Thank you, Madam Chair and committee members.
Greetings from Vancouver.
My name is Hank Bull, and I am a self-employed artist. I have been involved in contemporary art since the 1970s, especially through the movement of artist-run centres across the country. I have a good deal of experience with major museums in Canada and around the world. For the past four years, I have been on the Vancouver Art Gallery's board of directors.
I have two pieces of good news to share with you today. First, we are ready to build a new museum in Vancouver. Second, more broadly speaking, Canada's museums are at the dawn of a new era with respect to federal government support.
Now I'll say a few words about the Vancouver Art Gallery.
We serve all of Canada with travelling exhibitions, public programs, and publications, which have won international recognition.
We were founded in 1931. It's interesting to note that in 1931 there were five museums in Canada: the National Gallery, le Musée du Québec, le Musée des beaux-arts de Montréal, the Art Gallery of Toronto, and the Vancouver Art Gallery. We might not be one of Canada's official national cultural institutions, but we are surely the next best thing.
Over the past 10 years the Vancouver Art Gallery has experienced extraordinary growth. Its membership has tripled to over 32,000 voting members now. Its annual operating budget has grown from $7 million to now $19 million a year. Its permanent collection has grown by 60% to now over 12,000 works of art.
It has a particularly robust social media footprint, and we're very proud of that. Just yesterday we broke 50,000 Instagram followers. As of this morning, we're at 50,100 followers. That's more than all the other arts groups in British Columbia put together. It's more than any other museum in Canada except the Art Gallery of Ontario, which is in a city five times the size of Vancouver.
Our attendance has gone through the roof in the same period, from 180,000 people a year to, last year, 525,000 people who came through the doors. We are literally bursting at the seams.
The current facility, which is in a former courthouse, is long past its due date. Apart from being overcrowded, it's cramped, it lacks a lecture theatre, it has no education facilities, and it fails to meet even the most basic seismic safety requirements. There are a lot of national treasures in that basement. To give you an example of how bad it is, the larger trucks cannot get into the loading bay, and it is known that large paintings have been seen being walked up the streets of Vancouver in order to get them into the building. It's entirely inadequate. The situation has become urgent.
Now here's the good news. As many of you know, we are planning to build a new gallery. The City of Vancouver has set aside the land, a beautiful block of land in downtown Vancouver. The provincial government has already committed $50 million. It's in the bank. The board has raised over $40 million in private money so far. The architects have been engaged. The design phase is complete. We are shovel-ready. We're ready to go now. We just need the government's participation and to launch our public campaign, which we intend to do very shortly.
It's an ambitious project. It's like building a bridge across a river. It's a massive investment, but it also generates massive short-term and long-term impacts. According to an independent study, it will create 2,973 full-time equivalent jobs in the construction phase. That's more jobs than the Site C dam. It will generate tax revenues of $20 million a year and will add $28 million a year to GDP. Our goal is to raise $300 million to build the building, plus $50 million for an endowment. The federal government of course is a key player, and we're very happy to say that we've heard encouraging noises from the Minister of Canadian Heritage, from the Department of Infrastructure, and from the Prime Minister's Office. We've made a couple of trips to Ottawa already. We're encouraged by the federal response. We're also right now in very close negotiations with the Province of British Columbia, and we are hopeful that we're going to hear word of their recommitment soon to this project.
It's a big gallery. It's a beautiful gallery. The architects, Herzog & de Meuron, are fantastic. They designed the Tate Modern in London. They designed the famous Bird's Nest stadium in Beijing. This will be a very high functioning, beautiful building. It will be really transformative for the local economy and a big historical step forward for Canada when you think back to those five museums.
We ask you, committee members, please, to support this, to talk to your ministers, to join us as we go forward, and we look forward to welcoming you to the opening of this spectacular new facility. That's my first point.
The second point is that it's no secret that the museums of Canada are poorly served by the federal government. The Vancouver Art Gallery, for example, receives no annual funding from the Government of Canada. The Department of Canadian Heritage does give annual grants to film festivals and to music festivals for performing arts, but it does not give any annual grants to museums. This needs to be corrected.
There's the Canada Council. You'll say, “What about the Canada Council?” For its part, the Canada Council gives the Vancouver Art Gallery an annual grant of $300,000. This has not changed for over 10 years, despite its phenomenal growth. By comparison, the Vancouver Symphony, the VSO, receives an annual grant of $1.9 million. That's over six times more for an organization with a considerably smaller budget and a considerably smaller audience.
Similar examples can be found across the country. The Musée des Beaux Arts de Montréal receives a grant of $450,000 whereas the Montreal Symphony gets a grant of over $2 million.
Here's the good news. We're not saying that the symphonies should receive less money. The symphonies are magnificent. They deserve every single penny. Now that the Canada Council has been endowed with new monies, there is a great opportunity for this imbalance to be corrected. There's a new competition this fall, and I for one am very optimistic that the Canada Council, in its extraordinary wisdom, will act on this issue. The Canada Council is to be lauded. I'm not here to criticize the council. The council is one of the great organizations in the world of funding.
More germane to this particular committee is Heritage. There should be annual grants. We have access to project monies, but they're very hard to access. It's very complex. It takes years, the decisions are slow, and it's not easy. There really needs to be better support on an ongoing basis from Heritage Canada for the museums of this country.
That concludes my presentation. Thank you very much. I'm happy to take questions.