Evidence of meeting #25 for Official Languages in the 41st Parliament, 2nd Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was artists.
A recording is available from Parliament.
President, Townshippers' Association
I am going to ask Ms. Hunting to answer that question because she has the expertise on that.
Conservative
President, Townshippers' Association
She could provide some clarifications that I could not.
My apologies to you, sir.
Executive Director, Townshippers' Association
When it comes to funding for the Townshippers' Association, I can tell you that last year, 76% of our money came from federal subsidies. For the most part, the subsidies came from the Canadian Heritage program. We also have programs that stem from Health Canada in connection with the Community Health and Social Services Network, or CHSSN, to promote health and ensure access to health and social services in English for Quebec’s English-speaking communities.
We also receive provincial subsidies, the largest coming from the Make Way for YOUth program, which focuses on youth in the region. We have an immigration officer who works on recruiting and retaining young anglophone or English-speaking professionals in the regions. The problem with this subsidy is that our immigration officer works for seven municipalities at the same time. For the francophone community there is one immigration officer per RCM. Our officer has to do seven times the work of her colleagues with the same funding.
The funding we get from memberships represents roughly 1.5% of our overall funding. The membership fees do not really cover the association's operating costs. They more or less cover the cost of printing a quarterly review to provide members with information on the English-speaking community, such as services offered, and activities and initiatives available in the youth, health, and arts and culture sectors. Municipal subsidies are available for shorter-term, targeted projects, but it depends on the subject and the sector.
Conservative
Jacques Gourde Conservative Lotbinière—Chutes-de-la-Chaudière, QC
I know you do not work in the education sector, but sometimes young people in the anglophone communities have to move in order to attend an English-language school. The school boards receive subsidies from the province, In fact, it is federal money that is transferred to the province to help your communities.
Do you have any problems getting the money you need for school transportation?
Executive Director, Townshippers' Association
I can't speak for the Eastern Townships school board, but I know that transportation is always a challenge in the regions.
In our region, the Eastern Townships, the sparse English-speaking population is scattered over an area the size of Belgium. There are some children and teenagers who have to commute between home and school for an hour and a half or two hours, twice a day every day. They spend three or four hours a day on the bus. I had to do that too when I was growing up. I spent less time on the bus than some of my fellow students, depending on where they were from. It's a lot of time and it's always a question of money.
Conservative
Jacques Gourde Conservative Lotbinière—Chutes-de-la-Chaudière, QC
Thank you.
My next question is for Mr. Rodgers.
We are all very proud of artists who use their regional accent and present us with something different. I think that Canadians love to hear artists who take the time in their art to promote their part of the country, who they are, and so on. We all benefit from that.
Do the Canadian programs help these artists promote their culture and ours at the same time? These artists enrich Canadian culture. We like hearing different accents, for example, an anglophone singing in French with a regional anglophone accent. It's so interesting.
Do you have any examples of that?
Executive Director, English Language Arts Network Quebec
There really aren't any plans to support that type of initiative. Some artists sing in French to appeal to a francophone audience. I can name two or three anglophones who speak French well and who write songs in French in order to reach a francophone audience. There are others, like Susie Arioli, who you've all probably heard of. She does not sing in French, but at her shows she speaks a sort of “franglais”, which is quite interesting.
Personally, I think we should be promoting works that speak to the Anglo-Quebec experience. Over the past 10 years, I have read 100 or so novels. They are often love letters written in Montreal, for example, by anglophones living in certain neighbourhoods who have certain ethnic backgrounds. It would be good if those letters could be read outside Quebec or translated in order to be read in Quebec and generate discussion.
We contacted Vidéotron to create MYtv, to go with MAtv, specifically to ensure that there are exchanges between the two communities. There needs to be programs on the artists produced in English and dubbed or subtitled in order to promote dialogue. We said the same thing to CBC/Radio-Canada, which has the role of mediator to play between the two communities. There is a lot to do and not a lot of subsidies for this type of initiative.
Conservative
Conservative
Corneliu Chisu Conservative Pickering—Scarborough East, ON
Thank you very much, Mr. Chair, and thank you very much to the witnesses for their presentations.
The presentation from ELAN is very optimistic. From the Townshippers' Association, it's quite a pessimistic one. I will start with the most optimistic situation first.
You told us in your presentation that over the past 10 years there has been a surge in arts and culture activities in Quebec's anglophone communities. What factors would you say are behind the flourishing arts and culture scene? Your artists are going, but not necessarily only to the United States, and so on. How are you approaching the new European scene? I think it's a great consumer of arts from Canada, and has been for a long time.
Executive Director, English Language Arts Network Quebec
There are two parts to the question, so let's answer the first part.
Why there are so many artists in Quebec is a bit of a mystery. We're only starting to figure it out. You have to go back to the seventies and the eighties, which we alluded to, when there was a mass exodus of anglos from Quebec, including many artists, for all kinds of reasons. I remember 20 years ago the writers’ union in Quebec would not even allow the term “anglo Québécois”. If you were anglo, you were not Québécois; you were anglo Canadian. There was a whole discourse about who was Québécois and who wasn't. It was not a welcoming environment for anglos. There are some interesting studies on that.
Francophone culture—and I also alluded to this earlier—is an appreciation of the arts. There was a flourishing of francophone culture in Quebec in certain areas, such as theatre, film, and multimedia. People came to Quebec to see what was going on and liked it. Some people had trips back and forth after Expo 67, but there was a major change in the political and social climate after the 1995 referendum.The feeling was, let's move on to something else. There was an openness. It changed everything. People started coming. There was a snowball effect. People brought their friends. There were all kinds of economic conditions. Quebec had low rents. It was close to the States and close to Europe.
Now there are these people there. They weren't brought there by programs, policies, or an organization. They came there for all kinds of reasons, personal and individual.
Now that we have these artists there, we're trying to structure them, but there are very small organizations. ELAN, for example, has been around for 10 years. We have two employees. We don't have the capacity to be thinking about what our policy is with Europe. What the Townshippers' was referring to.... We have all of these artists. We have this tremendous natural resource. If we invest a little bit more in organizations like ELAN, the Quebec Writers' Federation, and the Quebec Drama Federation, to create policies and programs that will allow people to survive economically and to develop new markets in the States and Europe, the benefits for everyone would be enormous.
I'm optimistic, but it's a fragile optimism. It could all disappear tomorrow.
Conservative
Corneliu Chisu Conservative Pickering—Scarborough East, ON
How are you measuring success? For example, you are telling me that it was a great development of the arts in anglophone and also francophone.... How are you measuring the success of your organization? These artists who are successful.... Probably there's an economic study. They go back to the community, back to the sector and develop the arts more.
Executive Director, English Language Arts Network Quebec
Well, there are two large directions we work in. One is connecting artists to the community, which is where our work with education and health is important. Artists can be extremely beneficial for communities working with youth at risk and for stimulating education. There's a connection there between art and community via youth which is very important.
We also see artists as having a very strong role to play in creating social dialogue in Quebec. Once upon a time, all anglos were millionaires living Westmount. In some people's minds, that is still true. There are probably more people working in the arts than in banking in Quebec, by a margin of 10 to 1.
What we find is that when artists are in leadership roles, there is a much more positive dialogue with the francophone community. A few years ago, the president of QCGN was Linda Leith, who was the founder of Blue Metropolis festival. Because she's an artist, writer, and translator, her relationship to government and to other francophone groups was much more positive than someone who comes from a business background would have. I think artists have this role of developing the community, and also, with this linguistic duality, of developing a social relationship. Where my optimism is most strong is in those two areas.
It's not arts, purely. I mean, people are doing their arts on their own. It's the social connection benefits of the arts that are really positive.
Conservative
Conservative
Corneliu Chisu Conservative Pickering—Scarborough East, ON
I have one more very brief question for the Eastern Townships.
What are the main economic activities of the anglophones living in the Eastern Townships? What can be done to turn around, let's say, the downturn, like in the arts? What can be done? What is your opinion on that?
President, Townshippers' Association
What you've identified is precisely one of the issues we've tried to get at.
When we're dealing with a rural community, you could go to places in Quebec
—in Gaspésie and the north shore—
and what you'll find is that exactly the same kind of problem exists. What we find is that, as the young people become better educated.... In the case of young anglophones, for the most part, if we're looking at people under the age of 35, they are fluently bilingual. What happens, though, is that because of the lack of opportunity, there is a migration to the larger centres. If we just take the example of the arts in the townships, as soon as someone makes a certain name for themselves or achieves a certain level, they are naturally drawn to a larger community where there is more exposure. What we have to create, and what we tried to get at, is tailor-made solutions whereby, once we see that young English speakers have developed and acquired the necessary skills to be successful in our own community.... The unfortunate thing is there is lack of opportunity. Manufacturing is gone.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Michael Chong
Thank you very much, Mr. Cutting.
We're going to continue with Mr. Benskin. I know he's anxious to ask some questions.
NDP
Tyrone Benskin NDP Jeanne-Le Ber, QC
I have a whole slew of questions. If I had an hour, I wouldn't be able to ask them all.
I'll touch on what was brought up earlier in terms of the burst of anglophone arts in Quebec and how important that is to the economic development of the anglophone community in general and their presence in Quebec. Being one of those people—Montreal was always my home—I made a conscious choice not to leave either Montreal or Canada on a permanent basis in order to be part of keeping that regeneration alive. You were talking about after the 1995 referendum people beginning to come back. I think there was a trickle back before that.
I've always maintained that the anglophone community in Quebec is different. The anglophone community in the Eastern Townships in Quebec and Montreal is different from English Canada. I think it is not any more evident than in the artistic community. Disagree with me if you will, but I think what attracted anglophones to return to Quebec and the anglophones that were in Quebec was a rubbing off, if you will, of the passion and the self-identity that French Québécois had developed since the 1970s with Gilles Vigneault and all that, and I'll just make the link between Vigneault and Cohen.
Cohen was successful because he was different. He had the Gilles Vigneault troubadour aspect that wasn't happening anywhere in the English language at the time, except for maybe Bob Dylan. I think that's what he captured. But there's a vibrancy that the anglophone community borrowed from Quebec in its story-telling and its bravery in trying things that weren't happening in the rest of Canada. That's something that people dedicated themselves to, whether they were getting paid for it or not, to help build that community in Quebec. Would that be something you would agree with?
Executive Director, English Language Arts Network Quebec
Yes, I would certainly agree with that. There was a time when a small number of people, like yourself, sort of hung in there. You know that at the time there were hundreds, maybe...dozens. There just weren't that many professional artists choosing to stay in Quebec. Something happened around 1995. There was a change. Exactly what happened was there were people coming to Quebec for the first time. There were people whose parents left in the 1960s and 1970s who returned. More and more students were staying. The influence of that francophone cultural scene was extraordinary. There was something different about it.
What has shifted in the culture? There was a time when people who were integrated were kind of looked upon as oddities. I remember a few years ago talking at a large presentation of artists and saying that I worked in francophone film production, and at the end of the day, we would sit down and I'd write script in English. The crew was francophone, and we'd sit down and have a beer and they'd start going
“damned English, ha, ha!”.
I would say, “I'm English too, am I like that?”
Executive Director, English Language Arts Network Quebec
Then they would say, “But no, you're not a real one”.
There was a time when there was a handful of people who were all kinds of these odd ducks; whereas I think now, it's not just some odd ducks. There's a shift; there's an integration; there's a partnership that I don't think was evident before 1995. There's something there to build on, absolutely.
NDP
Tyrone Benskin NDP Jeanne-Le Ber, QC
In terms of economic development, we were talking about stability for both groups. I look at it as being almost three levels.
Stabilized operational funding keeps the lights on, keeps the telephone going, and so forth. My colleague brought it up, but I would divide the more project-based funding into two levels. One would be long-term project funding; in other words, projects for which you can do a three- to five-year strategic plan and say that a project can be done within a five-year period. The funding is there for that five years so you can save money; you can do your purchasing and your planning based on that. There other would be short-term project funding. This would be for an interesting project; for example, this group is coming in from Europe or wherever and you want to do an exchange and it's going to last a year or two.
Do you feel that would help stimulate activities in both sectors in retention in the English community in the Outaouais, the Pontiac, and the Eastern Townships and in generating artists who stay in Quebec and continue to create in Quebec?
Executive Director, Townshippers' Association
I think that definitely would contribute to the stability and the vitality of the community, because you wouldn't be trying to stretch your dollar as far as it could go. Gerald alluded earlier that you spend your year gearing up for the next fight for funding. I think that would definitely have a positive impact on how groups like Townshippers' and ELAN look at their long-term planning.
We do strategic planning with our core program funding, so we are able to say where we're going in the next five years and how we're going to get there. If we could do that on a long-term project basis, it would definitely be interesting for us and a positive thing for the community.
I want to add a side note about artists in the regions. It's really important to understand that artists in regions like the Eastern Townships are mostly amateur and emerging artists. They're not Arcade Fire. They don't have that level of success and level of public notoriety and support. The kinds of programs and avenues we need for those emerging artists are quite different from what more well-known and successful artists in the Montreal area are experiencing on a different level.
NDP
Tyrone Benskin NDP Jeanne-Le Ber, QC
I agree with you wholeheartedly.
When I was an emerging artist, one of the great employers at the time was the Piggery Theatre in North Hatley, and the Knowlton Theatre as well. They would develop emerging artists, and provide a community service as well, which would bring in tourist dollars. People would pay money. People would build their vacations around going to Knowlton and North Hatley. There were great restaurants in the area, wonderful scenery, hotels, and so on. So I do understand that.
As far as that aspect is concerned, my colleague across the way asked how you measure success. I know for an artist, being able to do what they do, whether they're being paid or not, is success. Being able to say they're in a play or they shot this indie film is a measure of success for them.
I don't look at things in terms of having emerging artists there, and they're not successful yet, because they haven't made it to Arcade Fire status—