By rights, every Torontonian should be sporting a T-shirt emblazoned with the slogan: 'I survived SARS, West Nile, George W. and the blackout!'

Between fatal diseases, the war on Iraq and a power outage that hit 50 million people and left each country blaming the other, relations are once again strained between the Great White North and its all-powerful neighbor.

The divide is further reflected in the fact that commercial production business has been creeping south since April, when SARS surged into public consciousness via CNN.

"In the minds of a lot of people, Toronto had body bags stacked up like so much cordwood," is how Madelaine Atkins, president of Toronto's Produce Film Company, describes the media hype. As Canada's film production industry regroups, some US producers admit to feeling a twinge of schadenfreude.

In other words, it's payback time.

"It was hard for me during the SAG strike [of 2001, in which most work went north of the border]," says one source, who feels that Canada's woes this year gave the LA film economy a boost.

It's a theory substantiated by Geoff Cornish, exec producer of NewNew Films and co-chair of the Commercial Production Association of Toronto. Productions didn't just shift to the US - some moved to Vancouver, Montreal and Winnipeg - but the fact remains that a good 80% of Toronto's foreign work in commercials "went away for three months" as a result of SARS hysteria.

"The silver lining," Cornish says, "is that the [domestic] market was reasonably busy" - except that, even under normal circumstances, 70% of Toronto's production work is Canadian-driven.

Not so at Toronto-based Partners' Film Company, where board flow is usually split 50/50 between domestic and foreign business. By mid-July, Gigi Realini, exec producer, said his company was still getting mostly domestic work.

And while Vancouver has profited to some extent, a few production service companies felt they suffered by extension. Global Mechanic's executive director, Bruce Alcock, notes that of 14 spots produced by his company in 2003, 10 originated in Canada. "Normally," he says, "95% of our work is from the States."

On the bright side, Toronto's Treehouse North Productions, which is completely reliant on roadhousing foreign productions, fared the crisis pretty well by accommodating those leery of flying to Toronto.

"On one job, the director and producer had no problem shooting in Toronto, but the agency people were reluctant," says EP Karen Silver. Fancy footwork saved the day. "We arranged a satellite link to New York so they could watch." In the end the suits braved Toronto anyway - a change of heart that Silver suspects was dictated by the agency's bottom line.

Treehouse also has a small satellite office in Vancouver, which helped convey a less Toronto-centric image. "During the crisis," Silver recalls, "about 75% of the calls were for the Vancouver office, which is not the normal state of affairs."