Good morning. Thank you for inviting us.
We have three tools that we use to evaluate the status of the music industry in the francophone and Acadian communities, that is to say the francophone minority communities. They are two studies that were conducted in 2001 and 2005 and our own knowledge of the field.
We conducted the 2001 study with funding from the Canada Music Fund. The Alliance nationale de l'industrie musicale, ANIM, had just been established. The study showed that music industry artists and artisans in the official language minority communities were getting very little federal government funding. That caused several problems with respect to the circulation and professionalization of artists and reduced our ability to promote them.
The 2005 study, which was commissioned by the Canada Music Fund, was conducted by Nordicity. That study, which was done five years later, was another attempt to establish an economic profile of the Canadian francophone music industry. According to this second study, there had been a distinct improvement in Canadian francophone artists' access to funding, particularly to Musicaction. That better access had obviously had a positive impact and other indicators had improved.
Natalie will round out the picture by outlining what has happened since 2005.