Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Mr. Brault, thank you for being with us today.
I'm going to switch to English because I have lots of things to say for my people back home. I'm channelling a mentor, a great Edmonton and Canadian musician and talent, and a distinguished senator, the late Tommy Banks.
Mr. Brault, we know each other well because I was previously parliamentary secretary to the Minister of Canadian Heritage.
I have to say that I like your work and I love what the CCA stands for. I like that the Canada Council for the Arts funds the Edmonton Opera, the Alberta Ballet, the Winspear Centre for the arts, the Citadel Theatre and many other worthy organizations in Edmonton and Calgary.
What I cannot stand for are the numbers, Monsieur Brault. If we look at the numbers and the principle of regional equity, the Canada Council for the Arts is categorically failing Albertans.
Let's take a look at the numbers. After we doubled the funding for the Canada Council for the Arts.... I will share this, and I will send a document that has been helpfully prepared by the Toronto Alliance for the Performing Arts—because they have enough money to do this kind of data crunching, and western arts groups do not.
Here are the numbers for 2017-18 for arts organizations funded by the CCA, per capita: Toronto, $16.62; Montreal, $30.73; Vancouver, $35.39. How much did Calgary get? It got $4.73. How much did Edmonton get per capita? It got $4.56.
Let's take a look at the provincial lens for the same year and the same funding, a year after the beginning of the doubling of the funding: British Columbia, 14.7%; Ontario, 32%; Quebec, 31%. Alberta got 5.7% of the funding.
On every single indicator—and this includes population, artists, assessors and funding—Alberta is at the bottom of the barrel. We are 12% of the population. We have 8% of the artists, 5% of the assessors, and just over 5% of the funding.
Monsieur Brault, how are you going to do regional equity, which is what the doubling of the funding was intended to do? I want to see more francophone artists. I want to see more indigenous artists. I want to see more LGBTQ artists. I am not seeing in the data a 25-year consistent underfunding of Alberta arts organizations moving a single needle. What are you and your organization going to do to address this egregious discrepancy in funding?