Thank you very much.
Good afternoon and thank you, Mr. Chair and members of the committee.
It's a pleasure and honour to be here, not only as the CEO of Symphony Nova Scotia but as a representative for Orchestras Canada. You received a written submission earlier on behalf of the Canadian orchestral community, whose membership includes 40 professional orchestras across the country with memberships in all provinces, plus another 90 orchestral groups and training organizations.
The thoughts that came forward from my colleagues over the summer that had been included in the submission can be boiled down probably into two ideas. The primary one is our unanimous support for the work of the Canada Council for the Arts and our gratitude for the permanent $30 million increase that was recently made to the council's budget by the Government of Canada.
The second thing I'd like to cover briefly later is the encouragement of the continuation and enhancement or expansion of some of the programs that the Government of Canada has put in place that have been tremendously successful in helping the orchestral community develop private sources of funding, particularly ones that are sustainable and bring stability into this sector.
As a bit of background, Canadian orchestras engage more than 5,000 professional musicians each year, as well as many more staff and suppliers and volunteers. We're all involved in co-productions of choirs, dance and opera companies, and many more community collaborations with music schools and faculties, local festivals, presenters, classrooms, libraries, health care providers, charities, and many other opportunities to expand our reach and impact through community engagement.
Symphony Nova Scotia, for example, performs almost 100 times every year to more than 40,000 people, at least 8,000 of whom are young listeners. Our annual budget is just under $3 million, and 72% of our annual costs are directed on stage for artistic and production costs. While Halifax is our base, this year we'll also perform in Wolfville, Amherst, Pictou, Lunenburg, and Antigonish. This is a fairly familiar picture with orchestras all across Canada. Community engagement is of vital importance to us to expand our bases in the community, but also to ensure that we're there in the future as well. You'll find what Symphony Nova Scotia does is pretty well what all orchestras across the country are doing as well.
Already this season we've performed a week-long Brahms festival to sold-out audiences, a world premier of a new ballet, and partnered with the Department of Theatre of Dalhousie University to bring to life A Spider's Tale, a children's story written by Binnie Brennan, a member of the orchestra.
Orchestras across Canada served audiences totalling 2.3 million people in 2005 and 2006. A study recently published by Hill Strategies Research states that 10% of Canadians over the age of 15 attended a symphonic or classical music performance during 2005. This is up from 8% of the population in the last study in 1992.
Another study by ACOA, the Atlantic Canada Opportunities Agency, revealed that in 2005 the cultural sector generated approximately $2.1 billion for the economy of Atlantic Canada, and approximately $33 billion nationally, or 3% of the gross domestic product.
The Canada Council for the Arts refers to the cultural sector as “the creative engine of our community”. I love this phrase. This is something that they're bringing in as part of the strategic planning exercise they're doing right now. The Province of Nova Scotia recently recognized the importance of this sector last week when it announced in the Speech from the Throne that it would double the province's culture budget over the next three years.
To expand a little more on those two main points that I brought up earlier, first of all, thank you very much for your support of the Canada Council for the Arts. The work this organization does is extraordinary. That Symphony Nova Scotia is a vital connected part of our community today is in large part a credit to the vision behind that funding support.
Second, we recognize the Government of Canada's significant investment in the Canadian arts and heritage sustainability program provided through the Department of Canadian Heritage, which is due to expire in 2009-10. Programs made possible through this spending package with the greatest impact on us and our communities include an endowment incentives component. The matching gifts provided through this program have been an invaluable catalyst for many orchestras that embark on endowment campaigns to create, through their foundations, a stable source of future income. Symphony Nova Scotia's foundation, for example, has grown from just over $600,000 in 2001 to just over $3 million today. This security dramatically extends our planning horizon and allows us to embark on creative partnerships and collaborative education programs in the future.
The forms of financial support for you to consider perhaps expanding or developing upon, ones that will help us to increase private sector support and a wider base, include the development of a coherent national charity strategy, clarification of the taxation of charitable remainder trusts under the Income Tax Act, streamlining of the federal charitable donation tax credit, and reducing or eliminating capital gains on the gifts of shares in privately held companies to registered charities. We have all noticed a tremendous impact of the work you did in eliminating the capital gains on the publicly traded shares.
Thank you very much.