Good morning, Mr. Chair and members of the committee. Thank you for inviting the Fédération culturelle canadienne-française to speak before the Standing Committee on Official Languages as part of the midterm report on the Roadmap for Canada's Linguistic Duality 2008-2013.
I would first like to give you an introduction to our organization. The Fédération culturelle canadienne-française is a national organization whose mission is to promote the artistic and cultural expression of francophone and Acadian communities. As the president of the FCCF, I am speaking to you today on behalf of our 21 members, some 3,000 artists and 150 arts and cultural development organizations, working in the francophone and Acadian communities across Canada. I have been active in the FCCF since 2006, and I also serve as the executive director of the largest francophone cultural centre in Ontario, MIFO in Orleans, which runs a number of programs including professional artist residencies and an art gallery that features local artists, as well as a music school and summer camps that promote arts learning.
I would like to take the next few minutes to outline how investments in arts and culture that are included in the roadmap are significant, to demonstrate that the projects they have generated have had direct impacts in our communities, and to discuss why the next roadmap should include a specific arts and culture component.
We would like to thank the government for identifying the arts and culture sector as one of the five priorities in the current roadmap. Recognizing the priority was a step in the right direction. Moreover, there seems to be consensus on the importance of arts and culture in the roadmap, since several groups that have appeared before this committee over the last month have identified this sector as being one of the most important ways to promote the learning, practice and visibility of the language, as well is the rootedness of the people of our communities in a pan-Canadian francophone space.
With the roadmap, the arts and culture sector has obtained $14 million through the Cultural Development Fund, $4.5 million through the Music Showcase for artists from official language minority communities, and $5 million through the National Translation Program for Book Publishing. In short, a direct overall investment of $23.5 million. The Canadian francophonie arts and culture sector has also benefited from indirect impacts of the roadmap, which we will return to a little later in our presentation.
Let us take a brief look at each of these programs. The Cultural Development Fund has several objectives, one of which is to promote the contribution of arts, culture and heritage to the sustainable development of communities in Canadian society. As part of the evaluation process for applications to this fund, 110 community projects have been funded. The Cultural Development Fund has also funded priority projects in collaboration with the provincial governments of Ontario, New Brunswick, Saskatchewan and Manitoba. The fund's leverage effect is significant. Indeed, it can be said that one of the fund's many success stories is the creation by the Ontario Arts Council of two new pilot programs in visual arts and media arts at the Franco-Ontarian Arts Office, which involved total funding of $500,000 from the CDF and the OAC. The projects funded by the CDF have also made it possible to establish interesting partnerships, increase professional development activities and develop new audiences, in addition to providing Canadians with access to the richness of the artistic, cultural and heritage expression of the artists in their communities. We repeat that this additional injection of $14 million was greatly appreciated, but our task here is to evaluate the roadmap and therefore to look at aspects that could be improved should the roadmap be renewed.
In this sense, we would like to draw your attention to two weaknesses in this program. The CDF is a fund that finances one-time special projects. This type of funding does not allow for the creation of lasting real benefits. The fund the arts and culture sector really needs is a fund that strengthens existing arts and culture organizations by providing them with stable and ongoing multi-year operating funding and by making it possible to support all the stages of the cultural continuum. As mentioned by the representatives from the Fédération des communautés francophones et acadienne du Canada regarding the roadmap as a whole, there also exists a challenge in terms of transparency with respect to the CDF. Indeed, it is difficult to obtain access to clear and complete data about the fund.
As for the Music Showcases for artists from official language minority communities program, it was designed to respond to the following two main objectives: promote the artists' career development, and promote access for communities to musical performances in their own language. The program is greatly appreciated both by the Alliance nationale de l'industrie musicale and by the artists working in the song and music industry. Since 2008, it has funded 171 projects for a total amount of $1,623,404. Without a shadow of a doubt, this success is due to the fact that the program criteria were developed with representatives of artists from official language minority communities. The criteria therefore reflects the needs of the community.
The program has fulfilled its mandate in all respects. A portion of the funding is allocated to events enabling artists from francophone and Acadian communities to offer a showcase of their work. The result is clear and measurable: the number of shows by our artists has seen a marked increase. Several of the artists are currently developing national or international careers, among them Damien Robitaille in Ontario, Surveillantes from Manitoba and Radio Radio in Acadia. This increase in artist tours has also ensured that the people of our communities have more access to music performances in their language, facilitating the emergence of the strong and necessary cultural identity that Ms. Pilon of the Commission nationale des parents francophones spoke to you about on December 1st.
Unlike the previous two programs, the National Translation Program for Book Publishing was not designed in response to the development challenges facing the publishers in our communities, but in order to promote linguistic duality. Even though it could be helpful, it does not meet the priority needs of small businesses like French-Canadian publishing houses and indeed very few of them have benefited from this program. The ecosystem of the book is fragile. This ecosystem has to be supported for books to be able to properly reach their audience. It is our hope that the next roadmap will offer a program based on the real needs of publishers, following exhaustive consultations with the community.
As promised, I will touch briefly on the roadmap's indirect impacts on the arts and culture sector. As you are no doubt aware, schools and school-community centres are at the heart of the development of French-Canadian communities. Schools and our communities have a double mission, namely to foster academic success, and to protect, promote and convey the language and the culture of the communities that they serve. The art-culture-education link is of paramount importance for ensuring the demographic renewal of our communities.
As mentioned by Mr. Paul from the Fédération nationale des conseils scolaires francophones, the roadmap made it possible to implement several projects from the federation's action plan, including the Table de l'axe action culturelle et identitaire, better known as TAACI. It is due to the cooperation made possible by this table that the spheres of education and culture jointly led the project Trousse du passeur culturel, a project that documents and catalyzes the contribution of arts and culture to identity building. This nationwide project has made it possible to offer training to all francophone school principals across Canada, thus enabling them to better integrate arts and culture into their educational projects.
We could continue for a long time sharing with you other success stories of projects funded by the road map that have had an impact on the arts and culture sector, but we would also like to use this time to talk about the roadmap's future. I believe we have been clear: the FCCF would like the government to renew the roadmap and even expand it to include an arts and culture component. During the forum "Être artiste dans la francophonie canadienne: Forum sur les pratiques artistiques de la francophonie canadienne", presented in June 2011, the participants took the time to report on the current state of the sector.
It is clear that over the last 40 years, the institutions that the communities have set up ensure that we can continue to build. The roadmap's programs have provided new funding, which continues to build and strengthen fragile but important and necessary gains. In short, these investments contribute to the profitability of previous investments and ensure that they remain profitable for a long time to come, providing better returns. According to the FCCF, this arts and culture component could be expanded to support the following areas of intervention: cultural development, arts infrastructure, artists, cultural industries and access to the arts.
We know that the members of this community share our vision, namely that it be possible for all Canadians to flourish in French throughout the country thanks to communities being able to assert, show, reinvent themselves and innovate. The FCCF firmly believes that this could be made possible through dynamic cultural development, accessible artistic creation, professional and visible cultural products and constructive strategic links established with other sectors, thus allowing for the emergence of life in French. We believe that an arts and culture component in the next roadmap can make this possible since this funding complements existing programs.
Once again, thank you for your warm welcome and for your attention. Éric Dubeau, the executive director of the FCCF, and I are available to answer any questions you may have. We look forward to reading the report that the committee will publish following this study on the impacts of the roadmap.