Canadian Heritage committee  Good morning, Madam Chair and members of the committee. It's my pleasure to be here speaking with you guys about the cultural hubs issue that you so courageously decided to tackle. As Madam Chair indicated, my name is Ana Serrano. I'm the chief digital officer of the Canadian Film Centre.

Canadian Heritage committee  It depends on whether your vision of a hub is a single place. I think, by its nature, a hub is a distributed set of networks. It could be a district. It could be a series of connected spaces across multiple districts. In that instance, if the vision of the hub is broader, I do think you need to have a public–private sector model to make a go of these things.

Canadian Heritage committee  This is partially why I led with the notion that although place is important, it's really your impact as services and networks across a variety of spaces that could be construed as public as well. In terms of what the film centre does in that particular community, we certainly have quite a number of open-type policy initiatives where the community itself is welcome to come to our space.

Canadian Heritage committee  Yes. We have postgraduate training programs, or residency programs as we call them. We have large endowments of scholarship to allow a diversity, and to ensure that anyone with talent can still come to the Canadian Film Centre. Those folks, essentially, get the benefit of an international roster of masters in their field, and learn from them.

Canadian Heritage committee  We have collaborated with l'inis for many years, and this is a great segue to the value of a distributed network. About 10 years ago, we collaborated with l'inis and the Banff Centre for the Arts and its Banff New Media Institute. For five years we helped accelerate talent into the digital media space and projects across these three regions, and the talent ended up creating unparalleled peer networks.

Canadian Heritage committee  Right now we have a very strong partnership with cultural services at the French embassy and, as such, I've been touring France quite a bit and being hosted by the Institut Français. I've seen many interesting models in France for how they support these kinds of interdisciplinary networks.

Canadian Heritage committee  Part of what we regularly do is to be quite rigorous in looking at the economic impact of the work we're doing. We essentially know how many jobs we're creating on a basis, because we have these rolling kinds of very detailed surveys of the people who come through the doors of the film centre and look at how they've impacted the economy.