The Beats

by Pete White, President, Writers Guild of Canada

Last Post

There were a lot of changes over those years. The president's part was to keep the initiatives on the agenda while the work of actually realizing them was left to many, many others. Together, council and staff forged a new identity for the guild, restructured the administration, expanded council to include Quebec, revised and enforced the collective agreements, covered story editors and animation writers, and started collecting IPA royalties.

We launched communications initiatives like the directory of members, Canadian Screenwriter magazine, and the WGC Top Ten awards, and created a program of workshops, advertising, and festival sponsorships. With our policy and lobbying initiatives, we became stakeholders in the industry and got the Screenwriting Assistance Program in the process. After years of false starts, we founded the Canadian Screenwriters Collection Society. And we still managed to put a million dollars aside for a rainy day.

With the fun stuff over, there are no lack of challenges ahead and my heart goes out to those who will have to rise to them. In addition to the crisis in drama, the issues include:

• The continuing frustration of trying to achieve a positive relationship not marred by politics with the ACTRA Fraternal Benefit Society.

• The CFTPA and APFTQ rift which has destroyed the reality of one national and equal agreement for all writers in the country.

• The attitude of the CBC industrial relations department, which continues to attempt to downgrade the status of some writers by seeking to have them covered by another union with an inferior collective agreement.

• The growing number of policies emerging from Telefilm Canada that are detrimental to Canadian screenwriters.

• The recognition of screenwriters as authors of the audiovisual work.

• And the continuing struggle of screenwriters to gain the recognition and respect they deserve in the minds of the media and public at large. They still do not understand what we do.

To Fred Yackman for all his hard work; to Tannis Stewart for organizing the details flawlessly; to Bill Williams for being a brother in arms through the difficult years; to David Barlow for being vice-chair of IPA negotiations and shouldering the burden that entailed; to Jim McKee for assuming the policy and lobbying portfolio and becoming almost indispensable in the process; to Maureen Parker for being my ally in virtually every endeavour, and without whose loyalty and energy nothing could have been acomplished; and finally to my wife, Suzanne, who kept the home fires burning when I should have been there.

Regrets? We didn't get around to changing the name of the guild to reflect that we're screenwriters, and we discontinued the print version of the directory of members. However, there's still the next 10 years to rectify that.

As for the last 10, the privilege was all mine.