Thank you, Mr. Chair.
I want to thank all of our witnesses. This has been extremely helpful to hear.
I would like to start with Mr. Jang. We haven't heard from him since the beginning, but he really set the tone.
It was something you said, Mr. Jang. You said that artists don't say how much they make per year; they say how much they make per month. As a musician for my whole life, that really resonated with me. I actually would set goals for how much I would need to make each week for what bills would get paid that week, so I wanted to set the stage. We've talked about it today: The median income of artists is almost 50% lower than of all Canadians.
The volatility, especially in the performing arts section, which we would be very aware of as we have heard that repeatedly, is not because people didn't want to work, but because they couldn't work. We've also heard that most artists don't have any of the social benefits such as paid vacation time, sick leave, maternity or paternity leave, supplementary health care through an employer or any kind of retirement or pension, yet at the same time, about half the artists are self-employed.
As you have seen, your performing arts centre has so many different sectors. What extra challenges do you feel all those factors have for someone whose career already was precarious before the pandemic and now faces a sector that admittedly, as you said, is going to be one of the last to recover? What can we learn from supports and what can we do moving forward?