Official Languages committee  Very much so. Through the RAEV project, 25 videos have been created in which the artists discuss why they, as anglophones, are working in a francophone musical context. Often the francophone culture has a direct influence—especially in theatre—but it might be as simple as these p

Official Languages committee  Less and less. It depends on people's age.

Official Languages committee  When the Blue Metropolis Montreal International Literary Festival was launched. the UNEQ executive committee was deeply opposed to the idea. It didn't want a bilingual festival in Montreal, a festival founded by anglophones, etc. That opposition lasted for two or three years, but

Official Languages committee  The president of ELAN is from the Wakefield-Chelsea area, so I'll let him answer that question. He has a much more personal connection.

Official Languages committee  I'd like to respond to that. That is a very serious problem. We understand that we don't want to turn project funding into program funding, but there must be some way of evaluating projects that have greater community value, through letters of support from the community. Someti

Official Languages committee  Yes. Our experience in the community and many studies demonstrate that when you have core organizations like the Townshippers' or ELAN that are stable, the benefits for everybody, the individuals, are enormous. So yes, indeed; three-year funding that is stable and indexed would

Official Languages committee  I think that it needs to be targeted. I think there are parts of the arts that are very important for community vitality. There is already quite significant funding for art for arts sake through the Canada Council, through the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec. ELAN is de

Official Languages committee  Back in the eighties and nineties, there was a lot of money invested in infrastructure both from the federal government and from the provincial government. At that time the English language arts community was pretty embryonic. It wasn't present. There were organizations like Cent

Official Languages committee  To conclude, artists constitute one of the largest segments of the workforce. The Canadian arts and culture sector generates $85 billion per year in revenues. In 2008 the Conference Board of Canada calculated this at 7% of Canada's GDP. Statistics Canada reported in 2005—we don

Official Languages committee  Shortly after the 1995 referendum on Quebec independence, the tide began to turn. Almost imperceptibly at first, artists began to return to Quebec or to migrate to Montreal, and young people were more inclined to remain in their home province than to leave. This was partly for cu

Official Languages committee  Made au Québec is ELAN's most recent and most successful visibility project. It aggregates coverage about anglo artists from media all around the world and provides a summary of that information in French. I used to do interviews with the francophone media. I'd be describing art

Official Languages committee  Mr. Chair, I was concerned we might run slightly over seven minutes, so we might have a bit of extra time. Good morning. I'm Guy Rodgers, and I'm the executive director of ELAN. Peter MacGibbon is the president. We want to thank the committee for inviting us here today to provi

Official Languages committee  It's a hard question to answer very briefly, but to summarize it, there's a debate going on in Quebec and in Montreal about the survival of French on the island of Montreal. There are two ways of interpreting this situation. One is that the problem is there are too many people wh

Official Languages committee  I'm not sure why that happened. I noticed that we weren't invited, or we didn't know about it.

Official Languages committee  Within our own circles, there are a lot of people to be consulted who have ideas, and there are various mechanisms we've discussed. In terms of the linguistic duality aspect of collaborating within the majority communities, some of the best practices and success stories from th