Thank you, Jean-Pierre.
First of all, I would like to say that our department is responsible for the grants and contributions. Canadian Heritage provides close to $1.1 billion a year in grants and contributions.
We have a total of 39 programs with 43 subcomponents to those programs to administer, programs that vary from the arts and culture programs to heritage to aboriginal youth through to sport. There were 7,800 grants and contributions that we approved in 2008-09, the last fiscal year, and over 4,000 of those were approved by either the minister or the minister of state responsible for the programs.
We also administer some programs, and one of them is the Celebrate Canada files. These are files that are less than $3,000. We processed 1,400. Those are for the Canada Day celebrations.
Then our director general of sport processes the athlete assistance program cheques, which are contributions to individual athletes, carded athletes, high-performance athletes. We processed about 2,300 of those.
Our approach to managing programs is to balance both delivering on program objectives of the government while ensuring proper accountability, due diligence, and managing our risk appropriately.
Turning to page 4, there's a very brief outline of the framework that we operate under. There are three elements to it. One is the legislative framework with a number of statutes for which we are responsible that dictate the accountability regime we've put in place.
There is a policy framework that is established by the Treasury Board Secretariat. The most important policy in this business is the Treasury Board policy on transfer payments. It dictates how we are to manage transfer payments for programs.
Finally, there is a risk management framework. This is how we organize ourselves to balance risks as we process individual applications.
Much of what we're changing in terms of grants and contributions follows from the recommendations of the blue ribbon panel on grant and contribution programs. This panel met in 2007 and delivered a report, which the government then implemented in 2008 in the form of an action plan. Canadian Heritage was one of six departments that were known as vanguard departments. The six departments were asked to lead in the development of action plans.
Fundamentally, the action plan—we have 21 initiatives that I could go through, if you wish—is about communicating better with our clients, managing the risk, and improving our processes in terms of moving files through the system.
In terms of communicating better, one of the issues on which a question has come up many times has to do with the service standards, the length of time it takes to put a file through the process from application to delivery of a first payment. On April 1, 2010, we expect to be posting on our website service standards for all our programs so that our performance can be measured against those standards.
I'm just going to turn to page 6 and go back to Jean-Pierre, who will speak to the arts and culture programming specifically.