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.