Jon, maybe we can handle this together.
There are two sides to this coin. There's a non-profit side and a commercial side.
On the commercial side—especially during COVID, when the government put $70 million into the independent concert promotion and venue sector to save the infrastructure—there was a very comprehensive conversation at Canadian Heritage about what would define the eligibility criteria. In my opinion, it was too narrow, and we lost a bunch of venues as a result. However, there are a few pockets on the commercial side where.... In the province of Ontario many years ago, for instance, we had something called “Vision for Ontario's Live Music Industry”, which we prepared in partnership with the government at the time. We defined what a venue is, a commercial venue.
There are different jurisdictions that have looked at the amount of Canadian content on stage, the size of capacity, and the business-model shapes, such as whether it's owned by a sole proprietor or a conglomerate, etc. There's that side of things.
Then there's the non-profit side. Typically, a program like the Canada arts presentation fund would outlay eligibility criteria and have something like a development component to bring smaller venues into that space to help them scale over time.
I think it really depends on what aspect we're looking at, but certainly there's a conversation to be had about understanding the way the business is today. It's changed fundamentally, and not just because of COVID, but over the last many years. What do artists need? What do audiences need? Where are the gaps? Where are the opportunities? Again, I'm a broken record today, but how can policy respond to that?