Evidence of meeting #11 for Canadian Heritage in the 41st Parliament, 1st Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was artists.

A recording is available from Parliament.

On the agenda

MPs speaking

Also speaking

Anita Gaffney  Administrative Director, Stratford Shakespeare Festival
Janice Price  Chief Executive Officer, Luminato, Toronto Festival of Arts and Creativity
Sarah Iley  Vice-President, Programming, Banff Centre
Fatima Amarshi  Executive Director, Coastal Jazz and Blues Society

10:05 a.m.

NDP

Tyrone Benskin NDP Jeanne-Le Ber, QC

Ms. Amarshi.

10:05 a.m.

Executive Director, Coastal Jazz and Blues Society

Fatima Amarshi

I think Anita has pretty much laid it all out. The key here is that community engagement piece—whether it's the kind of contest Anita's talking about, or the educational pieces like residencies, or the opportunities to invite young people and students into our programs. There needs to be more than just the presentation of the arts going on. There needs to be a component that is asking them to interact with you. That's really key in order to make sure that information gets passed down to a larger public consciousness.

I would just again echo the value of technology. The possibilities of what you can do online and the level of access you can provide through technology is tremendous. You certainly can't get that level at all with any kind of public presentation. Going forward and doing it through technology is vital.

Keep in mind as well that much of what all of us do is free programming. That is one of the key ways in which we help the public interact with our art, and learn about it and the histories of all of this. A significant portion of any kind of funding put forward should go toward supporting that kind of free activity.

10:05 a.m.

NDP

Tyrone Benskin NDP Jeanne-Le Ber, QC

Thank you.

10:05 a.m.

Conservative

The Chair Conservative Rob Moore

Thank you, Mr. Benskin.

Mr. Armstrong.

10:05 a.m.

Conservative

Scott Armstrong Conservative Cumberland—Colchester—Musquodoboit Valley, NS

Thank you very much, Mr. Chair, and I want to thank you all for your presentations, particularly those who have joined us from the west coast. As someone who's lived in British Columbia, I realize the challenge of presenting to a parliamentary committee located in Ottawa. Thank you for getting up so early.

Canada 150 is going to need a tremendous amount of volunteers. I'm assuming most of your organizations make ample use of volunteers and have a volunteer base. Could you all tell us a bit about the volunteer base you already have and whether we could possibly engage them in the Canada 150 sesquicentennial celebrations?

I'll start with Ms. Gaffney and we'll go around.

10:05 a.m.

Administrative Director, Stratford Shakespeare Festival

Anita Gaffney

Thank you.

We certainly are powered by volunteers. We have 1,000 employees at the festival, but we have 200 volunteers who help us on the ground, doing things like backstage tours, stuffing envelopes, and serving as ambassadors and advocates for the festival. Those people are working at a very grassroots level.

We also have volunteers at our board level. We have 32 board members who help us with advocating and fundraising for the festival. Then we also have volunteers who help with major fundraising events throughout the year. In all, we probably have 200 to 300 volunteers who support the festival, and they certainly would be engaged in an event of the nature of Canada 150.

10:05 a.m.

Chief Executive Officer, Luminato, Toronto Festival of Arts and Creativity

Janice Price

We're a bit of an inverse: our festival is for two weeks and Anita's is for eight months. We have 20 employees and 600 volunteers. As a younger festival, we had the opportunity—particularly because we partnered with the private sector, with Manulife, which has made volunteerism their national charitable activity—to create a volunteer program that right from the start was focused on including a lot of diverse communities. So right out of the gate we had an ESL component to our volunteer program. Also, because we happen in mid-June, we had a lot of international students who wanted to use volunteering as an opportunity to expand their language skills. We've also worked with other volunteer organizations that wanted to integrate physically or mentally disabled people into a volunteer core, so that they could find a way to give back a good share of what they'd been receiving.

So we took it as an opportunity to put some of our public outreach and engagement opportunities into the volunteer program, and we've grown and changed it every year and it's been extremely successful for us.

10:10 a.m.

Conservative

Scott Armstrong Conservative Cumberland—Colchester—Musquodoboit Valley, NS

Ms. Iley.

10:10 a.m.

Vice-President, Programming, Banff Centre

Sarah Iley

I wanted to refer to Culture Days. Culture Days grew out of an idea. A number of arts organizations were involved, and we thought it was an important thing to do—to engage Canadians in the whole notion of how important culture is in our lives. We've had an extraordinary response—people have organized themselves into groups of volunteers in 800 communities across the country.

We don't have people in all those communities, but the people who are there have embraced the notion. I think the Canada 150 notion would be something that people would want to embrace. Putting the call out and asking what they'd like to do and how they'd like to be organized triggers a tremendous response. Look at the response in Vancouver to volunteering for the Olympics. That's all in one community. You take this notion and tell them across Canada that we want them to think of things they can do together to create events and to support events that are already happening. This also goes back to the previous question: how do we make sure that the work gets out there? I think we can call on Canadians to self-organize and volunteer to create their own activities and bring their own events to light.

We've been absolutely astonished. Culture Days is in its second year. We had support from the Department of Canadian Heritage and from Sun Life, but it's really grassroots. Our main support has been concentrated on marketing the idea. This idea engaged people to create well over 5,000 events over the course of one weekend. Part of the challenge was that we concentrated the call. We asked that people organize themselves to do something once during the year, over three days. We had a tremendous response. I think there's a kernel there that could be developed for Canada 150.

10:10 a.m.

Conservative

Scott Armstrong Conservative Cumberland—Colchester—Musquodoboit Valley, NS

Ms. Amarshi.

10:10 a.m.

Conservative

The Chair Conservative Rob Moore

Mr. Armstrong, sorry, your time is up.

10:10 a.m.

Executive Director, Coastal Jazz and Blues Society

Fatima Amarshi

I would have to concur. One of the remarkable things about all of our organizations is the incredible commitment and enthusiasm of the volunteers. In our case, we have up to 800 volunteers who support our activities, many of whom have been with us for the 26 years the organization has been running. The level of commitment is extraordinary, and so is the level of skill these people bring to the task. Their enthusiasm for our activities is remarkable. Anything that would allow them to support their interest further with activities in 2017 would appeal to them. I think we would see an incredible response from any kind of volunteer call-out.

10:10 a.m.

Conservative

The Chair Conservative Rob Moore

Thank you, Mr. Armstrong.

Mr. Cash.

10:10 a.m.

NDP

Andrew Cash NDP Davenport, ON

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

It is wonderful to have the four of you here today. What an amazing repository of wisdom and knowledge of the arts and culture in Canada. It's great to listen to all four of you.

You spoke a bit about the importance of bringing Canada's story to the world. We're interested in bringing the world to Canada. But I wanted to get a better sense of the import and the opportunity that 150 presents to expose the world to Canada—Canada's story, Canada's arts and culture. Why is that important in the context of celebrating the 150th?

10:15 a.m.

Chief Executive Officer, Luminato, Toronto Festival of Arts and Creativity

Janice Price

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?

10:15 a.m.

NDP

Andrew Cash NDP Davenport, ON

Thank you.

I want to ask both Sarah and Anita about the particular issue around bringing people to your venues. You're both not in major centres. I think of Cinefest in Sudbury as another example of a successful model for bringing Canadians to their story. We have a broad country in which we're separated by geography. One of the challenges of Canada 150 is going to be how we include everybody.

We don't have a lot of time, but I wonder whether you want to speak to this issue. I think we need some sort of template for the smaller communities in our country, for how they could achieve some of this sort of success. That's to Sarah or to Anita.

10:15 a.m.

Vice-President, Programming, Banff Centre

Sarah Iley

Okay. I will start.

Bringing people to Banff is a challenge, in many ways. They may come to Banff, but they don't necessarily come to the Banff festivals, because they're really coming to see the Rocky Mountains. It is a challenge.

I think it's a really critical piece when people are thinking about the kinds of interests there are in tourism now. There's a whole range of reasons that people want to visit places, and enjoying the culture is a very key piece. In all of our tourism marketing for Canada we should be thinking about ensuring that we're not just talking about—what's the line?—“moose, mountains, and Mounties”, but are also talking about the cultural offerings in all of our communities, because in fact, when people are travelling they're very interested in knowing what those opportunities are. I think that needs to be embedded in all of the tourism marketing that we do, both for internal, domestic tourism—province to province, etc.—as well as for international tourism.

The other thing is that Canadians need to be made as aware of the importance and the range and the excitement of culture as they are of some of our sporting activities. Again, that's a challenge that collectively we can deal with in terms of marketing the opportunities for people to see things, recognizing that you don't all have to go to Toronto or Montreal in order to see interesting things, or even to Vancouver, but that there are really wonderful activities going on in centres right across the country. It's a collective marketing piece that then gets individually and specifically focused on your own community.

That's certainly what we do. We work with Travel Alberta and with Banff Lake Louise Tourism to embed our messages within the much broader messages of the region and the province.

10:20 a.m.

Conservative

The Chair Conservative Rob Moore

Thank you, Mr. Cash.

Mr. Gill.

November 15th, 2011 / 10:20 a.m.

Conservative

Parm Gill Conservative Brampton—Springdale, ON

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I want to thank the witnesses for being with us today.

My question is for Sarah Iley. The Banff Centre recently celebrated its 75th anniversary. Can you tell us about the legacy of that anniversary celebration in planning events and commissions? Was the idea of celebrating a legacy a factor in the decision-making?

10:20 a.m.

Vice-President, Programming, Banff Centre

Sarah Iley

Yes, it was. Thank you very much, Mr. Gill.

We thought it was very important that we would leave a legacy, and so to that end, artists from Calgary, San Francisco, Toronto, Regina, Halifax, Vancouver, New York, and the Siksika Nation, which is Blackfoot territory just outside of Calgary, were commissioned to create new works to celebrate the 75th anniversary.

As I mentioned earlier, we did a lot of co-commissioning. For instance, we co-commissioned a String Quartet composition with the Juilliard School in New York and Stanford University. That String Quartet has been performed all over North America, Australia, and Europe. We also co-commissioned with Luminato the aboriginal dance piece Tono, which has been seen around the world.

We created a book, where we invited writers and obviously commissioned them to write for us. We produced a CD boxed set of works that had been created and performed here at the Banff Centre. We had some concrete legacy pieces, but we also think the commission pieces, which will have a much longer life and will be seen on multiple stages, are very important. We also commissioned some art work, which not only resides in our collection but, again, is able to be seen elsewhere. We thought those were very important pieces as part of the legacy of the 75th anniversary.

I just want to add that we've also embraced as much as we can the technology that's available to us. In that year we joined the iTunes U site, and we've developed a whole range of podcasts of activities that have gone on here—interviews with artists, etc.—and those are available for download for free for anyone. That's something we've been growing since that time because we think it's a really important dimension for people who can't actually be here to see what happens here.

10:20 a.m.

Conservative

Parm Gill Conservative Brampton—Springdale, ON

Thank you.

Would you also be able to tell us about the national play competition you held for this anniversary, and also a little about how you publicized this competition?

10:20 a.m.

Vice-President, Programming, Banff Centre

Sarah Iley

We publicized it through the various playwrights associations. Because of our 35 years of running the playwrights colony in Banff, we have partners right across the country. The playwrights have done a lot of work with places like the Tarragon Theatre in Toronto and with the Playwrights' Workshop in Montreal, etc., so we publicized through those. We did a big public launch at Alberta Theatre Projects' Enbridge playRites Festival, which is an annual festival of plays.

We had a lot of submissions from people. We were supposed to choose and commission one play, and the jury came back to me and said they couldn't make a choice, so could we commission three? So we did. Those works will be produced for the first time this summer--works by Daniel McIvor, by Hannah Moskovitch, and by Colleen Murphy. So we have three different plays, and we left it very much to them to present the idea of what it was they wanted to create. They're not plays about the dance centre. They're plays that were important to artists at that time.

So our legacy is that we supported the creation of plays, which I think will be very timely in terms of what they deal with.

10:25 a.m.

Conservative

Parm Gill Conservative Brampton—Springdale, ON

Thank you.

10:25 a.m.

Conservative

The Chair Conservative Rob Moore

Thank you, Mr. Gill.

Ms. Boutin-Sweet.

10:25 a.m.

NDP

Marjolaine Boutin-Sweet NDP Hochelaga, QC

Ladies, thank you for joining us today. Thank you everyone, near and far.

My first question is for Ms. Gaffney.

You spoke about Shakespeare in London, which united the country. For me, I grew up in Quebec, in Abitibi, and when I was about 13, we moved to Ontario. The first time I read Shakespeare was in a class in Ontario. So, the reality isn't the same from one end of the country to the other.

I'll give you a very good example. Ms. Price, you were just talking about the song Canada, which was composed for Expo 67. I know it in French and English. But the song from Expo 67 I remember better isn't that one. It's the one by Stéphane Venne, which was also written in French and English.

As you can see, there really are different realities across the country. Ms. Gaffney, in your opinion, how can we reach everybody in this bicultural and even multicultural context?