Although art museums across the country were severely affected by the pandemic, they reinvented themselves on numerous occasions to continue their role as arts and community leaders across Canada. They have made an important contribution to the lives of Canadians throughout the crisis. Federal support, primarily through the Canada Council's and Canadian Heritage's wage and top-up subsidies, has been essential to the survival of Canadian museums. We are extremely grateful. Thank you.
This financial support has helped us, among other things, to reinvent ourselves on many occasions over the past 24 months. We have transformed our activities and migrated our community and educational actions to the web with a very high success rate. However, this has come at an immense financial and human cost. The lessons learned over the past two years will positively shape the future of museums and galleries in Canada.
However, Madam Chair, our members are still hurting.
Most art museums were closed for a minimum of seven months last year. Some still are, like the Ottawa Art Gallery and many university galleries.
As you know, varying provincial guidelines and the inability to forecast COVID-19 variants and waves have seriously affected all of our members. The main revenue-generating activities of our members died in 2020 and never came back. That includes educational and community activities, event room rentals, philanthropic activities, corporate sponsorships and membership fees.
The pandemic has forced all museums to shuffle their programming at the cost of cancelling exhibitions, closing others early, and cancelling tours in Canada and abroad. Adapting to a shift in visitors, now primarily regional and virtual, has also been a great challenge. Less tangible, but highly important, are the human resource impacts, which is a sector challenge even in the best of times. The pandemic has further exacerbated this with employee loss, retention and attraction challenges, impacts on the mental well-being of employees and communities, and remote and hybrid work adaptations.
The future does not look bright financially, as it will take months, if not years, for revenue-generating activities to reach their 2019 levels again. We're actually working on a three-to five-year horizon to achieve this.