Thank you, members of the committee. Good morning.
My remarks will be bilingual, so I invite you to use your earpiece.
My name is Martin Roy and I'm Executive Director of Festivals and Major Events Canada, which goes by the acronym FAME and represents over 500 festivals and events across the country. Today, I'm speaking not only on behalf of my organization, but also, and much more broadly, on behalf of 34 Canadian organizations and associations that are part of the #FutureOfLive coalition and are major players in the field of entertainment, from every province. I encourage you to identify organizations in your own area from the list I've provided to the committee.
On September 27, we held a press conference in Montreal to say that the situation is critical for the cultural sector, and that it is unsustainable. We made the decision to publicly appeal to the Minister of Finance to break the deadlock and resolve what could become a crisis within months. After reaching out to three successive ministers of Canadian Heritage and opposition parties, after raising awareness among at least 75 MPs, after obtaining letters of support from 29 of them, our coalition had no other choice. Allow me to summarize the issue.
The base budgets for two important Canadian Heritage programs that support the presentation of shows and festivals—the building communities through arts and heritage program, or BCAH, and the Canada arts presentation fund, or CAPF—have not been reviewed since 2007. Funding for these programs totals $50.2 million and currently supports more than 1,500 organizations.
To mitigate the issues of oversubscription and underfunding for both programs, the government provided $15 million per year in 2019-20, but for two years only. These temporary funds have been renewed three times for BCAH, but that is not even enough to maintain grants received at prepandemic funding levels, due in part to a 12% increase in the number of clients.
Clients who, before the pandemic, received over $100,000 under the BCAH program were only granted a maximum of $61,700 for 2023‑2024. That represents 40% less than during the 2010s, and the downward trend is simply accelerating.
A client who received $109,000 in 2014 would receive $137,000 today when factoring for inflation. Instead, they are receiving $61,700. That's a 40% shortfall in current dollars and a 55% shortfall in constant dollars. This can't go on. The downward trend must stop.
The CAPF situation is particularly alarming. Even with the temporary increase granted in 2019, the program’s budget has already reached a 20-year low in constant dollars. Worse still, this one-off increase has not been renewed beyond 2023–24. This form of programmed compression raises concerns among CAPF clients, who will face cuts averaging 23% starting next spring.
I can assure you that if these cuts materialize, they will create a chaotic situation throughout Canada's cultural landscape. The sector is already struggling to cope with inflation and a certain amount of destructuring resulting from the pandemic. It's not right to receive a letter a few weeks before an event, informing you of such a drop in funding because the overall envelope is no longer sufficient. Nor is it right to condemn all the associations that come under our umbrella to begging every year for the renewal or extension of investments that you simply refuse to integrate into the base program budgets. An entire sector, which has already had more than its fair share of problems with COVID‑19, is being undermined and jeopardized. Not only do we need to integrate the 2019 sums into the programs' base budgets, but we also need to inject further funds, because over 15 years, inflation accounts for nearly 40% and because there are more and more clients—at least 12% more in the last few years.
We therefore reiterate our request that one-off sums granted since 2019 be permanently integrated into these programs' base budgets. We are also asking for a proper historic catch‑up, i.e., an increase of $21 million to the Canada Arts Presentation Fund and $9 million to the BCAH program, in addition to the temporary sums renewed on a piecemeal basis since 2019.
I assure you that the prevailing situation is increasingly jeopardizing the ability of presenters to keep culture, its artists and artisans alive, as well as make ends meet while generating positive cultural, social, economic and tourism spinoffs for their communities. In your ridings, venues of all kinds, such as theatres and festivals, are at risk. I therefore ask for your support.