Mr. Speaker, this evening's adjournment debate concerns a question I asked the Minister of Canadian Heritage on February 3, to which I did not receive a satisfactory answer.
I asked about cultural programs that were cut, such as Trade Routes and PromArt, which helped our artists travel abroad.
In his budget, the minister chose to spend $25 million on the so-called Canada prizes for the arts and creativity to bring foreign artists here and give them bursaries. The whole idea struck us as completely absurd and illogical seeing as our own artists have just had their funding for essential cultural activities cut by $45 million. I will come back to that later.
Now this government is spending $25 million on bursaries—some of them worth six figures, that is, between $100,000 and $200,000—for foreign artists. That money is earmarked for foreign artists, while our own artists struggle with poor working conditions and low incomes. On average, our artists earn $22,000 per year.
What is more, these Canada prizes for the arts and creativity are the brainchild of two Toronto lobbyists who have had a great deal of influence on the government. In fact, the Conservative government's budget contains a complete word for word copy of the Luminato promotion from last summer. It is pretty amazing that the government's budget would be written by lobbyists. This government claims to be transparent, but we can see that it is not. Its first step when first elected in 2006 was to pass Bill C-2 in order to distance itself from lobbyists.
What is more, the Canada prizes project is a sham. It includes a list of so-called partners prepared to support this project and help Luminato to carry it out. Obviously, two lobbyists working down in their garage cannot set up a $25 million project by themselves. The partners, some of them as well known as the Grands Ballets Canadiens and Cirque de Soleil, had never heard of this project, or had heard very little. They were, in fact, not partners at all.
I am asking the minister to explain his logic to us. Before funding foreign artists to come here to Canada, should he not be funding artists from here so that they can go abroad? Now, and there is no denying it, there is a huge hole in this department's funding, so huge that performing artists can no longer tour outside the country.