Pre-Budget Submission: The CCA urges Ottawa to make strategic investments in the creative economy

CCA Bul­letin 21/09

August 17 , 2009

 

 

 

Just the Facts

On Fri­day August 14, 2009, the Cana­dian Con­fer­ence of the Arts (CCA) filed its writ­ten pre-budget sub­mis­sion with the House of Com­mons Stand­ing Com­mit­tee on Finance. In it, the CCA calls for the gov­ern­ment to tackle three broad pri­or­i­ties within the arts, cul­ture and her­itage port­fo­lio: fos­ter­ing mar­ket devel­op­ment for Cana­dian arts and cul­ture both in Canada and abroad; invest­ing in the cre­ative econ­omy, and secur­ing a future for both cul­tural infra­struc­ture and for the emerg­ing group of cul­ture professionals.

The com­plete sub­mis­sion out­lines, in detail, the man­ners in which fund­ing should be allo­cated and invested. Here is a sum­mary of the CCA’s recommendations:

Rec­om­men­da­tion 1:

Invest­ing in mar­ket devel­op­ment and cul­tural diplomacy

The CCA asks the gov­ern­ment to add $40 mil­lion to the Canada Coun­cil for the Arts’ base bud­get in order to expand its capac­ity to sup­port mar­ket devel­op­ment nation­ally and inter­na­tion­ally for Cana­dian artists, cul­tural insti­tu­tions, and indus­tries.  At the same time, based on evi­dence put for­ward by the gov­ern­ment itself, the CCA rec­om­mends that the arts and cul­ture once again play an impor­tant role in sup­port­ing Cana­dian for­eign pol­icy and inter­na­tional trade.

Rec­om­men­da­tion 2:

Invest­ing in the cre­ative econ­omy and its numbers

Rec­om­men­da­tion 3:

Invest­ing in cul­tural infra­struc­ture — Peo­ple and Places

• Increase the Canada Cul­tural Spaces Fund to $60 mil­lion annually.
• Ded­i­cate $1.5 mil­lion for the next five years to fos­ter the pro­fes­sional devel­op­ment of cul­tural work­ers through intern­ships and mentorships.
• Com­mit $50 mil­lion a year to estab­lish and imple­ment the long-awaited national muse­ums policy.

Tell me more

The CCA pro­vides a ratio­nale for its rec­om­men­da­tions which out­lines why the arts, cul­ture, and her­itage sec­tor rep­re­sents a worth­while oppor­tu­nity for invest­ment, par­tic­u­larly dur­ing a time of eco­nomic crisis.

Mil­lions of Cana­di­ans attend live per­for­mances and pur­chase books, mag­a­zines, films, new media prod­ucts, and sound record­ing mate­ri­als each year. Sta­tis­tics Canada esti­mates that house­hold expen­di­tures on cul­tural prod­ucts con­tinue to grow. The arts and cul­tural sec­tor is the liveli­hood for over 650 000 Cana­di­ans. Col­lec­tively, with direct, indi­rect, and induced inputs, the cul­tural sec­tor con­tributed $84.6 bil­lion to the Gross Domes­tic Prod­uct (GDP) in 2007.

This sec­tor is not one of hob­bies or recre­ational pur­suits, but is at the fore­front of the new cre­ative econ­omy which our coun­try must embrace if it is to main­tain its sta­tus in the inter­na­tional com­mu­nity. In fact, Sta­tis­tics Canada has noted that cul­ture employ­ment grew at a much greater rate than the work­force as a whole from 1981 to 2001. Dur­ing this period, the growth in cul­tural employ­ment was 81% in Canada, much higher than the 32% growth in the over­all labour force dur­ing the same period.

Those pur­su­ing careers in the arts and cul­ture sec­tor are dynamic pro­fes­sion­als within the Cana­dian labour mar­ket. They are char­ac­ter­is­ti­cally bet­ter edu­cated, boast a high level of self-employment and often work in mul­ti­ple capac­i­ties, within a vari­ety of fields.  The Cul­tural Careers Coun­cil of Ontario claims that “artists may be mod­els for the way we will be work­ing in the future – inde­pen­dent, entre­pre­neur­ial, and more reliant on indi­vid­ual net­works than con­ven­tional organizations.”

Though invest­ing in the cul­tural sec­tor may seem less con­crete than invest­ing in infra­struc­ture, nat­ural resources or man­u­fac­tur­ing, it is a sec­tor which is proven to give strong returns on gov­ern­ment funds. The cul­tural sec­tor has the unique abil­ity to put funds to work within a very short period of time, with low admin­is­tra­tive costs. The sec­tor con­tin­u­ally evolves in order to sta­bi­lize its pres­ence within Canada, but also to build robust audi­ences around the world.

The costs of cre­at­ing jobs in the arts and cul­ture sec­tor are amongst the low­est com­pared to other sec­tors of the econ­omy.  There is a for­mi­da­ble return for every dol­lar invested in the arts and cul­ture sec­tor. Accord­ing to the Con­fer­ence Board of Canada, for every $1 of real value-added GDP pro­duced by Canada’s cul­tural indus­tries, roughly $1.84 is added to the over­all real GDP.  Even more specif­i­cally, Hill Strate­gies notes that the per­form­ing arts gen­er­ate $2.70 in non-governmental rev­enues for every $1 invested by the gov­ern­ment. An addi­tional bonus to this small invest­ment is the employ­ment lev­els which nat­u­rally rise as a result.

In sum, the CCA sub­mits that it is of utmost impor­tance that the fed­eral gov­ern­ment devel­ops a long-term vision for its sup­port of the arts and cul­ture sec­tor of the Cana­dian cre­ative econ­omy, which has suf­fered from repeated short-term com­mit­ments and ini­tia­tives over the past five years.