By Kelly Townsend

Kidscreen‘s sister publication Playback concludes its two-part feature on the state of the Canadian kids TV industry. Check out part one, which examined the fallout from several recent kids channel closures in Canada.

The reduction in kids & family commissions from Canadian private broadcasters has presented a challenge for funding bodies like the Canada Media Fund (CMF) and the Shaw Rocket Fund (SRF) that are seeking to keep this focused production community afloat.

Trent Locke, the CMF’s COO and EVP of finance, strategy and analytics, says the US$91-million three-year commitment the CMF received in the latest federal budget will help it keep supporting production at a stable level across all genres for the next few years, including kids content.

Unfortunately, stable funding doesn’t solve the commissioning problem. Locke says the CMF set a target of 22% of its broadcaster envelope funds to be put toward children’s and youth content for 2024/2025. But the CMF only covers a portion of project budgets, and for many broadcasters, that isn’t enough of a financial incentive to commission kids content. So in reality, the share ended up being 8.5% (English-language) and 11% (French-language) for children’s programming. 

“That’s a big miss: 22% of our envelope is around $47 million, and [only] $20 million got spent,” Locke says. “The broadcasters just aren’t accessing [the envelope system].”

One of the ways the CMF is attempting to solve this problem is through its Distributor Program, which launched in 2024 and allows a distributor to trigger funds without a broadcaster. For the 2025/2026 fiscal year, the CMF reserved 40% of the program budget for children and youth programming, and Locke says all of it was used. Out of 63 productions selected to receive funding in the program’s second year, 25 were children’s and youth programs.

The CMF also made significant changes to the broadcaster envelope system to incentivize commissioning children’s and youth programming, including increasing the maximum contributions in the English and French development envelopes, and reducing commitment thresholds for linear programming.

“We’re trying to let the market and demand [have a voice],” says Locke, as audiences shift from linear to digital. “We’ve lowered a bunch of the thresholds to make it more affordable for broadcasters, or for a combination of broadcaster, distributor, foreign trigger and streamer.”

Rocket Fund runs aground
One of the hardest-hit components of the kids TV sector in Canada is the Shaw Rocket Fund. This organization was founded by Shaw Communications in 1998, and has been one of the country’s largest private funders of kids programming since. All told, it has provided roughly US$207 million to more than 1,150 children’s programs. However, the fund’s programs stalled in September after Shaw’s successor, Rogers Communications, pulled its funding support, citing a decision from the CRTC (Canada’s broadcasting regulatory body) that its contributions could expire at the end of the current license term.

And while SRF has been approved to receive contributions from foreign-owned streamers after it was ruled that those platforms will have to contribute a portion of their Canadian revenue to Canadian content, those payments are in limbo while the decision is being appealed by the streamers in court—meaning there’s little to no money flowing into SRF at the moment.

SRF president and CEO Agnes Augstin says the fund is “looking for solutions” and ways to support the kids sector. The remaining funds are being directed to a discoverability support program operating on a case-by-case basis, which is open to productions already funded by SRF.

Before losing its funding, SRF was already struggling to keep up with all the projects that needed help, as reduced commitments from broadcasters required funds to fill the financing gap. In fiscal year 2024, SRF was only able to support 34% of applicant projects, a sharp decline from 56% in 2023. By comparison, 77% of applicant projects were supported in 2018, and 72% in 2017.

Augustin says “this has been the hardest time that we’ve ever seen” since the fund has been operating, but that the kids content industry has rallied its support around the fund as it seeks relief from the CRTC.

Shaw Rocket Fund issued an appeal (called a Part 1 application) to the CRTC before the Rogers contributions expired on August 31, asking for the commission to uphold a previous order that said Rogers had to keep contributing. A response from the CRTC had not been issued at press time, though a previous staff letter issued by the regulator in May stated that Rogers’ interpretation that it could halt its contributions was correct.

After opening the Part 1 application for comments, the CRTC received dozens of submissions in support of SRF from Canadian industry stakeholders, including the Youth Media Alliance (YMA), Boat Rocker Studios, Eagle Vision, the Writers Guild of Canada, Knowledge Network and the Canadian Media Producers Association (CMPA).

“The loss of almost all of the funding for the Shaw Rocket Fund at this critical juncture would inflict potentially fatal damage on Canadian children’s and youth producers,” wrote the CMPA in its submission, citing a 35.7% decrease in kids content production volume between 2015/2016 and 2023/2024, and a 58.3% decrease in investment from private broadcasters between 2018/2019 and 2023/2024. “This is not merely a funding issue—it is a cultural emergency.”

Going global
As Shaw Rocket Fund continues petitioning the CRTC to maintain domestic funding support for children’s programming, Locke says that many Canadian production companies are looking to bypass the system through a model of co-productions and co-financing with international partners. 

For example, 9 Story Media Group and Sinking Ship Entertainment have secured commissions from outside of Canada with both public broadcasters such as PBS (Xavier Riddle and The Secret Museum) and the BBC (Odd Squad UK, pictured) and foreign-owned streamers like Apple TV (Sinking Ship’s Jane). And 9 Story has also secured critical investment through Scholastic‘s acquisition of the company for US$182 million.

Youth Media Alliance co-president Maria Kennedy, who also owns and serves as an executive producer at Little Engine Moving Pictures, says that Canadian producers have no choice but to look beyond their borders as the commissioning climate at home gets drier by the day.

“[Little Engine’s TVOKids series] Hare of High Park is all Canadian financing, but we’re doing it by the skin of our teeth,” she says. “[International co-productions are where] Little Engine will be going next, because you simply can’t produce a series or a feature film on a solely Canadian budget, certainly not an animated one.”

Adapting to the times
Despite these strategic realignments and the ongoing domestic regulatory situation, there are some in the sector who suspect that this all may simply be a case of rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.

Nelvana co-founder and former WildBrain executive chairman Michael Hirsch says the domestic industry has been in an irreversible slide for over a decade, and that looking for salvation on other shores is a short-term solution at best. 

“If you’re relying on the international marketplace, you’re eventually going to be disappointed, because that’s going the same way our industry is going,” he argues.

Hirsch believes the only way forward for the sector is to adapt to the industry’s ongoing digital transformation, even if the creative economy that has flourished in this space can be a profoundly alien one to businesses that have traditionally focused on broadcast.

“It’s a total change in the marketplace [and] the economics of the business,” Hirsch says of the online creator sphere. “It favors the people who have no overhead, or almost no overhead, who can work for nothing for a year or two building up a property.

“[But producers have] got to be nimble, and they’ve got to embrace these changes,” he says. “If you focus totally on the legacy business, you’re not going to be around for any long period of time.” 

Lopii Productions’ Rennata López (The Fabulous Show with Fay and Fluffy) says the Toronto-based studio she co-founded with her sister Georgina is sticking to its motto of “creating television where every kid can see themselves” as inspiration to keep producing quality series.

“I think [it’s about] going to where the children are currently,” she says. “It doesn’t have to be traditional cable; we can still find the children and make good content for them.”

With reporting from Jamie Casemore and Andrew Tracy.

Image courtesy of Sinking Ship Entertainment