As members may have seen, the main estimates basically are a snapshot of my department at a moment in time. About half a billion dollars is specifically dedicated through a number of envelopes to make sure creative industries are supported. If you look at the impact of that in Canada and look at some of the statistics that the movie producers association is putting out, you see that this supports 118,000 jobs that contribute $12 billion to the economy. That's not nothing, and it isn't money that we're just throwing down the drain without seeing a return on investment.
Obviously, some of the shows that I mentioned earlier are doing amazingly well on the world stage, but there are ones that are consumed here, sometimes over dozens of seasons. I've visited the set of Murdoch Mysteries, for example, and former prime minister Harper had a small role in it. I think he enjoyed it. It was an old-school role, so it was fitting.
These are all produced here in Canada, and they allow people to get modest support from the Government of Canada, including sometimes less than modest tax credits. They employ, in the case of the movie producers association stats, 118,000 people in Canada and, in the aggregate stats across the industry that my portfolio supports, several hundred thousand jobs in an economy that contributes $64 billion to Canada. That's not nothing, and it rivals any of the industries that we speak about in Parliament, sometimes a little more often than this.