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 identity on many fronts, as a member of the world community and of course culturally. Part of it has to do with having a sense of pride and being able to compete, as it were, on the world stage. I guess we need an “own the stage” program, or something like that, to have the arts equivalent of the sports initiative.
I do think there will be some natural tendency, desire, and necessity to celebrate--Sarah referred to this very well, and Banff is uniquely positioned to do this--and to make sure we take this as an opportunity to look back at the entire history of the growth of our nation as an identity.
I can say for Luminato that diversity is one of our three programming pillars. The others are collaboration and accessibility. That's where you get our blends of disciplines, over 70% of our free programming, and the incredible ethnic diversity that is reflected in our content. We think about it a lot. We think the new Canadian identity is that incredible mashup that happens between art forms and between cultures, which uniquely creates a new piece of work.
We have seen a moving away from--and I don't mean to be pejorative at all--that kind of caravan mentality of “I'll come and watch your folk dancing and then you'll come and watch mine, and then we'll be mutually respectful”, to instead figuring out how, when those things come together, there is actually a unique new piece of art created from cultures collaborating together, which can actually be described only as Canadian, because it couldn't happen anywhere else in the world.
There's going to have to be a balance between expanding upon those opportunities--and in particular, obviously, I'm speaking from the perspective of Toronto, where very close now to 50% of our residents were not born in Canada--and acknowledging and representing culturally all the parts of Canada and our Canadian history. We'll have to do that as well.