Canadian Heritage committee  I think the regionalism and the distinctiveness of the provinces and the regions will just intrinsically reflect itself in the work and the participation that ends up growing out of a national call to celebrate Canada at 150. In my remarks I talked about forward looking and the f

Canadian Heritage committee  I'm going to take advantage of this opportunity to bundle with this a further answer to Mr. Young's question about that unique Canadian identity and what I thought the opportunity was. It's partly that when we have created repertoire, and Mr. Benskin referred to this, we've had

Canadian Heritage committee  We're a bit of an inverse: our festival is for two weeks and Anita's is for eight months. We have 20 employees and 600 volunteers. As a younger festival, we had the opportunity—particularly because we partnered with the private sector, with Manulife, which has made volunteerism t

Canadian Heritage committee  Thank you. I was also really taken by the fact that we had such a focus, which was probably part of our natural life cycle as a country. I think of the 50 years since the centennial celebrations as being a time of incredible maturing for our country in terms of its own sense of

Canadian Heritage committee  I would add that we need the song, you know.... There are a lot of us here who are old enough that we could probably do the whole Bobby Gimby Canada song--I can. I'll leave it to Member Cash to come up with some ideas on that front.

Canadian Heritage committee  But that's not an entirely facetious comment. It's those things that layer together to create that sense of a unified celebration that everyone can come to--and who can't fall in love with a great theme song? I think it is a layer of things. For festivals like Luminato, for exam

Canadian Heritage committee  I would just like to add to that, because it's a very important question, the membership question. We're about a year and a half old as a formal organization. As I said, we're member supported through a dues system, and we have as a very top priority acquiring new members. You'

Canadian Heritage committee  Another place where festivals can play a role is that we will indirectly, obviously, have a trickle effect through other festivals' arts organizations, up to and including individual artists, because we, at our core, work within a much larger ecosystem. Where we are located acros

Canadian Heritage committee  I would expand on Anita's point and say that certainly the marquee tourism program was instrumental in also allowing us, from a marketing perspective, to attract.... There's no question: it's measured. We shared a lot of that data recently when a group of us from FAME came here a

Canadian Heritage committee  Thank you. Thank you for the invitation to appear. I am the CEO of the Luminato Festival, which is Toronto's festival of arts, culture, and creativity. I'd also like to thank you right off the top because for the past four years Luminato has been supported by the Canadian arts p