Good morning and welcome to Edmonton. Thank you for the opportunity to speak today.
My name is Paul Lucas, and I represent the festival consortium here in Edmonton. We have 44 festivals. We meet monthly. We're an advocacy group.
I'm going to be speaking a little bit about Taste of Edmonton, which is one of the festivals I produce here in Edmonton. I'd like to address Mr. Peter Julian's question about economic impact and numbers for Quebec.
I have some statistics for you. We attract over 2.8 million people to our festivals. There are about 44 of them. We generate 254 event days with 54 full-time staff. We have over 100,000 hours of volunteer time. We're kind of the backbone of the community in terms of contributing back and getting a lot out of the community. With close to 100,000 hours invested, we feel that we're well-entrenched in this community.
My own festival, as an example, attracts 378,000 people over 10 days. It's the largest outdoor food festival in Canada. As for our economic impact, we generate about $10 million to the economic impact of Canada. Our tax bill is $1.6 million. Of that, $850,000 goes to the federal government, $449,000 goes to the provincial government and $134,000 goes to the municipal government. We have an investment given back to us through the Edmonton Arts Council of $100,000. I'd say that's a pretty good investment in terms of what we return to the community.
As many of our festivals are struggling—and we do struggle—funding has not gone up very significantly. I know it's the way of the world. We try to be as lean and mean as we possibly can, but when you're running on 54 people putting those kinds of numbers together you're the sponsor, you're the cleanup boy, you're doing everything possible. We run these things on shoestrings.
The added problems we're facing now with security are tremendous. It's putting a lot of pressure on the ability to grow our festivals.
One last thing I'd like to bring to your attention is that my colleagues in the festival industry generate, on average, 19% of tourism created right here in Edmonton. We would really love to see that number grow. We're a northern region. We struggle for every dollar we can get. We would like to see a growth strategy within our festival community, particularly as Edmonton is such a northern city.
Thank you for the opportunity to speak.