish the economy, there are many uses for public funds. A dollar spent on movie subsidies is a dollar not spent on public transportation, parks, and other services that make Toronto not only a more attractive place to visit or set up a business, but also a more attractive place to live. We can pay to upgrade the track, instead of film crews camping on it.

I’m not saying we shouldn’t support the film industry. I would argue that there is a compelling public policy rationale for supporting film and television productions by Canadians that tell stories about Canadian communities. That’s not what we’re doing here. We are a stand for other cities.

It’s not something we’re scared of. The city boasts on its website that “Toronto doubles for New York, Boston, Washington, Chicago and other U.S. locations, as well as international cities like Paris, London, Morocco, Saigon and Tehran.”We’re not showing Toronto here. We are the dirty little secret and not the star of the show.

If you want some proof, scroll down to slide five out of this handy Toronto Economic Development deck. Of the two dozen productions mentioned, by my count only a few small ones are actually Canadian shows. There are some high-quality products here: The Road Of The Nightmare it was a wonderful sight. But you’d never know it was partly filmed in Toronto. Honestly, I’m not sure we should admit we were a substitute for Buffalo in a grotesque carnival thriller.

I am open to the idea that we should tolerate a level of interruption to allow studios to showcase Toronto to the world. I’m willing to subsidize some of it. But it’s hard to see a rational convincing public policy of turning the streets of Toronto into ad hoc film studios so that people can fool people into thinking This is Chicago. We are a big global city. We don’t have to be so desperate!