Of course.
The budget contained assistance for the large festivals, on the one hand, and there was other assistance for the smaller events from Canadian Heritage. At that time, the budget did not provide a definition of a large festival or a small festival. It took a few months before the government decided that large festivals were festivals with annual revenues of over $10 million. We recommended that the threshold be much lower, because in reality there are only about 25 events in Canada that have that kind of annual revenue. You know who they are; they're the big festivals. For the smaller festivals, the assistance is extremely diluted. At Canadian Heritage, there is a large envelope of $200 million, but it is used for just about everything, and there is a much smaller amount allocated to festivals.
In reality, COVID‑19 amplifies the funding problem on the festival side, because before the crisis, things were already not going well. Programs were frozen for over 10 years and there was no new investment. In 2019, there was a new two-year investment, which was then extended for one year in the 2020 Fall Economic Statement, and then extended again for two years in the budget.
What we'd like to do is get it over with and make these investments permanent. There's no reason to do it one year at a time. So that's another one of our recommendations, to make these investments in the programs permanent, that is, the Canada Arts Presentation Fund and the Building Communities Through Arts and Heritage program.