Canadian Heritage Committee on June 6th, 2019

[The Chair, Liberal, Julie Dabrusin]

We will start our 163rd meeting. We are continuing our study on the Canada Council for the Arts.

We have with us Mr. Jean-François Dubé, from the Front des réalisateurs indépendants du Canada.

We have the Professional Association of Canadian Theatres, with Boomer Stacey and Nick Tracey. As well, by video conference, we have The Old Trout Puppet Workshop, with Judd Palmer.

We'll begin with The Old Trout Puppet Workshop, please, by video conference, just in case we run into any technical difficulties.

[Judd Palmer, Co-Artistic Director, The Old Trout Puppet Workshop]

Good afternoon, Madam Chair and members of the Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage.

My name is Judd Palmer. I am one of the three co-artistic directors of The Old Trout Puppet Workshop, a collective of artists based in Calgary, Alberta.

Our main focus is the creation of experimental puppet theatre, mostly for adults, which we tour across the country and abroad, but we also make sculptures, paintings, illustrated children's books, operas and films, teach widely, and curate an international puppet festival in our hometown.

The founding of our company almost 20 years ago is a tale that resonates with the mandate of this hearing. Nowadays, Alberta's theatre scene is thriving and cosmopolitan and brimming with world-class talents, but in the late 1990s when I was young and given to brooding, I believed that any artist worth their salt had to move east. Therefore, full of grandiose ambitions, I packed up a rickety orange Volvo station wagon and drove to Toronto to hurl myself at the great walls of central Canadian theatre.

The great walls of central Canadian theatre did not exactly crumble under my onslaught. I found myself wandering the streets forlornly in search of a community that would take me in, and as my courage dwindled, I felt more and more as though maybe I just wasn't up to standard. I yearned for the community I knew, the people I grew up with, out in the far-flung wilderness, distant from the intimidating institutions of cultural power.

Then one pivotal day it dawned on me that maybe that distance was actually an opportunity. Maybe there was something unique and wondrous about being an Albertan artist that needed nurturing by friends and family and shared experience and that couldn't sprout in other lonelier climes. Maybe we could invent our own traditions, our own strange styles, our own institutions. I called up all my oldest friends, who by now were scattered across the globe on similar sorrow-stricken missions, and asked if they wanted to move back home and start a company together.

I had two things I could offer. The first was a coal-heated shack on my family's ranch in southern Alberta, where we could live and work in exchange for feeding the pigs and collecting the eggs. The second was a Canada Council grant I had managed to secure for $8,000 to create a show. To us, that was a staggering sum. We managed to live for months on that grant and premiered our first production in the bunkhouse to an audience of cowboys and Hutterites, with frost-rimed cattle snorting steam outside the windows against a backdrop of the howling winter prairie beyond.

Thus, our company was born, a company founded in provincial patriotism, out of a new-found love for hearth and home, and a revitalized sense of who we were and who we might become, supported, ironically, by a national institution that saw better through our own fears than we did. It was the Canada Council that gave us both the resources and the confidence we needed to begin, a gesture of approval given precisely because we were willing to stake a claim in the literal wilderness for Albertan arts and culture.

In other words, the Canada Council made it possible for our company to exist. Without the confidence of those long-forgotten jurors, I would probably still be lost and alone in some alley in Toronto, making children sad with a puppet show out the back of the same old Volvo.

My testimony today is principally this: To me, the Canada Council has always been an impossibly beautiful institution to which I owe, in many ways, my whole life. One of the things I love dearly about it is that it is an expression of the grand foundational Canadian idea that a country in its entirety is made stronger by taking care of all of its parts.

I'm not really able to offer an educated high-level analysis regarding regional inequities under the old or new funding model. Other witnesses have testified to a disparity between council funding for Alberta and for the rest of the country, and I fully support their desire for that disparity to be rectified. I believe the council is honestly working to do so. However, I must also speak to our own experience.

Our company has prospered since the days on the ranch, with significant support from the council throughout our history. We have rarely been turned down for a grant. Under the new model, our core funding has tripled. We're not sure why we have received council support where others apparently haven't, but we are enormously grateful for it and dearly hope in the coming years that the council finds ways to extend the same support to more artists from our province.

Of course, we do have some suggestions.

One thing that has always been a bit of an issue with funders at all three levels of government is how long it takes between making an application and receiving a decision. It can take three to six months for the council to tell you whether you got the money to go ahead with your project, and then another month to actually receive it. As a company that does a certain amount of international touring, that can be problematic, since presenters abroad often make their decisions on much tighter timelines. We had hoped that the new online portal and funding model would streamline the decision-making process at the council, but it doesn't appear to help, at least not yet, anyway.

As a small company with minimal administrative support, anything that reduces the amount of work involved in accessing council funds is a huge boon. Grant writing takes up a significant portion of my time, and although, of course, it's a necessary step in the process of public funding, it's not what I'm trained to do or necessarily good at. I think that's a significant obstacle for many people in the industry, especially those working at a grassroots, independent level.

The strides the council made under its new model towards efficiencies in this area are, I believe, truly impactful, and I hope the council will remember this important objective as it continues to hone its programs and processes.

Here's a small thing. Each level of government has its own funding body and each funding body has roughly the same programs, but the actual application process is just different enough so that you have to rewrite applications for the same project three times—or more, if you count private foundations—reframing it to meet slightly different criteria or to fit different formats, even though the substance is the same.

This is obviously not the direct purview of the council, but council could act as a leader in solving this problem, advocating with provincial and municipal funders to standardize the application process across all three levels, as they have with CADAC, the financial and statistical format adopted by many granting agencies.

If it were possible to write one application and then send it to multiple funders, this would save a truly amazing amount of unnecessary work for artists across the country.

There's one last thing. A few years ago, the Canada Council launched a program called “new chapter”, a one-time only project grant program in commemoration of Canada's 150th anniversary, with a maximum ask of up to half a million dollars—much larger than any previous project grant maximum, in my lifetime, at least.

There were over 2,000 applicants from across the country and my company was one of the 200 or so successful ones. Using that grant and additional support leveraged through it from the National Arts Centre creation fund, we created our own puppet opera in partnership with the Calgary Opera and the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity. It is playing in Calgary as we speak. Through the new chapter program, we were given an opportunity to make something bigger and more wonderful than anything we've ever attempted before, and we believe it has enormously enlarged our potential as an organization.

My wish is that our national political leaders, all of you attending these hearings, and the council, recognize the vast impact this program has had and will continue to have on the national arts ecology, and find a way to keep the program going somehow. Maybe it's only every few years and maybe it continues in a more limited scope, but I dearly hope for more chances for more artists—artists of the future—to be given the same opportunity.

We don't have the same system of private profit-based investment that drives the American theatre economy, and I'm glad for it. But for our artists to create work at a truly global level, it must be possible to access transformative developmental support at that scale without leaving the country, even if it's only once in a lifetime.

I and my company have been recipients of enormous support from the Canada Council and other funders. We would like to express heartfelt gratitude to the people who administrate those programs. It can't be easy, but we are certainly striving with honesty and great diligence for the common good of all Canadians.

We would also like to thank the people of Canada, Alberta and Calgary, who entrust us with their faith and support. We do our best to deserve it.

Thank you for listening.

[The Chair, Liberal, Julie Dabrusin]

Thank you very much.

I now give the floor to Mr. Jean-François Dubé, of the Front des réalisateurs indépendants du Canada.

[Jean-François Dubé, General Director, Front des réalisateurs indépendants du Canada]

Good afternoon.

I would like to thank you for the opportunity to appear before you today as part of your study on the funding of the Canada Council for the Arts, or CCA.

During this appearance, I will put the organization and its members in context, as well as the relationship in the media arts between industry and independent creation. I will also address some of the issues related to the funding that the council can provide to the Front des réalisateurs indépendants du Canada and its members. In conclusion, I will talk about the advances and adjustments needed to foster the vitality of media arts in the Canadian francophonie.

I'm going to start by giving you a little background on the Front des réalisateurs indépendants du Canada, known as the FRIC.

The FRIC was created in 2004 with the support of the Fédération culturelle canadienne-française, or FCCF, the National Film Board, or NFB, and the CCA. It is a national service organization that brings together francophone media artists from official language minority communities, or OLMCs. These artists work in documentary, fiction, experimental video and digital arts, in different formats and on different platforms, whether television, the Web or others.

The FRIC currently has 64 members in three main regions: Acadia, Ontario, and the west and north. It has had only one part-time employee, four days a week, for more than five years. The annual budget of the FRIC ranges from $120,000 to $165,000.

I would like to point out that, starting this year, the FRIC will for the first time receive programming funding from Canadian Heritage, which will allow the organization to consolidate. We would like to take this opportunity to thank the Department of Canadian Heritage for its support. The funds were obtained thanks to new investments in the 2018-2023 Action Plan for Official Languages. However, this portion of the organization's funding cannot cover professional development, or development and creative activities, which are more within the purview of the CCA.

I will now turn to the funding provided by the CCA to the FRIC.

The FRIC may submit grant applications for projects to the CCA. Since its inception in 2004, the FRIC has received funding for eight projects. However, as it did not receive project funding between 2013 and 2018, the FRIC is unfortunately not eligible for programming funding and will therefore not be able to benefit from the increase in the budget envelope of the CCA.

In terms of the relationship between the industry and independent creation, I would say that it is very difficult to develop original content independently in the Canadian francophonie outside the industry without a producer. Since OLMCs do not have the same levers as artists in Quebec, television is the best way to enable the creation and promotion of works in francophone communities. If there were no television industry in OLMCs, there would simply be no Franco-Canadian content on screens, or there would be very little.

According to the CCA, the artist must have full creative control over his work. In the industry, however, it is the producer and broadcaster who have the final say on production. As a result, for a long time, directors from OLMCs were not recognized by the council and its peer committees, since they worked mostly with the industry. This situation has caused a lot of discontent and discouragement over the years. Several FRIC members decided to abandon these efforts, after many refusals from the CCA. It is also for this reason that the number of projects submitted was and remains very small.

These are the results of applications made by artists to the CCA between 2015 and 2018. In 2015, the CCA accepted two requests. In 2016, no applications were accepted because none were filed. In 2017, three requests were selected; in 2018, only one.

I will now talk about media arts funding at the federal level.

At the federal level, you must be a corporate entity to propose the design or creation of a project, whether it be to the Canada Media Fund, for television or the Web, or to Telefilm Canada. Only CCA funding is available to artists.

Although there is a strategic fund for OLMCs at the Canada Council for the Arts and some incentives offered by Telefilm Canada, it is only the Canada Media Fund that has an envelope strictly reserved for Franco-Canadian minority production. The impact of this fund is tangible, and the television industry among OLMCs is doing quite well.

For example, I would like to talk about the situation of feature-length fiction and documentary films, which the CCA and Telefilm Canada are funding. We have just celebrated Telefilm Canada's 50th anniversary in 2017. The FRIC conducted a census to determine the number of fiction and documentary feature films created by OLMC artists with the support of Telefilm Canada. We found that, in 52 years, 13 feature-length fiction films were made and produced, and no feature-length documentaries were made. It's really very little.

Since 2017, there appear to have been significant improvements made by the council, particularly with respect to the eligibility of FRIC members for funding. The problem with this inherent duality of FRIC and its members, the relationship between industry and independent creation, seems to be a thing of the past in terms of artists' eligibility for funding. It is very encouraging to see that this first barrier has been removed. However, there still seems to be an inequality in the composition of peer review committees. The reality is that, most of the time, the peers who form the committees are almost all Quebeckers and do not know the reality and artists outside Montreal very well, or not at all.

I will move on to the relationship between industry and independent creation.

We are in a very complex era for the creation of media arts content, whether in terms of funding, distribution or otherwise. With digital and multiplatform broadcasting, the container no longer seems to matter: it is the richness of content that is essential. The industry should no longer be a barrier to content creation for the CCA.

In this regard, FRIC welcomes the new CCA program, in partnership with CBC/Radio-Canada, which aims to support artists and arts organizations in the digital age by providing an innovative way to access Radio-Canada's digital platforms. We hope that this program, which is a step forward, given that Radio-Canada is part of the industry, will meet our expectations and those of francophone creators, and that it will open the door to greater collaboration between the two sectors.

The new CCA funding model is still in its infancy, and that is why we believe that immediate action is needed. First, the commitment to increase CCA funding to 2020 must be maintained. Then, a rigorous consultation and engagement exercise must be put in place this year with the stakeholders involved in this funding, to evaluate the current approach and make the necessary adjustments to the new funding model.

There is therefore still a long way to go to ensure the full development of media arts in the Canadian francophonie. We are more convinced than ever that collaboration is the key to success.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Julie Dabrusin]

Thank you.

Now we'll go to the Professional Association of Canadian Theatres, with Boomer Stacey and Nick Tracey.

[Boomer Stacey, Interim Executive Director, Professional Association of Canadian Theatres]

Good afternoon, Madam Chair and members of the Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage.

My name is Boomer, and I am the Interim Executive Director of the Professional Association of Canadian Theatres, known as PACT.

I'm joined by my colleague Nick Tracey, Senior Director of Administration for Young People's Theatre and recently appointed chair of our advocacy committee.

We are here today to represent PACT's members, 150-plus professional theatre companies operating across the country.

[Nick Tracey, Director, Advocacy Portfolio, Professional Association of Canadian Theatres]

PACT's membership is diverse, ranging from the largest performing arts organizations in Canada to small independent or rural theatre companies.

We want to offer an overview of the importance that our members place on the Canada Council for the Arts and a brief evaluation of the council's funding modernization and renewed investment. We recently completed a member survey about their perceptions of and interactions with the council's new model. Of our 150 members, 116 responded, of which 100, or 86%, received council funding.

Theatres receive funding for creation and development projects, production and core operating dollars. In those surveyed, 90% had received core operating funding and 28% received special project grants.

Since the new funding model began, 40% of our survey respondents remained at a flatlined funding level and 59% of respondents saw their funding change, 94% of which received an increase. That means many of PACT's members can now hire more artists and staff, increase salaries, upkeep their facilities, reach new audiences and support greater and increased artistic programming.

We are happy to see funding going to first-time recipients and pleased to hear that the council aims to triple its investment with indigenous artists and organizations. We would be pleased to also see the government step up in other ways to further support the sharing of indigenous stories and creation of indigenous theatre across the country, including sustained funding to the NAC's newly created indigenous theatre section.

The most pressing message we bring today is that the arts sector is thrilled with the doubling of the investment. It is empowering many to enhance the delivery of their visions and missions, which reach and impact Canada's diverse communities. We applaud the council in implementing a new model, opening access and addressing major creative shifts in Canada's cultural ecosystem. We're at the crux of this shift and we must see the doubling of the investment continue over the next two years. This time period is necessary for us to see the return on such a historic investment truly take shape.

[Boomer Stacey]

We imagine it is no easy undertaking for the council to undergo a huge strategic shift at the same time as receiving an incremental doubling. PACT, most of our members, the Canadian Arts Coalition and many others advocated for the doubling of the budget. Many of our members are long-standing council recipients and are likely to come to you with concerns about the rollout. These concerns are legitimate in respect to council-client relations and the integrity of arm's-length decision-making. We see these concerns as opportunities for evaluation and readjustment in the council, and we will no doubt require consultation, open communication and action by council leadership.

This is the spirit in which we come to you today, to encourage more responsiveness, reciprocal dialogue and action between the council and its clientele as we undergo this strategic shift and doubling of the budget together.

Our members had mixed responses as to how easy it was to identify which funding stream they should apply under. Thirty-five per cent of our surveyed members found it easy to identify, 40% were neutral and 25% found the process difficult. We believe that the council's current cross-country outreach sessions and presentations, along with client-officer relations, will help ease some of these difficulties.

Program officers presented at our national conference two weeks ago in Saskatoon, giving an important opportunity for theatres to understand the new funding streams and the criteria for assessment, and to clarify any confusion or misinformation that theatres had about eligibility. We value this close relationship with council and hope to continue this opportunity for officers to meet with our members.

We understand that council staff are also undergoing a learning curve with the new model. As a result, our members were split fifty-fifty on whether or not staff were helpful. In terms of overall communication, including that from the leadership, 58% said that communication was not transparent and 61% felt that it was unclear. This is especially troublesome in two areas. For one, many were told before they applied under the new funding model to dream big, to reach for the stars, to be aggressive in their budgetary ask. This set unrealistic expectations and was especially frustrating for recipients who remained flatlined or who saw a decrease in their funding. We believe that the council is now well aware that they did not set realistic expectations in the first year, especially since the doubling of the investment is incremental, not fully realized in year one.

Second, a huge change was made to the peer jury assessment process, the lifeblood of the arm's-length funding decision-making. The Canada Council and provincial and municipal councils have always had other artists and arts practitioners assessing and ranking the applications and have then allocated funding amounts to each recipient. Previously staff and leadership were required to approve and have the final sign-off only on funding allocations over certain amounts.

We met with a program officer this week to discuss our member survey, which helped demystify the new jury process for us. Under the new model, jury members rank and submit recommendations but the council staff make the final funding allocations. It is our understanding that officers adhere to the jury's ranking and allocate funding increases of as close as possible to the applicant's budgetary ask. Under the new ranking system, juries have three choices: green, fund an increase; yellow, flatline; or red, decrease. Juries are reminded of the implications of their decisions; however, it can be easy to fall into the yellow flatline zone, and for juries who rank many green, the funding might run out before it makes its way down the list.

In addition, it is clear that well-written funding applications continue to be well assessed. The council and others are doing outreach sessions across the country on how to write a good grant application, and we believe in the importance of developing grant-writing skills. However, small theatres with limited staff capacity who must undertake multiple roles in addition to grant writing or some companies that may have limited experience with grant writing but that have no less merit in their artistic or operational abilities risk making their way into the yellow or red categories. We will continue efforts to build grant-writing skills across the country; however, we need to determine how to assess merit as expressed in something beyond a well-written application.

Many of our members are also questioning whether jury makeup is as diverse as it should be. We have submitted our concerns and our survey results to the Canada Council officers with whom we work most closely. However, we are looking for more open dialogue and active consultations with the council's leadership, especially as this new model is evaluated. We are looking to, first, an understanding of new strategic decisions and then to readjustments of the model as necessary to truly benefit the council's clientele and their communities. We see a lot of promise through our artists and arts organizations that the doubling investment of $180 million will realize its full impact, all while the council and its clients work together to ensure that the new model is as strong as it can be.

Thank you for your time, and we look forward to your questions.

[The Chair, Liberal, Julie Dabrusin]

Thank you very much.

Because we had votes and started a bit later, what I propose is that we do a round of three five-minute questions.

We'll begin with Mr. Long for five minutes, please.

[Wayne Long, Liberal, Saint John—Rothesay, NB]

Thank you, Madam Chair.

Good afternoon to my colleagues.

Thank you for coming in this afternoon and giving us your presentations.

My riding is Saint John—Rothesay. It's in southern New Brunswick. It's home to the beautiful—built in 1913—Imperial Theatre, Saint John Theatre Company and Symphony New Brunswick. If anybody knows full well the importance, the benefit, that the Canada Council brings, it's me.

I'm just going to start with a show of hands. Who thinks that the Canada Council funding is fair, distributed fairly, equitable and consistent? Let's have a show of hands.

[A voice]

One.

[Wayne Long, Liberal, Saint John—Rothesay, NB]

I wasn't asking you, Pierre.

[Voices]

Oh, oh!

[Darrell Samson, Liberal, Sackville—Preston—Chezzetcook, NS]

He's been like that all day.

[Wayne Long, Liberal, Saint John—Rothesay, NB]

I'm glad to see he's back into it.

On a serious note, with regard to an application process, a funding entity, it's of utmost importance that those applying, those sending in applications and taking the time to fill out applications, feel that it's fair and consistent.

I want to start with you, Mr. Stacey and Ms. Tracey. In your experience, do you think there are disparities in Canada Council funding for members based upon region? Do you see that? Do you see a disparity where more goes to Ontario and less goes to Alberta and what have you? Can you just give me some comments on that please?

[Boomer Stacey]

We are hearing from our members that they feel that there is disparity. I don't think that there's any region—

[Wayne Long, Liberal, Saint John—Rothesay, NB]

Do you think there is?

[Boomer Stacey]

Do I think there is?

I haven't seen stats that I accurately believe in to show what the exact numbers are. Again, we're hearing very clearly from our members that they feel that there is some disparity regionally, but also in other aspects of looking at merit as well.

[Wayne Long, Liberal, Saint John—Rothesay, NB]

You have members who feel that there's disparity. In your opinion, what do you feel is wrong? What are you hearing from your members is wrong with the process, and what do you think could be done to improve that?

[Boomer Stacey]

My colleague Jean-François mentioned the makeup of the juries. We feel that in order for people to understand the context and how our members are making work across the country.... We recognize that in rural situations, in northern situations, and province by province, the context is different, so to have a jury made up of peers who understand those particular contexts will help even that out if it's the juries that are, indeed, making the funding recommendations. I think that's part of the process.

Again, I don't believe that regional merit or regional parity is the only merit that we need to look at. We have a number of companies that exist in a very rural context, in an indigenous context and in a multicultural context, and we want to ensure that there's parity amongst all of the ways that you can carve the money.

[Wayne Long, Liberal, Saint John—Rothesay, NB]

I can speak for one of the organizations in my riding that always, unfortunately, views it with skepticism. You know, they see their organization and then they see almost an identical one in Nova Scotia that received the 28% increase. They're very appreciative of the funding, of course, but they're also always asking, “How come this or that?” and they don't ever really feel that they get a clear answer as to what they deem is some disparity.

Mr. Dubé, do you have any comments on that and on what you feel we could suggest to Canada Council to make it better?

[The Chair, Liberal, Julie Dabrusin]

You have about 30 seconds to respond, Mr. Dubé.

[Jean-François Dubé]

Very well.

In the case of media arts and official language minority communities, peer committees receive context sheets. Do they really have the desired effect? I'm wondering.

I myself was a member of a committee and found myself in a situation where I had to take a position and intervene on a Franco-Canadian project that was on the edge of acceptability. In the end, it was the Canada Council for the Arts officer who told me not to worry and that the project would not lose its funding.

Something must be done with peers to ensure that they understand the reality and situation of Franco-Canadian artists. Right now, there is so much discouragement, especially in the field of media arts. There is no motivation. The Canada Council for the Arts is somewhat open, but that is still very minimal.

[The Chair, Liberal, Julie Dabrusin]

All right. Thank you very much.

Now we will go to Mr. Yurdiga, for five minutes, please.

[David Yurdiga, Conservative, Fort McMurray—Cold Lake, AB]

Thank you, Madam Chair.

I'd like to thank the witnesses for joining us here today.

My first question is going to Mr. Stacey.

In my community, it's quite diverse. We have bigger centres, smaller centres and some northern communities. It seems that the more successful groups in the larger centres are able to secure funding, whether it's through the Canada Council, the municipality or industry.

From your perspective, should there be a separate category to address the northern communities? They don't have the financial means. The community is too small. They have a very small population.

Do you think there's a need to have a separate pot of money to address these smaller communities that have very few resources? They're very talented people, but it seems like their needs are not met. Can you comment on that?