Canadian Heritage Committee on Oct. 20th, 2009

[The Chair, Conservative, Gary Schellenberger]

Good morning, everyone. I'd like to call this meeting to order.

This is meeting number 30 of the Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage. Pursuant to Standing Order 108(2), we are studying cuts to the Canadian musical diversity program.

This morning, for the first hour, we have the three witnesses as individuals: Gary Cristall, musician; Jesse Zubot, musician; and Nilan Perera, musician. Welcome, gentlemen.

We'll start with Mr. Cristall, if he'd like to make a short presentation. Then we'll go to Mr. Zubot and then to Mr. Perera. Thank you.

[Gary Cristall, Gary Cristall Artist Management, As an Individual]

I will try to keep this short. Frankly, I could have sent what I had to say, but flying from Vancouver here and back in a day gives you an opportunity to maybe ask some questions that I can answer.

First, I'm not a musician. I live off the work of musicians. I'm an artist manager. I used to run a festival. I ran a record company, etc. I also worked for the Canada Council for six years, where I administered the sound recording program, which was the old name of the music diversity program that was cut. I know that program from having worked running a record company and a record distribution company before I came to Ottawa and making records with support from that, administering the program while I was here, and then working as an artist manager for the last ten years, since I left the employ of the Canada Council.

To be honest, I'm quite shocked that they managed to get away with it. I regarded it as a mugging, and it happened on a hot, late-summer Friday afternoon. You can tell that they were embarrassed, because they didn't announce it at the press conference in Montreal. It went out over the Internet at 4:30 on the Friday afternoon of a long weekend, which is not usually when good news comes out. What essentially the cutting of this program has done is to rob Canadians of their heritage, of the most interesting music that is being made by Canadians today. I don't want to get into—although I'm sure my associates will—the impact it has on working musicians today. It will rob them of the ability to produce good CDs. It will deny them the ability to inspire other people to hire them, touring, and one thing or the other.

My concern is a little bit different. I think this is an appropriate place to talk about it, because for me there is a wonderful phrase I have heard: that aboriginal elders think of seven generations. What impact is what you do today going to have seven generations down the line? I can tell you that in seven generations, some of the most interesting and creative work made by Canadian artists today will not be accessible to the public.

Paintings last hundreds and sometimes thousands of years. A whole variety of art is made and preserved for future generations. In terms of music, it is something that is ephemeral unless it is recorded. We listen today to recordings that were made a hundred years ago, and the format obviously has changed from cylinders to 78s, etc., but we have access to that. Because of the cut of this program, the musical creation of some of the most talented artists in this country will not exist in a hundred years. It will not exist next year. It will not exist in fifty years. In that sense, the cutting of this program has an impact that will be felt forever.

You may have access to things recorded on cell phones and people's home studios, but the kinds of good recordings that are passed on from generation to generation and form part of the cultural heritage, the artistic heritage of this country, will not exist because of what this program has done. Commercial recordings will exist, but those artists who found a different way, who've taken a different route—to use that old cliché, marched to a different drummer—are not going to be able to preserve their work. That is fundamentally going to be the impact of this program.

Regionally, I come from British Columbia, where some of you know that the arts is kind of right up there with the spotted owl these days in terms of an endangered species, with a 90% cut by the provincial government to arts funding. That aside—and it's bad enough—there was never a provincial program in British Columbia to fund sound recording. Some cities have programs: Edmonton, Toronto, Montreal, etc. Those programs do not exist in Vancouver or in any other municipality. The only way the British Columbia artists were able to acquire any kind of public funding for their recording projects was through the Canada Council or FACTOR. The commercial artists will still have access through FACTOR and MusicAction. In fact, that will be somewhat richer because of money taken away from this program. But artists who were creating interesting, dynamic, visionary work are simply not going to have any access to public support for their work. This hurts Canadian culture.

I think that in this town there's a building named after Marius Barbeau, the great folklorist who was responsible for preserving a great deal of Canadian culture, from aboriginal music that he recorded in the 1920s to thousands of traditional Québécois folksongs. The only album of the recordings of Marius Barbeau I'm aware of was funded by the Canada Council sound recording program. It is a double recording of religious songs and traditional songs from Quebec. I think that speaks for itself. Without that program, Marius Barbeau's work would only be accessible by people who go to the museum and listen to it on bad headphones.

There's just an enormous amount of good stuff that isn't going to be recorded. When I was at the Canada Council, for the 50th anniversary of the United Nations we put out a four-CD set of great Canadian music, funded by the Canada Council, that was distributed all over the world. Almost all of that music came from recordings that had been made through the support of the sound recording program. For the 60th anniversary of the United Nations, that is not going to be possible. There will be a cut date of 2009. Anything after that is simply going to be funded by the artists themselves, or by the bank of mom and dad, and will be done at inferior studios or whatever. Frankly, I think this is a crime against art and culture.

It not only hurts artists directly in terms of their ability to get their work out there, but I think it robs future generations of Canadians of the ability to listen to some of the most creative and visionary artists of our times recorded in decent circumstances. That is its fundamental impact. That's why you should do something about it, because I believe that this committee, to some degree, is the guardian of the national interest when it comes to culture and heritage.

We're here, I'm certainly here, to ring an alarm bill and say that for a few dollars—and $1.4 million is not a lot of money in the context of the kind of money spent by this government--the folks at Canadian Heritage made a bad decision. They made a decision to rob the individual, independent, visionary artist and give the money to the music industry. It's not that the music industry doesn't need or deserve funding, but this is the wrong place to get it. I think that's the real core of this. It is the wrong decision. It should be corrected.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Gary Schellenberger]

We'll have Mr. Zubot, please.

[Jesse Zubot, Musician, Owner of Drip Audio, As an Individual]

I've worked a great deal within the contemporary commercial music industry, and I now spend most of my time composing, performing, and promoting creative forms of music. I'm a two-time Juno Award-winning musician, multi Western Canadian Music Award-winning musician, and three-time recipient for violinist of the year at Canada's National Jazz Awards.

I've always been a musician interested in progression and in developing new forms within the musical spectrum. I do not sit back and work within a specific musical genre, as many contemporary commercial artists do. I do not rely on a proven product to support my living. I'm constantly searching for more, and I believe there are many musical forms that have not yet been heard. I first directly benefited from the specialized music sound recording grant in the year 2000 as a young developing musician with a release of a recording named Zubot & Dawson: Tractor Parts. It was funded by the specialized music grant, and it ended up being nominated for a Juno Award. This opened up opportunities for us in many ways. At the end of the year after the release of this recording, we ended up performing at every folk and jazz festival in the country.

The album garnered international press by publications such as Acoustic Guitar Magazine, which said that it was the best thing to happen to acoustic music since David Grisman and Tony Rice put together their groundbreaking quintet 20 years ago. That Canada Council-funded recording was brought to the attention of a renowned U.S. producer, Lee Townsend, known for his work with jazz recording legends. Lee Townsend produced our third recording, and it ended up winning a Juno Award. Without the funding from the specialized music sound recording grant, there's a very good chance that none of this would have happened for us.

When it comes to FACTOR, FACTOR helps out artists who sell a certain amount of recordings. Unfortunately, in order to get funding from FACTOR, you have to sell a lot of recordings. Creative musicians do not sell that many recordings at the beginning of their careers. In recent years, the specialized music sound recording grant has become essential to me in a different way. I have become a record producer, and I run a record label named Drip Audio. I've released 23 recordings of underground musicians stemming from the Vancouver creative music scene that are geared toward improvisational music. These recordings have garnered international press from publications such as the The New York Times and the jazz bible, DownBeat.

Drip Audio artists have performed at some of the most prestigious creative music festivals in the world, including the Moers Festival in Germany; Mulhouse Festival, in Mulhouse, France; festivals in Portugal, and all over. The music from Drip Audio receives extensive radio airplay from BBC 6 Music, CBC Radio 2 The Signal and Espace Musique, and countless radio stations. CBC Arts Online has called Drip Audio one of the most original musical operations in the country. Without the support of the Canada Council, none of these would have happened.

Another avenue for musicians like me that I can grab onto is being a session musician. The Canada Council recording grant enables me to rely on a certain income every year, which would not exist without this grant.

One of the recent recordings I worked on was for an Inuit throat singer named Tanya Tagaq. She has become somewhat of an international sensation, working with iconic Icelandic singer Björk. The Kronos Quartet's David Harrington has called her the Jimmy Hendrix of Inuit throat singers. This past summer I performed music from the Canada-Council-supported recording Auk/Blood, by Tanya Tagaq. We performed this music at grand performances and concert series in downtown Los Angeles, and at the Lincoln Centre and the Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian in New York. Next month we will present this music at the London International Festival of Exploratory Music. Her album received mention in such important publications as The Village Voice, The Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Weekly, Time Out New York, and many others. Without the support from the Canada Council specialized music recording grant, none of this would have happened.

I'll try to wrap this up.

The specialized music grant makes it feasible for musicians such as me to make recordings without feeling confined to sell, sell, sell. This grant enables you to concentrate on the creation of music rather than having the pressure of constantly controlling and guiding your vision into something that will be accepted commercially. It enables musicians to keep searching for new sounds and ultimately to create new genres. It makes being an artistic musician a reality.

Music is like medicine; it needs to exist on this planet. It is everywhere and all around us. Music needs to continue to grow and develop, much like science. We need to let it be free from control of the corporate world for it to stay alive. This recording grant enabled that to be a reality.

Thanks.

[The Chair, Conservative, Gary Schellenberger]

Thank you.

Mr. Perera, please.

[Nilan Perera, Musician, As an Individual]

First of all, I would like to thank the committee for asking me to be a witness at these hearings.

My presentation will be in two parts. One is my own and the other is a letter that was penned by Nick Fraser, who's probably one of the finest musicians this country has produced. He was asked to be a witness, but he couldn't be, as he was at a recording session. The points he made are extremely good.

Again, my name is Nilan Perera. I've been a musician and composer in new creative music and for modern dance for the past 25 years. I've been involved in many projects and ensembles and have toured nationally and internationally. I'm also currently on the board of directors of the Association of Improvising Musicians Toronto. It's an organization that's been running for about four years.

The cuts to the Canada Council for the Arts grants for specialized music recording and specialized music distribution puzzled me greatly when I first heard of them. After I found out more, I became upset and decided to start an online petition. I've since gathered over 5,800 signatures on that petition, which I will submit to the committee at a later date. I don't have it with me right now.

I've applied to this program a few times over the years and for the most part have been unsuccessful. I have been involved in other projects that have gotten support from this program, but the possibility of getting a CD made has given me and my colleagues across the country a significant incentive to continue to create focused work and consider the possibilities of a viable career in music.

I've also sat on a few Canada Council and Ontario Arts Council juries and have been impressed by the fairness and rigour of the process. I have walked away feeling very good about how things were conducted and the work that had been approved.

These programs are the primary tools for the production and distribution of original Canadian art music in Canada. There is simply no other program that addresses the basic function of supporting the creation of a hard copy of work that can then be launched by distributors into the world. This is the basic cutting edge of marketing the Canadian art music brand, as well as the means to access work for our creative composers and musicians. It is also the primary production exponent in Canada of the current living research and development of sound as music that the mainstream and not-so-mainstream pop artists mine for new forms and sounds.

These cuts are the same as cutting research and development at the university and research institutional levels and giving the money to the producers of the goods that had their basis and inception in research and development by those same institutions. What I don't understand is the rationale of cutting off a very small, very efficient, and highly successful program of approximately $2 million that gives out a few grants, generally in the $6,000 to $10,000 range, but giving money to a massively funded program whose worth is over than $13 million. It's kind of like cutting the food fund for the orphans to pay for the toothpicks of the millionaires.

I wondered why and how this happened and I wondered why the recipient of these funds, which is FACTOR, I believe, could not have accessed the money from other sources. After all, the recording industry is profit driven and I'm sure they would have considered it a good investment to provide such a comparatively small amount of cash to do the work that FACTOR wants to do.

Support for these programs is vitally important to the creation of the Canadian music culture in Canada. This culture is being created on a daily basis by artists across Canada who need all the support they can get to create work that has originality and purity, something that can be created and nurtured by not being subjected to the whims of the commercial market.

That's my rant.

This is Nick's letter, which was addressed to Mr. Moore:

I am an artist and (as such) a small business that is affected by the current cuts to the Canada Council Specialized Music Recording program. I have been a professional musician for twenty years. I am a Juno Award winner (and two-time nominee), teach at the Faculty of Music at the University of Toronto, and have received multiple Canada Council grants for study, composition, recording and career development. All this to say that I can speak personally to the positive effects these grants can have on an artist’s career. By cutting this program, you are denying small businesses their initial, base-level product that makes all of their other income possible. This action removes a key part of the infrastructure of arts dissemination in this country. In your statement to the media, you said that the council program “was basically to fund artists who have no interest in developing any kind of commercial opportunities for their music.” I can assure you that this is not the case. The artists are in fact best positioned to find commercial opportunities for their music as that is how they survive. They are the only ones with any real incentive to promote their work. I personally don’t know any artists that are not interested in “commercial opportunities”, because these opportunities represent our careers.

The businesses (artists) that this program funds are small but viable businesses that contribute greatly to the financial and cultural life of this country. For example, let's say that a group receives a $10,000 grant to make a recording. If 1,000 copies of a CD are made and 600 of them are sold, the group ends up with a $2,000 profit. The initial $10,000 represents only a portion of their total budget (as laid out by Canada Council criteria) and is spent on the following....

It's spent on recording costs and paying recording studios and engineers and musicians, who are small businesses in their own right; on graphic design of the disc and paying the graphic designers and visual artists, who are small businesses in their own right; on manufacturing costs and paying the CD duplication firms, which are small businesses in their own right; and on marketing costs, such as paying publicists, buying advertising from publications, etc., etc.

Nick continues:

So the money is funnelled back into the economy (and back to the government—we all pay taxes!) by employing other small businesses, something I was under the impression this government would support in the “current economic climate,” as people seem to call it. The $2,000 profit may not seem like a lot (and it isn't--trust me), but I assure you that it is not a simple “a/b” equation (i.e. the profit from recording sales is not the only benefit of having the recording). The product allows all of the other income for that given project to take place in the form of concert tours and performances here and abroad.

Essentially, the CDs that are made are our business cards, if you will, and quite effective ones.

Nick continues: That income can be significant. One Canada Council funded project that I was a part of has sold upwards of 5,000 copies and has allowed me to make over $10,000 in touring income. Not only that, but the artists are what make festivals and concert series possible and these organizations employ a countless number of not only artists, but caterers, security staff, ticketing staff...etc.

It seems that these funds are being moved to support more “commercial” music ventures. What data does the government have to prove that more “commercial” ventures are in fact more successful? Having served on the jury for the Specialized Music Recordings Program, I can attest to the fact that due to the high level of competition, the grant recipients represent the “cream of the crop” of Canadian musicianship. I can't say the same for the projects that I have participated in that were of a more commercial nature (many of which were funded by FACTOR). The key here is that recordings of a more commercial nature are not guaranteed success. The recordings that are funded by FACTOR may represent activity with a higher financial ceiling, but it is no more guaranteed than the success of specialized recordings. I would bet that due to the rigorous, transparent jury system of the Canada Council (which FACTOR does not share), a higher percentage of Canada Council funded projects achieve a modest level of success than projects funded by FACTOR.

The press release states that there will be “$900,000 for digital market development, in a fund aimed at music entrepreneurs and businesses”. Let me make something clear: artists ARE music entrepreneurs, they ARE businesses, and an extremely high percentage of them are doing a damn good job of it. We work on “digital market development” because we need to in order to survive. We need more support, not more bureaucracy.

Again, that is from Nick Fraser, and that ends my presentation.

Thanks very much.

[The Chair, Conservative, Gary Schellenberger]

Thank you.

We have about half an hour left for questions and answers, so I ask everyone to try to stay within the five minutes for each person for questions and answers.

We'll start off with Mr. Rodriguez, please.

[Pablo Rodriguez, Liberal, Honoré-Mercier, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Welcome to all of you.

Thank you for being here today.

Listening you talk about your experiences, your journey and your successes, we realize that you are well grounded in the community and established members of the industry. Consequently, you should normally have been consulted on the future of these programs.

Has anyone of you been consulted on these cuts?

[Jesse Zubot]

No, I don't know anyone who was consulted, nobody. I don't know one person in the music industry who was consulted.

[Gary Cristall]

My understanding is that the decision was made by three people from the commercial music industry, which was a little bit like consulting a group of foxes on whether the chicken coop needed a fence, and the answer was predictable.

[Pablo Rodriguez, Liberal, Honoré-Mercier, QC]

All right. Thank you.

You have not been consulted.

During the evaluations, recipients of the various programs of the Canadian Music Fund generally expressed extreme satisfaction. The recipients are happy and the government decided nevertheless to go ahead with the cuts. Why did they do it, in your opinion?

[Jesse Zubot]

I think the three people who were consulted are obviously far away from anything to do with creative music or real music at all, and they were--

[Pablo Rodriguez, Liberal, Honoré-Mercier, QC]

But don't you have the impression that the government wants to get involved in the content? They want to have a say in what Canadians are going to listen to by doing this, by cutting this specific program?

[Jesse Zubot]

I don't really understand that.

[Gary Cristall]

No, I don't think so. I think basically they were lobbied by the industry because of the cuts last year in DFAIT to the Trade Routes program, etc. They said, “Why don't you take some money from the weak and the poor and give it to us, because we're successful and we'll do good things with it.” I don't think it's about content; I think it's about market.

[Pablo Rodriguez, Liberal, Honoré-Mercier, QC]

I don't think that any of that money is going to the Trade Routes program.

[Gary Cristall]

No, but it's going to an international promotions fund at FACTOR. That's where the new money is.

[Jesse Zubot]

It's going to the same people who last year received $8.5 million for their record companies. I have a list here of them all, and they are all commercial record companies. A few of them venture into artistic areas within musical creation, but from what I can see, the sole purpose of what they do is to create a product that creates income. I don't understand why they would need $8.5 million when they're--

[Pablo Rodriguez, Liberal, Honoré-Mercier, QC]

But by doing that they're picking winners and losers.

[Jesse Zubot]

Well, their recordings already make money, and they don't need that money.

[Pablo Rodriguez, Liberal, Honoré-Mercier, QC]

Yes. So what's left for you? What other program can you...?

[Jesse Zubot]

Nothing. There's FACTOR, and basically you have to streamline your musical creation in order to fulfill their guidelines. FACTOR likes to say they don't discriminate against musical genre or creation, but as far as I'm concerned, they do drastically.

[Gary Cristall]

There are some provincial programs in some provinces.

[Pablo Rodriguez, Liberal, Honoré-Mercier, QC]

In Quebec there are some, yes.

[Gary Cristall]

Yes, in Quebec, in Manitoba, in Alberta, in Ontario, but certainly from British Columbia, no, and some other provinces also no, and those are not necessarily always specifically for sound recording. In Ontario, for instance, they have a popular music program at the Ontario Arts Council, but it's for everything.