Mr. Chair, members of the committee, I thank you for inviting us to this meeting.
My name is Kevin Chan, and I'm head of policy at Facebook Canada.
I understand the committee would like to discuss a job opportunity we had open last year. The facts are the following. The job was publicly listed and openly advertised on the Facebook careers site, shared widely on social media and with a broad set of public policy professionals in the private, non-profit and public sectors. Interested and qualified candidates were required to apply online and then went through a rigorous interview process. I am pleased to share with you that Rachel Curran is the successful candidate from that process, and she is with us today. She is the only one who received an offer of employment, and she accepted it.
I also understand that some committee members are interested in the flow of people from one sector to another. Public policy professionals regularly cross over between the private, non-profit and public sectors This kind of cross-sector experience helps build a better understanding of complex and nuanced economic and social issues.
The public service of Canada facilitates this practice. Interchange Canada, a cross-sectoral career mobility mechanism, has, since 1971, offered public servants opportunities to “build a better understanding and improve networks between the core public administration and other business sectors”.
The specific allegation that Facebook tried to recruit directly from Canadian Heritage is false, as was noted in our letter to the editor of the National Post, as was a headline about the matter that appeared in the print edition of that publication.
We will of course be happy to answer any questions you may have on this subject, but first we would like to tell you what we've been doing to support Canadian arts and culture since the beginning of the pandemic.
A recent New York Times headline referred to a “Great Cultural Depression” in the wake of COVID-19, and that is not an exaggeration. Many performance halls, venues and festivals across our country have been closed since March 2020, and the impact on the performing arts has been devastating. In the early weeks of the pandemic, I reached out to officials at the National Arts Centre to see how we could work together quickly to help. On March 19, 2020, Facebook and the NAC launched #CanadaPerforms, a $100,000 relief fund to support Canadian artists for their live online performances.
#CanadaPerforms has now grown beyond our wildest imagination, bringing in additional financial support from other partners, growing the relief fund to $700,000. In those very difficult first months of the pandemic, we were able to support 700 Canadian artists and published authors, and their performances reached 4.75 million people who tuned in from coast to coast to coast.
I'll now turn it over the Marc Dinsdale, our head of news partnerships.
