Thank you, Madam Chair. I appreciate this.
Thank you, Minister, for being here. Your passion for the arts is clearly on display.
I have said this before, but I will start by saying that science is getting us out of this pandemic, but it's the arts that are getting us through this pandemic. The artists are the people we turn to in order to make sense of what's happened and the challenges we've faced in the last two years.
Making art takes dedication, and that dedication requires support. We get more with what we support. I have heard many times from our artists that our government supports were a lifeline to their sector. That is the term they used.
Throughout the study, we have seen how far-reaching the Canadian Heritage programs are, the number of sectors that fall under the scope of Heritage and the number of programs that are created specifically to support those in the cultural industry.
Can you take a step back, look at those last two years, and speak to the scale and scope of the funding that has been created since the pandemic started?