Sure: I'll give you a couple of examples from the economic action plan.
The cultural spaces fund is one of the programs in my department that I referenced earlier. They have an annual budget of $30 million a year just for cultural infrastructure for the entire country. The average contribution from that fund is about $150,000 per year. Typically, those funds go to things like replacing seats in a theatre.
Evergreen Cultural Centre in Coquitlam, B.C., had matching funds, and for $35,000, I think it was, they replaced all the seats in their theatre. It was a pretty badly built theatre, actually, when it was first built; it's only been up and running for about eight years. They replaced the seats. It was originally a static theatre presentation opportunity, but because they replaced the seats, they now can have dinner theatre. They can have shows. They could do performing arts and they could have musical performances, or they could open it up and do improv for kids when student groups come through. They've taken what was a static performing centre and made it much more dynamic, and the opportunity for more presentations has gone through the roof.
We also do things like put in fire suppression equipment in old theatres. The Imperial Theatre in New Brunswick had a leaking building envelope, so for about I think $200,000 we fixed that to maintain the integrity of the structure of that grand old theatre of Canadian culture.
In the economic action plan, we doubled that fund of $30 million per year to $60 million over the course of the economic action plan, and we of course saw requests flood in.
Keep in mind as well that a lot of our theatres, like a lot of our rinks and a lot of our other infrastructure, were built for the centennial. This is, by the way, going back to the beginning, part of your study about Canada's 150th birthday. We have a lot of theatres across this country--small theatres, community theatres--that were built as part of Canada's centennial in 1967, and a lot of them need support, rebuilding, and up-fitting. They need to replace copper pipes, to put in state-of-the-art technology, and to get rid of asbestos and things like that. So we provide funding for that.
Another program we had-- to go specifically to your question, Jim, about the economic bang for the buck--was the marquee tourism program, which supported large-scale events and festivals that bring in thousands and thousands of visitors to our big centres. The Calgary Stampede, the PNE in Vancouver, and the Pride festival in Toronto are large marquee events that bring in thousands of visitors and millions of dollars in economic activities to our cities all across the country. Those events that receive those funds, like Luminato, were very appreciative of those funds, which helped a lot of events that were going to have very difficult years in 2008, 2009, and 2010 have some of their best years ever.