I don't personally receive these grants, but I provide management services to many artists who do. I didn't make a list, but I did look for an article I wrote for a B.C. publication that asked me about this, and in 2006-07 there were 16 recordings funded in British Columbia, for a total of $164,000. The following year, 2007-08, there were 26 grants awarded to B.C. artists, with a total value of $253,900. So we're talking about grants in the range of $10,000 to $15,000.
What I think is interesting is the diversity, just from British Columbia, in some of these projects. Traditional songs of Haida Gwaii, the Haida people, are not going to get funded by FACTOR, and they're not going to become what we call “chart chompers” on any commercial play. There's the world music of the Orchid Ensemble, an Asian group; very far-out contemporary classical compositions by the New Orchestra Workshop; jazz by a woman named Jodi Proznick, who's very, very good; and music by Alex Cuba, who is becoming a commercial success and is now working with Nelly Furtado.
So the range of this is enormous, from people who are recording their traditions, in the case of the Haida Gwaii singers, to people who have commercial aspirations. It's wrong to say this is for non-commercial artists. It is right to say—and we defined this when I wrote some of the guidelines for the program while I was at the Canada Council—it is music that is driven by creativity, not by commercial intent.
Now, against all odds, somehow, music driven by creativity and not by commercial intent sometimes becomes commercially viable. That's neither here nor there. The question is the intent of the artist, and that's why it deserves public funding, and those are some of the numbers in terms of grants that have been given to artists in B.C.