Hello. Thank you very much for inviting me to appear before this committee.
I'm Mark Sandiford. I'm the Executive Director of Creative P.E.I. We're the sector council for the cultural and creative industries in Prince Edward Island.
As with every province and territory, the cultural industries are extremely important to P.E.I., both socially and economically. But what I believe makes P.E.I. unique is our ability to collaborate across disciplines and with other sectors. This is the gift of being a small, tightly connected society. As a result, we have a lot of cultural hubs, both formal and informal. This morning I would like to walk you through some of our experiences.
Let's start with a definition. For me, cultural hubs are places where people gather to participate in cultural experiences. Historically on P.E.I., that would have been in churches and kitchen parties, libraries and dance halls, but now we have the kinds of cultural hubs we're discussing here today.
In P.E.I., cultural hubs typically start with anchor facilities, such as the Confederation Centre in Charlottetown, the Victoria Playhouse in Victoria-by-the Sea, Artisans on Main in Montague, and Green Gables House in Cavendish. These anchors serve as magnets for other cultural activities and enterprises that eventually grow to form a full-blown cultural district.
In our experience, successful anchors are often single-purpose facilities. The multidisciplinary aspect of a hub only emerges later as the anchor is joined by others. I think this is an important note. Cultural hubs are stronger if they're encouraged to grow organically rather than be over-designed and over-built at the start. The key to starting a hub is to create a well-focused, robust, sustainable, limited purpose facility. The key to growing a hub is to encourage other players to establish additional facilities within walking distance of the anchor.
P.E.I. is lucky to have low real estate prices compared with the rest of Canada. One of the keys to our success in growing our culture sector has been affordability for housing and commercial rent; however, we are beginning to see our own gentrification challenge. P.E.I.'s population growth is great, but it is also putting upward pressure on affordability that may soon need to be addressed.
Recently I've been thinking a lot about public libraries as a model for cultural hubs. Canada has a large built infrastructure of libraries, all dedicated to serving a cultural purpose. Now that the need for lending physical books is declining, it may be time to think about how libraries can be repurposed as cultural hubs.
There is strength in networks. In P.E.I. the professional theatres have recently formed a network to support each other. This network allows smaller rural theatres, such as Watermark in North Rustico, to work with larger theatres, such as the Confederation Centre and The Guild, in Charlottetown, on things such as training, staffing, and joint marketing.
Film P.E.I. recently opened a media-focused hub that is actively reaching out beyond its core membership to offer their facilities and programming to other groups, such as the P.E.I. Crafts Council and the Mi'kmaq Confederacy. Fostering these horizontal connections between hubs is the key to maximizing the impact of investment in infrastructure.
This leads me to the topic of programming. Facilities are great, but I think that too much emphasis has been put on infrastructure and not enough on programming. Canadian Heritage needs to extend its excellent cultural spaces fund to give hubs the consistent organizational funding to allow hubs to be staffed and to deliver programming.
Finally, I would like to talk about economic impact. In P.E.I. this is closely linked to the issue of seasonality. P.E.I. is a tiny market. Our population is only about 150,000 people. Every summer, however, we welcome more than one and a half million visitors.
This situation creates two very different cultural realities. From June to September, all of the theatres are packed, there are festivals galore, and artisans do a booming business. By November 1, in rural P.E.I. pretty much everything is closed. Cultural activity shrinks to Charlottetown.
Given this situation, it is amazing that P.E.I.'s cultural sector performs just under the national average in terms of jobs and GDP. It's pretty much all accomplished in four months.
Seasonality is very tough on workers. I believe part of the solution to this problem is to find a way to refocus the off-season on providing cultural experiences for our own residents. Cultural hubs could be the ideal vehicle for making this happen.
In Charlottetown, we are already seeing the beginnings of how this could work. The Confederation Centre and The Guild shift their programming focus to serve a local audience. Dance classes start up. Winter festivals bring people out. We are also seeing some fascinating new initiatives that could accelerate this process: a potential new discovery centre focusing on the STEAM disciplines and a possible makerspace, all being planned to exist within the cultural district.
What we need to do now is to figure out how cultural organizations and all levels of government can partner to encourage the growth of these kinds of initiatives.
Thanks very much.