Good afternoon, Mr. Chair, ladies and gentlemen, committee members. I am National Director of the Canadian Conference of the Arts.
My CCA is different from Mr. Paton's CCA.
The Canadian Conference of the Arts is the oldest and biggest arts and culture organization in Canada. Our members come from all areas of activity and all disciplines in the country, from painting in their studio in Victoria to the St. John's Symphony Orchestra as well as the major unions and associations of employers in our cultural industries.
For more than 20 years, CCA has taken part in the consultations of the federal Minister of Finance and this committee on tax and budgetary measures that might optimize investments in this sector of our creative economy.
Public investment in the Canadian cultural sector is an issue of perennial importance to the CCA and its members. While we think further such investments in creativity are required, we rejoice in the recent announcement by the government for an ongoing increase of $30 million to the budget of the Canada Council for the Arts.
Similarly, we are happy that the government is investing $30 million in building communities through the arts and heritage and, more particularly, that $7 million is supplementing the arts presentation program.
While we also rejoice that the latest budget has reinstated the $5 million for the summer internship program for museums, we note that the long promised and much needed new museum policies and the related increased investments in our heritage are still missing in action.
Of equal importance to us is the issue of adequate funding and support of the internationalization of Canadian artists, creators, and arts professionals. The CCA hopes the standing committee will recognize the value of all programs under the Departments of Canadian Heritage and Foreign Affairs and International Trade, which aim to build Canada's image abroad and develop new markets for our artists and cultural industries.
Along with all our colleagues from the non-profit sector, the CCA hopes you will also use your report to encourage the Minister of Finance and the President of the Treasury Board to expedite the implementation of the recommendations of the blue ribbon panel on grants and contributions. This report contains many constructive recommendations and properly acknowledges that grants and contributions recipients are partners with the federal government in delivering valued services to Canadians.
The recommendations regarding multi-year funding and the development of an accountability framework, commensurate with the size of the grant or contribution and the risk involved, are eminently sensible.
The Canadian economy is currently undergoing a fundamental transformation at it passes from the industrial to the information era, which some call the creative economy.
In the previous model, the Canadian population could count on working for the same employer until retirement age. Today, people change jobs a number of times in their lives, and the number of self-employed workers is rising at an increasing rate.
Similarly, lifelong learning is now the norm as individuals acquire new skills to remain competitive and productive members of the workforce. Yet for all of these changes, the federal government has not moved to retool its programs and services, which are firmly rooted in the industrial employer-employee model.
Benefits such as maternity leave, disability allowances, and employment insurance are denied to self-employed Canadians. This erosion of the universal nature of the social benefit programs is constant and affects more and more Canadians every year, as it has affected artists for a very long time.
The CCA therefore recommends that the federal government commission a task force to examine how self-employed Canadians are currently treated under aging and increasingly obsolete conceptions of the fundamental nature of the Canadian labour force. Such an investigation would also be asked to examine tax policy as it affects the self-employed.
In that regard, the CCA has long recommended that income averaging be reintroduced into the tax system, but the Department of Finance continues to turn a deaf ear. If income averaging is not possible, we must come up with other solutions to a system that is clearly unfair for an increasing number of workers in all areas of activity.
We therefore invite you to encourage the Minister of Finance to include this issue in the mandate of the task force we spoke of earlier.
The place of copyright and residual income is central to success in the creative economy. For the past several years, the CCA has called upon the federal government to grant a limited exemption from federal income tax on copyright and residual income, which is the way it's done in Quebec, among other places. This form of incentive rewards creativity and innovation and bolsters Canadian productivity and competitiveness. The Minister of Finance has not yet accepted this reasoning, which has received the noted support of the Canadian Council of Chief Executives.
Finally, another dimension of the changes within the Canadian labour market is the prospect of the retirement of baby boomers in all sectors of the economy. We have to look into a mentorship program, and I'll get back to that if you're interested.
Thank you for your time.