A group of producers who make content for OMNI Television has launched a campaign urging the federal government to offer millions of dollars in funding to protect struggling multilingual and multicultural programming.
Programs on OMNI are ineligible to access the Canada Media Fund , which is the main source of funding for Canadian television production and is financed jointly by the federal government and private broadcasters. The association’s request for $6-million was calculated by combining yearly producer salaries across Canada’s ethnic media sector and other operating costs, said Igor Malakhov, an editorial director on OMNI1 who specializes in Russian and Ukrainian community programming.
The CMF is made up of funding from private Canadian broadcasters, the Department of Canadian Heritage and the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission. In 2023, its total funding budget was roughly $336-million, of which just more than $4-million went to multilingual programming, but not to independent producers such as OMNI’s.
Mr. Di Felice’s network does receive funding from the CMF, though he agrees that the allocation of funds to multicultural media is small. “But these producers have a bigger issue because some of their kind of content isn’t even eligible,” he said., a Hindi and Punjabi-language program on OMNI that is geared toward British Columbia’s South Asian community, said her work is now almost entirely volunteer-run. “The little funding we get goes to the camera person,” she said.
Sherry S. Yu, a professor at the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Information specializing in ethnic media, said the value of OMNI’s independent ethnic programming is often understated.
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