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 a tendency to self-consume it and perhaps feel good about ourselves on that front. But those works do not tend to migrate themselves into the repertoire in the classic sense of the La Bohèmes and the Swan Lakes and the Shakespeares and so on. That's the opportunity we have here: to create stories that won't be made possible once, through a wonderful feeling of joy and celebration around Canada 150, and then disappear. The new platform is that our work has to really leave a permanent legacy.
What are the pieces we could create, small, medium, or large, that are groundbreaking, reflective of our Canadian identity and our Canadian talent? Just as we engage work from other countries around the world that are showcasing the best of their artists and their stories, we should be able to do the same. A significant component of the planning, I think, has to be, first off, around how we create work that is going to have the ability to be performed every four or five years at the Canadian Opera Company, The National Ballet, or Stratford, or move on to other regional companies. We have not been as successful at that as we should.
The other part of it is where we go to build support, both the combined funding from private and public sector and others, and build audiences.
I don't want to eat up all your time, but what has happened is that you end up with artists who have the capacity to do that, such as Robert Lepage, or Michael Levine, the great set designer: they do the predominant amount of their work now outside of Canada. How do we recapture those talents and embed them in the creation of something that will be permanent Canadian work?