Evidence of meeting #103 for Canadian Heritage in the 42nd 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.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Julie Dabrusin
Welcome, everyone.
This is our 42nd meeting. We are continuing our study of cultural hubs and cultural districts in Canada.
Welcome, everybody, to our 103rd meeting.
Today we have four witnesses. We have Alanna Jankov from The Guild, and we have Christa Dickenson from Interactive Ontario. Our kids went to school together—just as a segue.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Julie Dabrusin
Yes, I must.
We also have with us Gilles Renaud, from Ateliers créatifs Montréal, and Alexandre Fortin from the Regroupement Pied Carré.
We will begin with the presentation by Ms. Jankov, please.
Alanna Jankov Chief Executive Officer, The Guild
Good morning, Madam Chair, and members of the committee.
Before I begin, I would like to acknowledge National Volunteer Week and recognize the 12.7 million Canadian volunteers and thank them for their contributions.
The Guild is a not-for-profit arts and cultural hub with a provincial mandate to support new and emerging professional artists, creative industries, and community organizations through subsidies, mentorship, training, and professional development opportunities. We present and produce first-class theatre 12 months of the year in our 200-seat black box performance space. Each year, our gallery at The Guild presents six months of curatorial artists' paid exhibits and an additional six months of community-based exhibits in our public gallery. We also offer versatile rehearsal space for artists as well as networking and promotional opportunities for PEI artists, the public, and the cultural sector.
We are proud owners of a building in the heart of downtown Charlottetown, formerly a Royal Bank of Canada branch. In addition, we have a recording studio, a musical theatre for grades K to 12, and office space for several other creative industries.
Six years ago, I was hired by the board of directors to take my experience and achievements and use them to save a struggling cultural organization and turn it into a vibrant hub in Prince Edward Island. With the support of an active board, an energetic creative team, government partners, and the community, we have completed three infrastructure-improvement projects with the generous support of Canadian Heritage's cultural spaces fund, ACOA, and the Province of P.E.I.
We have hired students through the Canada summer jobs initiative. We've created a theatre mentorship program with the help of the P.E.I. government, and we have received support under the Canada arts presentation fund. The Guild has become a venue where artists get much-needed exposure, where arts groups have a space to create, and where the community has a gathering spot in which everyone feels welcome.
The Guild's operating budget has grown from $250,000 annually to over $1.5 million per year in just over six years. We have also increased our box office revenue to nearly $1 million per year, in comparison with only $50,000 per year in 2012. We have five full-time employees, doing the work of many, and more than 25 part-time support staff members. In addition to this, The Guild is indirectly responsible for an additional 65 part-time cast and crew from our mainstage six-month production of Anne and Gilbert: The Musical, Atlantic Blue, our TD Confederation Centre Young Company, and our other festival productions.
The Guild is located directly across the street from the Confederation Centre of the Arts. A 1,105-seat theatre with a national mandate, the Centre is the home of the longest-running musical in Canada, Anne of Green Gables: The Musical. In this shadow we have flourished and found creative ways to present year-round entertainment to a population of only 37,000 in Charlottetown, coupled with the 1.5 million tourists who visit Prince Edward Island annually from June to September.
The Guild has secured contracts with Holland America cruise lines. We are a venue for Music PEI and the East Coast Music Association. We are an MBS Radio co-presenter. We're an artsVest partner, a CARFAC member, and a SOCAN supporter, and we continue to grow our partnerships and sponsorships with Atlantic Canadian business.
Having said all this, we are a small organization doing big things. To continue to operate, we rely on the support of the community, local business, individuals, and most importantly, our three levels of government.
We must continue to have open and transparent relationships with our government partners and work together to reduce the stumbling blocks that continue to affect the creative industries. Lengthy applications for funding grants and investment dollars, lack of resources and recognition that the creative industries are an economic driver, and our inability to succession-plan our future with certainty—these are some of the barriers that we face daily. Changes such as increasing the terms for Canada summer jobs for students and expanding the eligibility of students in the recently announced work-integrated arts organizations might seem like small improvements; however, they would greatly benefit organizations like The Guild.
It is my hope that you will recognize the importance and vital role that cultural hubs like The Guild play in their communities, their contributions to Canadian tourism and the cultural sector and, most importantly, to acknowledge our proven ability to be both fiscally responsible and culturally aware. Financial support enables us to meet strategic and cultural targets while continuing to nurture and celebrate the artistic community and engage the public. We will continue to exemplify positive cultural outcomes in Prince Edward Island and in Canada.
To close on a positive note, 2018 will mark our sixth year presenting The Guild Festival, which includes our mainstage six-month six-shows-a-week production of Anne & Gilbert: The Musical, which, I might add, was presented at the National Arts Centre in 2015; our weekly francophone Ceilidh series; our tribute to Atlantic Canadian songwriters, Atlantic Blue, starring Tara MacLean; and everything else Canadian, from babies to burlesque, which you will see performed on The Guild stage in 2018. The Guild is a true reflection of Canadian culture. We are inclusive, relevant, accessible, exciting, and entertaining.
Thank you.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Julie Dabrusin
Thank you very much.
Now we will be going to Ms. Dickenson on behalf of Interactive Ontario.
Christa Dickenson President and Chief Executive Officer, Interactive Ontario
Thank you.
Good morning. Bonjour.
My name is Christa Dickenson. I am the president and CEO of Interactive Ontario, a non-profit non-partisan trade association representing over 340 companies in Ontario's interactive digital media industry. Our members produce a variety of interactive digital media, including e-learning, video games, mobile games, augmented reality, and virtual reality, as well as social media content. Most of those members are small to medium-sized companies.
Thank you for your invitation to come and talk about cultural hubs and the way in which the government can help them to develop.
Many members of Interactive Ontario have benefited from cultural centres, both formal and informal, as they were starting out. We would be happy to share their experiences and our ideas on what could be done to better support cultural entrepreneurs in the realm of interactive digital media.
IO is here to talk not as either an organizer of a cultural hub or as a potential future applicant but as a trade organization that would like to see the creation of more cultural hubs that can provide the necessary services to help IO members and IDM companies across the country grow from individual creators to small start-ups to, ultimately, bigger creative industries with their own premises. IDM companies in Ontario are primarily small businesses, with 88% of companies actually having 20 or fewer full-time equivalent employees. That first stage of growth from one or two individuals to a small start-up with ongoing production is probably the hardest and is in most need of support.
The IDM industry in Ontario contributed $1.4 billion to the GDP in 2015. With support, that contribution could very easily grow. Perhaps more importantly, support at the early stage of a cultural entrepreneur's career can help to diversify the industry and encourage more people from underserved segments of the population, such as women, indigenous people, visible minorities, and the neurodiverse, to put their good ideas to work in their own company.
I first would like to talk about the different kinds of hubs that exist today. The traditional cultural hub is like the Centre for Social Innovation, known as CSI, or 401 Richmond, both in Toronto. They are shared workspaces for artists, cultural producers, social innovators, and entrepreneurs, which also offer community-use space, exhibitions, and programming to assist both the tenants and members of the community. They're incredibly useful workspaces—and in fact IO itself regularly rents meeting spaces in CSIs—but they target very specific kinds of art workers as tenants.
On the other hand, there are the tech start-up spaces for collaboration and support of new and emerging technology companies. MaRS Discovery District, Communitech, and Ryerson's DMZ or Digital Media Zone are examples of spaces that offer shared workspaces and entrepreneurial support specifically to tech start-ups. There is little community engagement, but they do offer programming and networking for their tenants and support in accessing the marketplace.
Now, IO's members are interactive digital media producers, and they tend to straddle both the cultural space and the technology start-up world, so they do not fit well in either one of those spaces. They create a cultural product like video games or mobile games, so they don't fit into the tech start-up community. For example, MaRS specifically supports four sectors: energy and environment, finance and commerce, health, and work and learning. As entrepreneurs, they don't necessarily fit within the community as a traditional cultural hub. As an example, the CSI mandate is to support those who want to change the world. So I ask you: the latest Angry Birds isn't likely to change the world, is it?
For this reason, IO would like to see the development of a third kind of cultural hub, which we think fits the expanded definition of cultural hubs contained in the Creative Canada report, where it references the next generation of creative entrepreneurs in small businesses and start-ups. It would combine the cultural focus of the more traditional cultural hub with entrepreneurial support of the tech start-up hubs, and it would offer collaboration opportunities between cultural industries.
As an aside, I heard GamePlay Space present to you last Tuesday, and I think they're a great hub space for the gaming community, but we are advocating for spaces that would support a wider cross-section of cultural industries.
The interactive digital media industry would need the following resources in any cultural hub. That means secure, high-speed broadband available both as Wi-Fi and dedicated lines; small group work spaces that are soundproof and facilitate collaborative work; presentation and boardroom spaces; access to non-arts professionals such as accountants, lawyers, financial advisors, marketing advisors, HR consultants, and the list goes on; access to non-IDM arts professionals such as graphic designers, illustrators, animators, and screenwriters; ongoing training and mentorship opportunities; shared equipment such as presentation or demonstration equipment; shared equipment and technology to support collaborative work with other locations, i.e., live-streaming and virtual conference facilities like the one I'm in right now; space for playtesters from the community; and 24-7 access.
There are also aspects to a successful cultural hub that are difficult to quantify. A location such as a renovated warehouse, a Victorian office space, or some other architecturally unique space fosters a creative environment. IDM creators would also welcome flexibility over the work environment so that, for example, programmers could create dark workspaces to better see their code. IO members would also like to see a cultural hub open to a wide variety of cultural industries to support collaboration and to foster a creative environment they would feel comfortable in. Opportunities to engage with the public to showcase their work or playtest while in development—
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Julie Dabrusin
I'm giving you a heads-up that you're pretty much at the end of your time. Could you wrap it up? You might be able to bring in some of that through the questions afterwards.
President and Chief Executive Officer, Interactive Ontario
That's perfect. I have one minute left. Thank you.
Without this third version of a cultural hub, IDM creative entrepreneurs are working in less than ideal spaces. There are for-profit collaborative spaces that allow them to get the job done but cost more than a non-profit cultural hub and don't provide the opportunities for collaboration, mentorship, training, and community engagement that a cultural hub can provide.
Thank you very much.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Julie Dabrusin
Thank you. I appreciate that.
If I have understood correctly, Mr. Renaud and Mr. Fortin wish to make their presentation together.
To begin with, you would like to show an audiovisual presentation. However, I have to obtain unanimous consent from the members of the committee because the audiovisual presentation is only in French.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Julie Dabrusin
Since everyone is in agreement, we can show the audiovisual presentation.
Gilles Renaud General Director, Ateliers créatifs Montréal
Thank you, Madam Chair.
To clarify a point, since we're doing a combined presentation, do we both have 10 minutes?
General Director, Ateliers créatifs Montréal
Thank you for the invitation. My name is Gilles Renaud. We will present our PowerPoint slides in French, but we can make the presentation both in French and English. I'm the
General Director of Ateliers créatifs Montréal.
and Alexandre will talk afterwards for Pied Carré. They are both non-profit organizations. Our role as a non-profit is as a real estate developer.
Our goal is to provide affordable space for artists, craftspeople, and organizations, and we're very diversified. Our goal is to make it affordable, adequate—meaning up to the code and safe—and long-lasting. This is essential for the artists.
We have six different projects in four boroughs in Montreal, over 300,000 square feet of space for artists and organizations, more than 280 studios, and over 750 artists of different practices.
I'll go over our projects very fast. We have Le chat des artistes and CouturOscope, which is a kind of mutualization organization for fashion designers, whom we consider creators as well. We have two other projects, and I'll go very quickly over this one. Le patrimoine industriel in Montreal is a very interesting one. It's a combined deal with the City of Montreal to make a hub with urban designers and visual artists linking urbanism and the people living in this area.
This slide shows a painting we have on the roof of one of our buildings. You have the particulars of the artist there. It's not long-lasting, but it's very spectacular.
That's a very quick look at what we're doing. I will let Alexandre talk about the Regroupement Pied Carré, which is one our of projects. It's the biggest project in Canada for visual artists.
Alexandre Fortin Vice-President, Regroupement Pied Carré
Good morning. My name is Alexandre Fortin. I am vice-president of the board of directors of Regroupement Pied Carré. We are a non-profit organization that rents out artist studios over four floors in a specific pre-industrial building in Montreal in the Mile End neighbourhood. We have 410 artists and artisans of different kinds, micro businesses, visual artists, dance groups, and various such organizations.
Right now it's an extremely successful project, so 92% to 93% of the spaces are rented out. It's a great success. Our goals are basically to create a space that is affordable, since cost is a problem for many artists, and to create a space where there can be exchanges between disciplines and different kinds of artists. It's also to protect and preserve techniques and cultural hubs for all. We also want to maintain the cultural and artistic aspect of the neighbourhood—Mile End has the highest concentration of artists in Canada per capita. It's also to look for funds to maintain said artist space.
At this point, one of our goals is affordability or to maintain prices that are affordable for artists so they have actual spaces to work in and also to create collaboration and the mixture of different disciplines. Right now we have, yes, galleries, artist studios, collectives, micro businesses, dance studios, artisans, several festival organizations, performance art, and literary arts; and in the last few years, we also have several creative businesses such as Ubisoft, which is a video game company; Framestore, which is a post-production company; Union des Artistes, which is the equivalent of the Screen Actors Guild but in Quebec specifically; and various other businesses. Right now, they decided to choose that particular building, that particular neighbourhood, because of the fact that it was specialized in the creative arts. It had a certain cachet and a certain dynamism, really, so the whole neighbourhood is boiling with creativity, so to speak.
I'll just quickly go over the galleries, because there is the creative hub aspect of the project, but there's also the diffusion and gallery hub of the project. We have the Centre d'art et de diffusion Clark, Atelier Circulaire, Optica, Diagonale, and Dezibao, to name a few. You have textile arts, video arts installations, regular visual arts, electronic music festivals—it's very varied and it's all in the same small spot. The concentration of creativity there is simply amazing.
Right now, some of Pied Carré's long-term goals are to create a better established website—it may seem small, but in terms of interactions between groups, it's of huge importance—have a calendar of events, a very detailed guide of the artists in the project; to create links with the public and with the various organizations; to keep some public spaces open for public activities, conferences, and exchanges between groups and communities; to create those festivals and activities between communities; to create better accessibility to new technologies such as 3-D printing and virtual reality; and also to create a link between various organizations, centres, and such.
Thank you very much.
General Director, Ateliers créatifs Montréal
Actually, yes. We still have something to present.
How much time do we have left?
General Director, Ateliers créatifs Montréal
Actually, there are two factors. We consider the cultural hubs program, or sector, to be essential. Today, we want to show that, with the projects we are working on, together or separately, we already have groups of artists, craftspeople and creators in various areas, including the digital arts, as well as the visual arts. The districts and the residents are linked as a result of public outreach, exhibition and awareness activities. Currently, we believe that the demand for projects corresponds exactly to what the program is in the process of developing. We have prepared a presentation about the program as we design it. But we have also prepared some recommendations. I could move immediately to the recommendations if you wish, given the little time we have.
The basic principle, in our opinion, is to encourage hubs to become established in infrastructures that already exist; this is for reasons of economy. It is also what our taxes can be used for. Hubs can be created in centres of activity that are already diversified in nature, that meet the criteria, but that can vary with the size of the project. For example, the project led by Pied Carré extends over four floors, with 200,000 square feet of space. Three or four clusters of workshops can be placed together. Equipment and space is used in common and a community forms between the artists, the entrepreneurs, the companies and the craftspeople. This gives rise to a creative stimulus. We already own the infrastructure; we just have to adapt the space. The idea is to link the concept of the project to the site we have, whenever possible. For us, that represents a major saving.
One of the difficulties with projects of this kind is clearly the funding, which has two aspects. First, there is the physical location, meaning the buildings, the renovation work, the equipment, and so on. Then there is the operation, which is all about the concept of the centre. The approach we have taken with all our projects is to establish financial viability. We have to develop our own operating revenue, but we also have to obtain financial support in order to support our projects in an affordable way. There is a diversity of tools, but they can be brought together into one complete whole, to complement municipal, provincial and federal programs.
On the municipal level, there are certainly tax incentives and property taxes, which vary with the districts. We have to examine how we can become involved in the regulations. In city centres, in combination with the province, there is funding specifically for social economy equipment and programming, funding, that is, for things other than culture. The idea, of course, is not to take away funding from culture. We have to find ways of developing these hubs using an economic development approach. By that, we mean developing the social economy and the financial viability with support that meets the demands.
I will stop here because my presentation includes many elements and subcategories. Mr. Fortin and I intend to present the committee with a much more detailed brief. Today, we mostly wanted to stimulate your interest so that you can read the brief more attentively when we submit it.
Thank you.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Julie Dabrusin
Thank you very much.
We will now start the question and answer period.
We're going to begin with Mr. Casey for seven minutes, please.
Liberal
Sean Casey Liberal Charlottetown, PE
Thank you, Madam Chair. Good morning to all of the witnesses and thank you very much for being here.
Ms. Jankov, I'm going to start with you. It's not every day that we have someone from Prince Edward Island before the committee, much less someone from the fine riding of Charlottetown. I know that the members of the committee are very keen to hear more about the cultural scene in Charlottetown.
In your opening remarks, you talked about the fact that The Guild is in the shadow of the Confederation Centre of the Arts, which occupies a full city block and has an 1,100 seat theatre. I don't think you mentioned it, but Holland College, which is located in Charlottetown, also has a school for performing arts, which is dominated by international students but is really a hotbed for young up-and-comers who are finding their way in the creative arts. My question for you is around the challenges and the benefits associated with being in the shadow of the Confed Centre and having the Holland College performing arts program just down the street. I would expect that having something that big with a national mandate just across the street would sometimes make your life difficult and sometimes make it better. Can you talk to that a bit?
Chief Executive Officer, The Guild
Where would I start? The really amazing thing about The Guild is that we can't go wrong. No one expected anything from us, so everything we do is really awesome. The Guild was a boat anchor. Six years ago the sheriff had the locks on the doors and the place was bankrupt. Everything we have done has exceeded all our partners' expectations. The introduction of Anne and Gilbert, our musical and our main stage production, created a bit of controversy in downtown Charlottetown with the Confederation Centre of the Arts. They did everything they could to stop it, because in their opinion this was the ruination of their main stage of Anne of Green Gables.
We were flattered, of course. We're a 200-seat, black box theatre. How could we cause any kind of disruption downtown? Instead, it increased that whole block, so it became even more of a hub. People could come to see Anne of Green Gables. They could come to see Anne and Gilbert. They could go across the street and shop at the Anne shop. They could go a little further down and buy the Anne chocolates, or just around the corner and get a wagon ride with Anne. It became something of a good thing instead of a bad thing.
It proved we had a bit of credibility and knew what we were doing. That segued right into good partnerships with the Confederation Centre of the Arts and with Holland College. Now, with our musical theatre school, we have partnerships and scholarships set up with Holland College. Each year, one of our grade 12 students gets a scholarship to go to the performing arts at Holland College. That is a positive thing that came from that.
Their 300-seat theatre, which is a soft-seater, is really marketed more towards their school. We have ventured into conversations on how we could create programming for them that we do at The Guild. We have also started a pay-what-you-can theatre festival every year in partnership with other theatres across P.E.I., including the Confederation Centre of the Arts.
I don't know, Sean, if I answered your question, but usually when I ask you questions, you don't answer mine either, so I don't know.
Liberal
Sean Casey Liberal Charlottetown, PE
This is all going into Hansard to be recorded in perpetuity. You understand that.
Liberal
Sean Casey Liberal Charlottetown, PE
In spite of that last comment, Ms. Jankov, you're being quite modest when you describe the situation with The Guild and how when you started, the locks were on the doors, or they were on the verge of putting locks on the doors. In your opening remarks you said that one of the challenges you have—and I would say this is undoubtedly a challenge in any not-for-profit entity—is succession. I don't think there's any question that the success of The Guild is largely because of your energy and imagination, but if you get hit by a bus or move on tomorrow, will The Guild survive? Will this not-for-profit that serves the cultural community so well have a chance?
I know you talked about that being a challenge. Is there an opportunity there for government? How can you take on the succession issue in a not-for-profit like the one you operate?