Evidence of meeting #95 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 hub.
A recording is available from Parliament.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Julie Dabrusin
Welcome everyone to the 95th meeting of the Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage.
Pursuant to Standing Order 108(2), we are beginning our study of cultural hubs and cultural districts in Canada.
I'm happy to welcome our witnesses today from the Department of Canadian Heritage. We have Ramzi Saad, Director General, Arts Policy Branch; and Lise Laneville, Director, Strategic Arts Support, Arts Policy Branch.
You will have 10 minutes.
Ramzi Saad Director General, Arts Policy Branch, Department of Canadian Heritage
Hello.
My presentation has two sections: the first deals with cultural districts and the second with creative hubs. In each section, I will give an overview, explain the federal contribution, in particular the Heritage Canada programs I am responsible for, and provide examples of investments.
Turning to slide 2, we have an overview of the arts and culture sector. The arts and culture sector is a significant contributor to Canadian quality of life and personal satisfaction, as well as a major contributor to the Canadian economy. In particular, following a recent 2017 arts and heritage accessibility survey, Canadians overwhelmingly believed that arts experiences were a valuable way for bringing people together from different languages and cultural traditions.
As you can see from the figures on the slide, Canadians feel that arts and culture make a positive social contribution to their communities, as well as making positive economic impacts.
I'll begin the formal presentation in two sections: cultural districts and creative hubs. We'll start with cultural districts.
What is a cultural district? Although there is no set definition, a cultural district is traditionally conceived as a well-recognized, branded, mixed use area where a high concentration of cultural facilities serve as an an anchor of attraction. Facilities include amenities like performance spaces, museums, galleries, artist studios, arts-related shops, music or media production studios, dance studios, colleges for the arts, libraries, arboretums, and gardens. Because they are mixed use developments, cultural districts incorporate other facilities, such as office complexes, retail spaces, and occasionally residential areas.
The development of cultural districts can happen organically, or they can be engineered by urban planners and municipal governments. In both cases, it is the municipality that has a key role to play in either supporting the construction of the districts, trading permissive zoning regulations for growth, implementing tax or other incentives for cultural organizations in the area, or by officially designating them as cultural districts.
While municipalities play a key role in the establishment or designation of these districts, all levels of government can play a role in the local economic growth and improving the quality of life at the local municipal or regional levels.
We will turn to slide 4.
I will now go over the federal contribution to cultural districts.
A number of federal departments and organizations contribute to the vitality of cultural districts. The three main contributors are Infrastructure Canada, the Department of Canadian Heritage, and the Canada Council for the Arts.
In terms of the broader development of a cultural district, the Department of Canadian Heritage offers programs that invest in the organizations and public spaces that present the main cultural offerings in the cultural districts to the public. I am responsible for two key programs: the Canada Arts Presentation Fund and the Canada cultural spaces fund.
I will now give you an overview of each program.
We will turn to slide 5. I'll begin by giving an overview of the Canada arts presentation fund.
The Canada arts presentation fund supports professional arts festivals and performing arts series to offer activities that connect artists with Canadians in their communities. The program has a permanent $32 million grant and contribution budget, and budget 2016 provided an additional $0.5 million in grants and contributions for an export supplement in fiscal year 2017-18.
The beneficiaries include festivals and organizations of varying size across the country, like the Edmonton Folk Music Festival in Alberta, the PuSh International Performing Arts Festival in Vancouver, Festival transAmériques in Montreal, and the Confederation Centre for the Arts in Charlottetown, and smaller festivals with big local impact like Dance Matters in Toronto and Théâtre de la Ville in Longueuil.
Since the inception of the program in 2001, opportunities for Canadians to attend arts festivals, or performing arts series supported by the program, have tripled to over 600 annually in more than 250 communities across the country. The fund has a direct impact on Canadians; more than 20 million people attend the program-supported festival series each year.
The second program I'd like to give an overview of, on slide 6, is the Canada cultural spaces fund. This program is the only federal program dedicated to cultural infrastructure. It supports the improvement of physical conditions for artistic creativity and innovation. The fund provides support in three areas: the improvement, renovation, and construction of art and heritage facilities; the acquisition of specialized equipment; and feasibility studies related to cultural spaces.
Some examples of organizations that have benefited from the program include the Winnipeg Art Gallery and the Stratford Festival. From 2001 and 2002 until the end of 2017, over 1,700 projects in 436 unique communities across Canada were supported by this fund. Eighty per cent of these communities are in rural, remote, and small urban centres.
In addition to the ongoing investment in cultural infrastructure through this fund, which is $30 million annually, budget 2017 announced an additional $300 million over 10 years, starting in fiscal year 2018-19. This additional investment is part of the investing in Canada plan, which recognizes the role that cultural infrastructure has to play in cities of the 21st century.
Those are the two programs.
In order to illustrate how the federal government supports a cultural district, we'll give you a federal example. We're now on slide 7.
In Canada, we have seen the growth and establishment of cultural districts such as Queen West in Toronto, Granville Island in Vancouver, Sir Winston Churchill Square in Edmonton, and Quartier des spectacles in Montreal. I will use the Quartier des spectacles in Montreal as an example of a cultural district.
The Quartier des spectacles has received support from various governments and organizations to help create a vibrant destination in downtown Montreal. The Quartier des spectacles is a municipally-driven project to recognize, develop, and designate a sector in downtown Montreal as a cultural district. Although overseen by the municipality, the project received support from Infrastructure Canada and the major projects component of the building Canada fund.
To complement this larger investment, the Wilder Building, a dance centre, received $4.7 million in funding from the Canada cultural spaces fund. This support provided artistic organizations with a space for its activities.
Tangente, a long-standing contemporary dance company, is one of those organizations. Tangente received support from the Canada arts presentation fund and the Canada Council for the Arts.
The work of organizations such as Tangente draws the public, local residents, and cultural tourists to the region. The organizations have the ability to present and develop their content because they have financial support for their activities.
Government support is co-ordinated here to ensure that the entire district has the resources and infrastructure required to support the organizations and the public. For their part, the organizations on site have the resources needed to create productions that bring the district to life.
That ends section 1 with an overview on cultural districts.
I'd like to now move over to the second section and topic, which is creative hubs.
Like cultural districts, there is no set definition of a creative hub, but they are conceived and designed to encourage collaboration, innovation, and productivity. They are multi-tenant user facilities involving participants from a range of sectors and disciplines. They include some or all of the following characteristics: shared space, technology, and other resources; opportunities to develop collaboration and to exchange ideas; and public access and programming.
As you can see from the diagram on slide 8, each individual creative hub will strike a different balance of all those elements, which are sensitive to local context and respond to the needs of the creative sector and the broader community. However, it is also the mix of the participants, the availability and diversity of the collaborative spaces, the intent to share skills and talent, and the provision of improved access to specialized and digital equipment that enable creative hubs to foster innovation and growth in the creative sector.
Creative hubs are not a new business line for the Canada cultural spaces fund. Projects with some or all of these characteristics have been eligible for support from that fund. To do so, I would like to illustrate two recent examples we have supported, as shown on slides 9 and 10.
An example of a creative hub supported by the Canada cultural spaces fund is cSPACE in Calgary. It's a renovation project that created a 50,000 square foot incubation facility. It is being used by a wide variety of artistic disciplines, including cultural industries, film production, sculptors, visual artists, theatre, as well as a teaching studio for the Alberta College of Art and Design continuing education program.
cSPACE also emphasizes pure learning strategies and collaboration while also providing space and resources for public presentations. Affordability is a constant barrier for artists, and the building's below market rental rates for studio and office spaces make it accessible to arts and festival groups and other creatively focused entrepreneurs.
There are co-working desks, teaching studios, classrooms for collaboration, workshops and professional development, theatre space, hallway galleries, and a meeting room for public programming. cSPACE encompasses all of the characteristics that we described earlier of a home for tenants from a range of sectors; shared spaces and resources, which is key for the creative community; and a focus on collaboration and public access to showcase their work.
The second example is a recent project that has been approved. It's a New Dawn centre in Sydney, Nova Scotia. The New Dawn Centre for Social Innovation on Cape Breton Island is a renovation project that has taken a convent, and created a creative hub. It has a range of participating disciplines, shared resources, gathering spaces, programs for exchange and collaboration, and public programming in spaces.
The centre, though, takes a different approach to creative hubs, and relates to the specific needs of the community in an effort to support education, innovation, and technology in Cape Breton. New Dawn will create a mixed-use facility with sustainable working and gathering spaces for Cape Breton's creative, innovative, and forward-looking creators. As a centre for social innovation, it will support individuals, businesses, and not-for-profit and charitable organizations working in innovative ways to affect social change. An interesting fact about New Dawn is that nearly 25% of the building is dedicated to collaborative spaces and offices for those outside of the arts and cultural sector. The project is expected to be completed by spring of 2019.
That gives you a good illustration of the proliferation and the projects coming forward in Canada around creative hubs.
Lastly, in support of creative hubs, the Government of Canada laid out its vision for the creative industries in Canada through the creative Canada policy framework. The vision for Canada's creative industries in a digital age framework outlines how the government will support skills, development, innovation, and collaboration by investing in the next generation of cultural spaces, creative hubs.
As stated in the policy framework, creative hubs will help nurture and incubate the next generation of creative entrepreneurs and small business startups. Canadian creative talent will have access to spaces where they can build their entrepreneurial skills, create, collaborate, and innovate, and help generate new markets for Canadian creativity in all its forms.
The additional investments under budget 2017 in the Canada cultural spaces fund will now enable the program to prioritize targeted support for creative hubs in order to advance the creative Canada vision by bringing together professionals from a range of arts or heritage sectors and creative disciplines while always continuing to invest in traditional arts and heritage infrastructure projects that remain part of its core business, such as museums, theatres, and performing arts centres.
To date, the department has secured all of the necessary authorities for the Canada cultural spaces fund to provide an additional $30 million per year for 10 years, and right now my team and I are finalizing the details for operationalizing this investment, beginning in April 2018.
I'll close there.
Thank you.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Julie Dabrusin
Thank you very much for the presentation.
We will now begin the question and answer period.
In the first round, members have seven minutes for questions and answers.
We will start with Liberal MP Gordie Hogg.
Liberal
Gordie Hogg Liberal South Surrey—White Rock, BC
Thank you. My apologies for being late. I still am not adjusting very well to the weather here. I thought I brought the sunshine with me from British Columbia this time, and apparently I failed to do so.
Can you talk to me a little bit about Richard Florida's work on creative cultures and how it might combine with this?
Director General, Arts Policy Branch, Department of Canadian Heritage
Richard Florida is a man who is all about how to bring the creative sectors together, and how to force collaboration in order to incent innovation and look at new ways in which creative talent is incubated.
For us, the programs provide an opportunity, within the Canada cultural spaces fund, to prioritize investment, to find ways in which the creative disciplines can come together with the arts and heritage sectors, and to create the content and showcase the creative works sought by Canadians both in Canada and abroad.
Liberal
Gordie Hogg Liberal South Surrey—White Rock, BC
Regarding his reference referred to the educational component and the living structure of it, would they differ dramatically? When you were talking, it sounded a lot like Richard Florida's talk of creative cultures and the sense of how they might be in a hub. I was trying to articulate how that might fall into a hub context.
Director General, Arts Policy Branch, Department of Canadian Heritage
From what we've seen across the country in the development of hubs, it's about responding to the needs of a community. As a result, creative hubs will be distinct across the country. We have examples of hubs that strictly have the creative sector in them alone. There will also be hubs like the New Dawn Centre for Social Innovation that will have educational components or programming.
To allow for collaboration in the cultural sector, you really have to respond to the needs of your artists and your communities. That is what I think is going to be the changing conversation with hub proponents around the intent to ensure innovation and collaboration amongst many disciplines in the creative sector.
Liberal
Gordie Hogg Liberal South Surrey—White Rock, BC
You made reference to Gibsons Public Market and Granville Island, and I'm familiar with both of those. If I were to spend a little bit more time than I have at Gibsons, how would I know if it were flourishing or not? What would the context be?
Director General, Arts Policy Branch, Department of Canadian Heritage
The response would be several-fold. One is that you'd be looking at the improved working conditions for the creative sector and its ability to create, preserve, collect, and exhibit its works. The other measure would be around how Canadians access that content and ensure that they have the best facilities to experience it in. We allow for the support of the best technical and digital equipment, the best experience provided through these hubs, and the opportunity to showcase that work. All of those conditions can be fostered through a creative hub.
Liberal
Director General, Arts Policy Branch, Department of Canadian Heritage
That is an excellent question, and now that we're all talking about creative hubs, everyone's talking to me about the virtual hub. The mandate I have with the Canada cultural spaces fund is to support physical spaces. I think this is something we're going to have to explore. To answer your question on a virtual hub, we have not yet embarked on that, because we're trying now to understand what physical spaces and conditions creators need. I think the idea of how the hubs across Canada will be networked may be part and parcel of how we get to what a virtual hub really is. The idea is that while we're looking for collaboration within a hub, it's important for the hubs to also develop that network. Maybe that is part of how we would get to a virtual hub, but that's something we haven't explored yet. Now that we're talking about creative hubs, I can tell you that this is coming up, but I don't have a specific proposal with regard to it.
Liberal
Gordie Hogg Liberal South Surrey—White Rock, BC
We have community arts councils in our communities. A number of them are very active and have spaces. I think they see themselves as cultural hubs, and I wonder what it is about them that would not make them hubs, other than that they have a physical space and they bring different types of arts. The essence of what you're describing, they seem to have.
How would I tell them they're not a cultural hub?
Director General, Arts Policy Branch, Department of Canadian Heritage
From a technical perspective, in the applicant guidelines we'll be launching in April, we'll be putting together a clear definition of a creative hub, based exactly on the characteristics I've outlined in the presentation.
We're will have to have a conversation to determine whether those centres or multi-use centres are hubs or not. But ultimately, we're going to be making sure that we have a variety of disciplines, people, and sectors, a variety of business models, in a hub, and we want to make sure that the public has access to that hub in programming, experiences, and the opportunity for artists to be able to showcase their work through those hubs.
It will also be critical to have the shared resources and spaces to offset the affordability question, so we can get artists into centres so they can innovate and collaborate.
As to your point, we are able to support them. Depending on the centre, we'd have to assess whether it's a hub or not, but depending on the needs of the community, if they're coming together and they're getting the benefits of that collaboration, then I think that's great. But our idea is to incent and to make sure that the proponent or developer of the hub is coming in, making sure that the mix of tenancy and the intent for collaboration is there. It's not just about having a multi-tenant facility where you're just renting your office space and you leave at the end of the day. The idea is to make sure that there are workshops, development sessions, and a real opportunity for the tenants to engage with each other. I think that's what's going to distinguish what we support today in multi-tenant facilities vis-à-vis the creative hub of the future.
Liberal
Gordie Hogg Liberal South Surrey—White Rock, BC
Would my interpretation of this be incorrect if I were to suggest that since you've already got the core, the next iteration is to decide how we can connect these core-like nodules across the country? Is that the expectation or intent?
Director General, Arts Policy Branch, Department of Canadian Heritage
The answer is yes, and we plan to do that through partnerships with portfolio agencies, and municipal, provincial, and territorial governments. As part of the creative policy framework, we intend to strike those partnerships to make sure that those creative hubs are networked.
Conservative
Peter Van Loan Conservative York—Simcoe, ON
In your presentation, you have a bit on cultural districts, and I suspect that if you said the word “creative hub” to an ordinary person off the street, what would come to their mind would be something akin to a cultural district. But when you're looking at creative hubs in the context of this vision for Canada's creative industries in the digital age—which I gather is where you're going to go for funding—it seems to be focused on something much smaller, like a single-building-type situation.
Can you expand on that a bit more for me and clarify that they are not the same thing, but very different things?
Director General, Arts Policy Branch, Department of Canadian Heritage
Correct. As described, a cultural district is a composition of many types of amenities and facilities. A creative hub could be a physical space in a cultural district, thus an amenity or part of what makes a cultural district. But a creative hub could be a stand-alone building in any community across the country that's allowing for the creative sector to collaborate, innovate, and enhance productivity. As I described earlier, a cultural district is looking at all the elements that could have commercial spaces with individual dance centres, gardens, and creative hubs. The creative hub is very much a physical space, but it's the occupants inside and the way they are working that make this unique.
Conservative
Peter Van Loan Conservative York—Simcoe, ON
I think for many smaller communities that are interested in accessing cultural spaces funding, there might be some real challenges here. There might be real bias in the program in favour of places where these things are already together. If a smaller community were suddenly required to take their local theatre group, their local art gallery, and some of their other similar cultural organizations to get cultural spaces funding as a hub, they might suddenly say it's costing them too much to get all of those into one place. They're all in different buildings right now in this particular community.
My concern is that if this is a big part of the programming, is there an inherent bias in favour of larger urban areas versus smaller communities?
Director General, Arts Policy Branch, Department of Canadian Heritage
If we can go back to the cultural spaces fund slide, my response would be to note that 80% of the communities that the cultural spaces fund supports are in rural, remote, or small urban centres.
Director General, Arts Policy Branch, Department of Canadian Heritage
That's correct. The cultural spaces fund will always continue at its core to support museums, theatres, and performing arts centres. That is the core. We have received additional money through budget 2017, from which we can prioritize investment towards creative hubs. As we ramp up, a portion of that investment, depending on the needs of the community, will be used through the additional funding available. But rest assured that all communities today will continue to be able to apply for and access support from the cultural spaces fund. I think what will be interesting is that, as we engage and do our outreach with stakeholders and as the regional offices of Canadian Heritage across the country are working with partners, we will be able to introduce the concept of creative hubs. We can put forward the ideas around ways that the stakeholder community can collaborate, and maybe, depending on the community and its affordability issues or the ecosystem there, they may decide to come forward and say, “We'd like to aggregate our work and be part of a centre that can share resources.” In some centres right now, we hear big theatre companies saying, “Let's pool our resources and come together because we can't afford to be operating on our own.”
In response to your question, communities across the country will still access the fund, and I think we'll be able to have a conversation with them around the best ways they can share resources. If creative hubs are the way it would work for a community, then they will also be able to apply to the program. It's not limiting the current support we provide across the country.
Conservative
Peter Van Loan Conservative York—Simcoe, ON
You indicated that you would be coming out with criteria for applications sometime in the near future. Is that correct?
Director General, Arts Policy Branch, Department of Canadian Heritage
That's correct. As part of the intake for 2018-19, we'll update the applicant guidelines and specify the definition of a creative hub. We will launch them, and they will be made publicly available.