I can, absolutely.
In our budget submission, our second recommendation is around a tourism-focused festivals program. Going back several years, some may remember the marquee tourism events program. Ostensibly, the essence of that program was to incentivize larger festivals across the country through a tourism lens to grow their activity and, through marketing, etc., try to increase their audience base and therefore the exponential direct and indirect tourism benefits.
We're supporting festivals to a certain extent through the CAPF program and through the tourism growth program to a certain extent. There is an events component there. However, our recommendation around the festivals program is fundamental to really leveraging the music tourism piece. That's where the opportunity is. Every market in this country would love to have a Taylor Swift event. We have Bruce Springsteen coming this weekend to Ottawa. It's incredible. We just don't think about the infrastructure. It's just a huge opportunity.
I know you're not used to having live music people come to the finance committee. In a 30-year career, this is my first time presenting, and I'm so happy to be here to talk about this, because from a policy perspective, it's low-hanging fruit in our opinion; it truly is. This is not about what's wrong with arts and culture and how COVID crushed us; this is about looking at how, as I said in my remarks, we take on the risk and everybody benefits—not just the hotels and the restaurants that I talked about, but also transit, the local corner store, the parking lot and the airlines, etc. It is a way to pay it forward, unlike many other industries.
The opportunity is to sit down with the live music industry to really unpack the scalability of this industry. I know that Taylor Swift is not necessarily coming to every market, but when we look at it from a policy perspective, we can start to fine-tune how to leverage live music activity.