Canadian Heritage Committee on Nov. 30th, 2020

[The Chair, Liberal, Scott Simms]

Yes, I'm afraid you are, Ms. McPherson.

That said, I have a point of clarification that I have to clear up right now. You were the flexed-arm hang champion?

[Heather McPherson, NDP, Edmonton Strathcona, AB]

That's right.

[The Chair, Liberal, Scott Simms]

I used to be pretty good at that myself.

[Heather McPherson, NDP, Edmonton Strathcona, AB]

So we have a way to get physically active in our committee.

[The Chair, Liberal, Scott Simms]

Ah, there you go.

I wasn't particularly athletic. It was just that I was so short, there was too much of a distance to the ground for me to let go.

[Voices]

Oh, oh!

[The Chair, Liberal, Scott Simms]

Nevertheless, congratulations on your title.

Up next is Mr. Waugh for five minutes, please.

[Kevin Waugh, Conservative, Saskatoon—Grasswood, SK]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Mr. Antunes, earlier this month, the YMCA closed two facilities in Regina. I used to be on the YMCA Saskatoon board. I can tell you that the YMCA deals with the most vulnerable people in our communities. Now Regina has closed two. They have only one left, and in a fairly good neighbourhood, I might add. Regina closed one on the east side and one in the downtown.

This is a major catastrophe, I would think, for YMCAs across the country. We are seeing it here now with Regina closing two of their three locations. I'd like your comment on that.

[Elio Antunes]

It's devastating. We are concerned that this will continue with YMCAs, with local sport clubs and recreation and community centres. As I mentioned, many of these organizations are dependent upon the registration fees of their programs to sustain their operations. With us not registering in those programs for such a long time, it has a significant economic impact on their organizations, which prevents them from operating.

That will have a significant impact, as I mentioned, not only on our ability to access local programming to be physically active. There are also the contributions, well beyond physical activity, to the social issues facing communities and under-represented groups, as you mentioned. It's critical. I fear that COVID will reshape our SPAR sector landscape in the future, which will look very different. That will be very unfortunate, if that's the case.

[Kevin Waugh, Conservative, Saskatoon—Grasswood, SK]

I should mention the Regina Marlins swim team. Their home was in downtown Regina, at the YMCA, and now they've lost that. There's another catastrophe, a really good swim club in this province now looking for a new home because of the closure of the YMCA.

I'm going to move on.

Mr. Julien, thank you for your presentation and thank you for sending it out earlier. The numbers on the labour force survey are not surprising, where the arts, entertainment and recreation sector lost 36,000-plus jobs in October. Performing arts, spectator sports and related industries lost 4,800 more in October. As we go on with COVID, those are startling numbers. Could you maybe just talk about that?

You had a really good presentation. Unfortunately, all the arrows pointed down. They were all red, and I think it's going to take a long time before your organization and others in this country turn this around. Thank you for the survey, and I want you to comment on the numbers that you produced here in front of the committee today.

[Frédéric Julien]

Thank you.

I'll answer the member by first providing a bit of context on these statistics. The labour force survey provides information on employed people. To be deemed employed, whether you are on payroll or you are self-employed, if you worked any number of hours during the reporting period, you count as employed. Our sector is one in which there are many freelance workers, so what you're actually seeing is a more positive outlook on reality by virtue of the fact that we have many self-employed workers who would have been deemed employed just because they worked a few hours during the reporting period.

In terms of labour, one of the big problems is that we are facing a significant exodus of the the workforce to other parts of the economy. When the activities finally resume, arts organizations will have to rehire; they will have to train their staff. Therefore, this is an opportunity to do things differently. The kinds of skills that will be required in 2021 and beyond are arguably different kinds of skills from those that were needed even 10 years ago. In terms of professional development training that can be provided to staff and entry-level training, this is an opportunity to provide new digital skills to our staff, but also to ensure that as we rehire, equity principles are observed. It's an opportunity to make this workforce more representative of the makeup of the Canadian population.

[Kevin Waugh, Conservative, Saskatoon—Grasswood, SK]

Well said.

Thank you very much, Mr. Julien.

Chair, I'll turn it back to you, as my five minutes are up.

[The Chair, Liberal, Scott Simms]

Thank you, Mr. Waugh. Yes, you're just three seconds shy, the sign of a former broadcaster indeed.

Now we'll go to the final questions from the Liberals. I have two names: Mr. Louis and Mr. van Koeverden, so I'm going to split the time.

Mr. Louis, I'll let you know when your two and a half minutes are up. The floor is yours.

[Tim Louis, Liberal, Kitchener—Conestoga, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chair, I appreciate that.

I thank all the witnesses for being here, for their advocacy and their testimony.

I would like to focus my time on Mr. Julien.

I also read the report you had. It was very informative and something I haven't heard discussed much. We talk about investments in infrastructure, investments in careers, and I appreciate how you referred to it as the entire chain of jobs in the arts sector.

You mentioned the wage subsidy, rent subsidy and the CERB, the support they've provided and the need to continue that. We talk about the supply side: presenters, festivals, artists and concert promoters. Could you elaborate more on the demand side and how we could support increasing the demand for the arts as we come out of this, maybe partnerships with different levels of government or with patrons, with supporters? Can you share some ideas or some possible best practices on how we can focus and support enhancing the demand side of the arts?

Thank you.

[Frédéric Julien]

This is a very important and relevant question.

We can safely presume that the behaviour of customers will be different after the pandemic. It has already evolved significantly over recent years particularly due to the consumption of culture online, so it will continue to evolve.

There will be a need to assist the sector in making better meaning of these changes in behaviours. In terms of how we can also better understand the demand, one initiative that is going on in Montreal, called Synapse C, is, for example, looking at consumer data, what people buy, when and why, going quite granular to better understand the demand and then make their recommendations.

There is also a need for investment into the development of a more data-centric approach to both supply and demand. Nowadays, people find their cultural activities using digital devices, and the job of those digital devices is to match information data about the offer with the supply, with data on the demand. We need to become more adaptive at representing our information as data that those machines can then use to make better recommendations to our users.

[The Chair, Liberal, Scott Simms]

Thank you.

Go ahead, Mr. van Koeverden.

[Adam van Koeverden, Liberal, Milton, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chair. It's really nice to be here on the heritage committee.

My questions will be for Mr. Antunes.

I'm a big fan of your work and a big fan of your organization.

I have the app on my phone, I will gladly discuss it with my colleague, Mr. Champoux.

who now has the app on his telephone, so we'll be doing push-ups after the meeting.

Mr. Antunes, I'm really, really excited to support Canada Moves month in any way that I can and to celebrate ParticipACTION's 50th anniversary together with Canadians. I would love to hear more about removing the barrier of affordability for 2,500 community organizations that would get grants. I'd also like to highlight that we announced $14 million for community sport organizations on Friday. It wasn't the best time of the week to share really good news, but it is good news. It is the remainder that Mr. Shields—I think it was—referenced earlier.

My question is with respect to the 60% of organizations that have not been able to access the support. How can we broaden eligibility and how can we support Canada Moves month and hopefully make 2021 Canada Moves year? We both know that it's incredibly necessary and important.

[Elio Antunes]

There's much to do. One kind of focused opportunity, as we mentioned, is to declare June as Canada Moves month. Our idea was that we're already implementing a community engagement initiative called the ParticipACTION community better challenge, which is trying to find the most active communities across the country.

That initiative is already being funded and invested in by the Government of Canada. What we'd like to do is leverage that opportunity to provide up to $10,000 in grants to up to 2,500 organizations, a $25-million one-time commitment to be able to resource those local organizations to kick-start re-engagement in their local programming. What we would do is leverage the opportunity that we already have in the market with communities, so now let's just resource the local organizations to be able to actively participate, attract and engage people in those local programs as part of the ParticipACTION community better challenge.

Our expectation is that the benefits of that kick-start will be far-reaching well beyond June and our community better challenge. Those organizations will have the ability to continue to re-engage local community members in their programming.

[Adam van Koeverden, Liberal, Milton, ON]

I'll just do a quick follow-up.

I'm curious about the 60% of organizations that do not have access. How can we broaden eligibility? What is the barrier to access?

[Elio Antunes]

We work with a lot of them. We have about 10,000 local organizations that we work with on an ongoing basis. The challenge is that a lot of those organizations are volunteer based. They're small organizations, and they may not have the resources to be able to go out and fill up locations or get corporate sponsorship.

For all of the programming that we do, we usually have micro-grants associated with their programming to provide support to those local organizations to be able to reduce barriers to participation. This will be a significant influx of revenue that these organizations may not be eligible to receive in any other way.

My answer would be that the eligibility would be based on organizations that are connected already to our organization and that are delivering programming. We would obviously have committees in place to look at criteria. Under-represented and equity-seeking groups would be part of that. Then we would provide those grants, and they would implement those programs and report back.

[The Chair, Liberal, Scott Simms]

Thank you very much, everyone.

Thank you to our witnesses: Alex Sarian from Arts Commons; Frédéric Julien from the Canadian Association for the Performing Arts; Elio Antunes from ParticipACTION, who taught me how to use the ParticipACTION app. I suggest you download one from an app store near you.

We'll see you again this coming Friday for the same subject.

The meeting is adjourned.