The Canadian union representing more than 21,000 English-language actors will stand behind the U.S. Screen Actors Guild in the event it goes on strike, according to Stephen Waddell, national executive director of ACTRA.
That includes directing members not to work for any struck U.S. production that attempts to come north of the border, said Waddell.
“ACTRA will support the Screen Actors Guild to the greatest extent that we can,” Waddell said. “There is no other alternative for us. We are a trade union and we support our brothers and sisters.”
But he said there are limits to what ACTRA (the Alliance of Canadian Cinema, Television and Radio Artists) can do to discourage or prevent its members from taking work shipped to Canada, not that there has been much to take recently.
ACTRA has agreements with hundreds of Canadian production companies, almost all of them doing Canadian film and TV work.
While U.S. producers who are not signatories to the ACTRA agreement would be frozen out, it would be difficult to prevent ACTRA members from working for Canadian companies that land contracts for U.S. productions, Waddell said.
SAG’s contract with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers ended June 30. Talks broke off last week, despite the intervention of a federal mediator.
U.S. producers have criticized SAG for planning to hold a strike vote among its 120,000 members “at a time of historic economic crisis.”
Waddell said the dispute is bad news on both sides of the border.
“The whole situation is unfortunate. The fact that this has been going on for so long means… there’s virtually no U.S. production shooting in Canada, which is a significant problem for our members.”
