Proceedings of the Standing Senate Committee on
Foreign Affairs and International Trade
Issue No. 40 - Evidence - Meeting of February 28, 2018
OTTAWA, Wednesday, February 28, 2018
The Standing Senate Committee on Foreign Affairs and International Trade met this day at 4:15 p.m. to study the impact and utilization of Canadian culture and arts in Canadian foreign policy and diplomacy, and other related matters.
Senator A. Raynell Andreychuk (Chair) in the chair.
[English]
The Chair: Today the Standing Senate Committee on Foreign Affairs and International Trade is authorized by the Senate to study the impact and utilization of Canadian culture and arts in Canadian foreign policy and diplomacy, and other related matters.
Under this mandate, we’re very pleased to have three guests here today. I should tell our guests that we do not introduce you with your biographies because it would take too long. We want to use that time to dialogue with you, so your biographies have been disseminated to all of the members. We are thankful that, with your experience and backgrounds, you’ve agreed to come here.
Before us today, senators, we have Guy Berthiaume, Librarian and Archivist of Canada, Library and Archives Canada; John Degen, Executive Director of The Writers’ Union of Canada; and Barry Hughson, Executive Director of The National Ballet of Canada.
Before I turn to our guests, I will ask the senators to introduce themselves, starting on my left.
Senator Bovey: Patricia Bovey, independent senator from Manitoba.
[Translation]
Senator Cormier: René Cormier, from New Brunswick.
[English]
Senator Ngo: Thanh Hai Ngo from Ontario.
Senator Oh: Victor Oh, Ontario.
Senator Greene: Stephen Greene, Nova Scotia.
Senator Ataullahjan: Senator Salma Ataullahjan, Toronto, Ontario.
Senator Cools: Anne Cools, Toronto, Ontario.
The Chair: And I’m Raynell Andreychuk from Saskatchewan.
I’m going to take you in the order — unless you have a preference otherwise — as I introduced you. I will turn to Mr. Berthiaume, Librarian and Archivist of Canada, for the first presentation. I trust they will be succinct so we can have time for questions.
Welcome to the committee.
[Translation]
Guy Berthiaume, Librarian and Archivist of Canada, Library and Archives Canada: Senators, thank you for the invitation to discuss cultural diplomacy with you. It is a topic that I am pleased to see at the forefront of the news.
First, let me say a few words about the institution that I have the pleasure of leading, Library and Archives Canada. In 2004, Canada innovated by becoming the first western country to combine its national archives and national library to form a single institution, Library and Archives Canada. Thanks to that merger, the size of our collection means that LAC is one of the three or four largest libraries in the world, after the Library of Congress, the British Library and, depending on international rankings, the National Library of China. I won’t make that a big debate. I will concede third place to them as they are much more numerous than we are.
So, our library is the fourth largest library in the world. We have a very vast collection, but in addition to books and archives, I want to draw your attention to the fact that we have a vast collection of Canadian art, the world’s largest collection of Canadian art, with more than 425,000 pieces of documentary art, including paintings, sculptures, and 30 million photographs. If you wondered where the photo of Donald Trump with Pierre Elliott Trudeau came from when our Prime Minister went to the United States for a first meeting, it came from our collection. Do not worry; it was not the original but a copy of the photo.
All of these treasures are kept at the Gatineau Preservation Centre, a 20-year-old but state-of-the-art facility that receives many international visitors every year. These visitors range from political leaders such as President George W. Bush, who visited the centre in 2004, to the King and Queen of Sweden, who came in 2006, to a steady stream of official delegations. Over the past 24 months, we have welcomed over 25 delegations from around the world.
[English]
By welcoming these delegations, we allow them to discover our collections, meet our experts and experience our state-of-the-art facility. Additionally, we shine a light on Canada, our heritage and our culture.
[Translation]
Library and Archives Canada have also signed memoranda of understanding with the national libraries and archives of Argentina, China, Mexico, France and Korea.
[English]
Agreements like these create mutual opportunities to share expertise, lessons learned and best practices. It’s exactly the kind of collaboration we need to address the complex challenges of being documentary heritage stewards in the digital age.
In 2016, we adopted our international strategy to organize our activities in a way that is strategic, coherent and coordinated, and to ensure alignment with our mandate and corporate priorities as well as the international priorities of the Government of Canada.
In essence, the strategy helps us to define who we engage with and how. It also helps us address issues that are not unique to Canada, that are felt worldwide, such as developing international information management standards; improving access to the documentary heritage for everyone, including people with disabilities; and developing digital unification initiatives to facilitate the exchange between countries and peoples of copies of documentary heritage that relate to their own culture.
Furthermore, our collections contribute to social change nationally and internationally on such issues such as reconciliation with Indigenous peoples and the rights of LGBTQ communities.
[Translation]
Within the parameters of your study on cultural diplomacy, you raise the question of the link between cultural industries and cultural diplomacy initiatives. Some believe that it is fine to skip over cultural diplomacy and go directly to trade discussions. I do not share that opinion. Quite the contrary, I believe that an appetite for the industries and products of another culture develops with exposure to that culture — and to tangible manifestations of that culture.
Because of our fusion, LAC unites two distinct communities: archivists and librarians. On both fronts, we are well positioned to deploy Canada’s soft power. I mentioned earlier the many international visitors we receive at our Gatineau Preservation Centre, and the memoranda of understanding that link us to several large national institutions. Invariably, all our international partners hope to profit from our exceptional expertise through staff exchanges — to send us interns or to host our specialists at their institutions. Staff exchanges are a unique opportunity for Canada to play an international role well beyond its relative weight in the global economy and geopolitics. Such exchanges cost little and could be achieved by capitalizing on the global reputation of Canadian memory institutions — our museums, our libraries and our archives.
I will dare to dream that, through your committee’s focus on cultural diplomacy, our country will give itself the means to excel globally by paving the way for exchanges of all kinds — including, of course, those of a commercial nature. Thank you.
[English]
The Chair: Thank you.
We will now turn to Mr. Degen from the Writers’ Union of Canada.
John Degen, Executive Director, The Writers’ Union of Canada: Thank you for the invitation to talk with the committee. I come here wearing many hats. I’m the Executive Director of the Writers’ Union of Canada. That’s my day job. But if I did not lead the union’s staff, I would happily be a dues-paying member of my organization. I am myself a published novelist and poet, and a long-time freelance journalist. Writing is my life. Because of that, writers’ issues are not abstract or theoretical to me in the way they seem to be for many who attempt to influence the application of cultural policy in Canada.
I also chair the International Authors Forum, which is an umbrella organization for author unions and guilds from around the world. The IAF represents close to 700,000 writers and visual artists, a number that grows each day as more groups crowd under the umbrella. My work with the IAF has cemented for me an understanding that Canadian cultural product is indeed greatly admired and certain of our cultural policies even more so. I believe Canada has immense potential to influence truly progressive cultural policy outside our borders.
There has really never been a better time for Canada to focus on exporting our culture and the best of our values through our culture. Canada’s authors have captured the world’s attention. Just last year, the wonderful young adult author Cherie Dimaline won both our Governor General’s Literary Award and the U.S. Kirkus Prize for her allegorical dystopian novel The Marrow Thieves. Domestic and international television adaptations of Canadian novels have attracted international awards and viewers in huge numbers, and of course, we are all still riding the wave of attention resulting from Alice Munro’s 2013 Nobel Prize for Literature.
In recent years, because of Canada’s rising profile and potential, I have been asked to tell the story of Canada’s writing success in Helsinki, Tokyo, Mexico City, Seoul, Melbourne, London, Rome and Beijing. Innovative and dedicated cultural policies and supports are always part of the story that I tell when I give international presentations.
You should know, for instance, that Canada’s Public Lending Right Program, which is a compensation mechanism rewarding Canadian authors for the collection of their work in our public library system, is the envy of the world. Canada is the international model for progressive compensation of authors collected by libraries, and governments everywhere study our program when considering launching or improving their own.
Sadly, these days I can’t get through one of these upbeat pro-Canada international presentations without having to answer a number of worried questions about our country’s negative impact on world copyright standards.
Despite what you may have heard to the contrary, Canada’s current copyright laws are not one of our admired cultural exports. The recent presentation to this committee by another witness, Michael Geist, does not represent the opinions of Canada’s creative sector as I know it. Professor Geist does not speak for us. He speaks for himself from an academic and theoretical perspective that I would suggest contains significant blind spots. I don’t believe his theories or highly selective research have any practical application in the real world of professional arts and culture. Any suggestion that the world admires Canada for its 2012 copyright changes is the result, I believe, of a very selective small sampling of opinion, a tiny classroom of like-minded theorists perhaps.
Like I said, at the International Authors Forum, I listen to the collective voices of close to 700,000 creative professionals and supporters from around the globe. Those voices disagree strongly with the views presented to you here earlier by Professor Geist.
Plainly stated, this country’s current copyright policy has dangerously eroded the economic viability of our cultural sector and encouraged an educational environment in which Canadian creativity is not pragmatically valued. This is a terrible export from Canada and is doing immense damage to our position as a world cultural leader. The situation is so negative here that a consortium of school boards and provincial education ministries has recently launched a lawsuit against the copyright collective representing my members, Canada’s authors. At issue is whether tens of millions of dollars worth of our work can be copied and taken by education budget-makers without permission or payment to us.
Let me put that in perspective. At the Writers’ Union of Canada, we administer and support programs that pay this country’s authors to visit schools, to collaborate with teachers and to present to their students. These programs are so popular and so desperately valued by front-line educators that our funding window for school visits essentially closes as it opens. Having provided that incredible value to our schools, we now find ourselves being sued by their boards and administrations for daring to expect payment for the core of our work, which is the writing itself. There’s really nothing to admire about this scenario. It should and it does embarrass Canada internationally.
Finally, on a good note, you should know that Canada has been selected as Nation of Honour for the 2020 Frankfurt Book Fair, which is the largest international book, reading and rights fair in the world. It’s kind of a gigantic deal. But this significant honour sets a very tight timeline for us to get our cultural diplomacy house in order, because if Canada arrives in Frankfurt in two years with schools still suing authors, I don’t know if any of us wants to attend that party.
We must repair the damage and fix the mess in the middle of Canadian copyright policy and then previously well-funded mechanisms for exporting Canadian culture through our embassies and international connections, such as our Promart and Trade Routes programs, can be rebuilt and lead the work of our cultural diplomacy. Thank you.
The Chair: Thank you.
Now we turn to Barry Hughson, Executive Director of the National Ballet of Canada.
Barry Hughson, Executive Director, The National Ballet of Canada: Good afternoon, Madam Chair and members of the standing Senate committee. Thank you for the invitation to speak before you today. My name is Barry Hughson, and I’ve served as the Executive Director for the National Ballet of Canada since 2014.
The National Ballet is Canada’s largest dance institution and the fourth-largest in North America. Founded by Celia Franca in 1951, the National Ballet has been under the artistic leadership of Karen Kain since 2006. Karen’s focus is founded on three guiding principles: Develop, attract and retain the finest artists; engage the world’s best dance makers, composers and designers; and bring the National Ballet to the world stage as one of the most innovative and exciting ballet companies of today. This vision has propelled the National Ballet of Canada to the top ranks of ballet companies worldwide, embraced by artists, audiences and critics alike.
For the National Ballet, international touring is a critical element to attracting and retaining a world-class artistic workforce, encouraging the best dancers in the world to come to Canada and ensuring that Canada’s best dancers stay. Touring brings visibility to the company’s artistic integrity and excellence, which attracts the world’s best creative minds to come and make work in Canada. Recognition by international critics and audiences validates our place in the world with our patrons at home and reminds the world of Canada’s exceptional contributions to the arts.
Beginning with inaugural tours to Mexico City in 1958, the National Ballet is one of the few arts organizations in Canada to undertake large-scale international touring. We consider our company to be an important cultural ambassador for Canada, building this country’s reputation for artistic excellence, innovation and cultural philanthropy in cities around the world.
In just the last five years, the National Ballet has had engagements in major cultural capitals, including New York City, Washington, Los Angeles, London and Paris. Upcoming international tours include engagements in San Francisco, Hamburg, Moscow and St. Petersburg.
We’re also pleased to be joining Heritage Minister Melanie Joly on Canada’s cultural trade mission to China in April, advancing ongoing negotiations to bring the National Ballet of Canada to the Grand Theatre in Shanghai and National Centre for the Performing Arts in Beijing.
Accompanying me on the trade mission is Xiao Nan Yu, a principal ballerina for the National Ballet, born in China, but having spent her 20-year professional career in Canada. She will be an exceptional ambassador on the trade mission, helping to bring together the two countries she loves.
Senators, 2017 was an important year to expand the National Ballet’s international reach. We travelled to Paris for the first time in 45 years to perform John Neumeier’s master work, Nijinsky, followed by performances of The Dreamers Ever Leave You in London, a work by the Canadian choreographer Robert Binet. The London performances were part of our Canada 150 celebration, and we worked closely with Canada House in support of the engagement. We also launched the UK Friends of the National Ballet of Canada, a U.K.-based charity that will engage the more than 200,000 Canadian expats living and working in London, many of them now important influences in their new country, keeping them engaged in supporting The National Ballet of Canada and connected to their homeland.
In April we will launch a new international exchange program. The National Ballet will appear on the San Francisco Ballet’s season, with the exchange being completed when the San Francisco Ballet performs in our 2019-2020 season in Toronto. This will begin a series of exchanges over the next several years, bringing the National Ballet to more international markets and more major ballet companies to Toronto. The National Ballet will work closely with the National Arts Centre and other Canadian presenters to encourage multi-city touring for visiting companies.
The National Ballet is also engaged with international partners in the co-commissioning of major new works, sharing the financial risks and artistic rewards of making new works for the international dance community. Most recently we partnered with the Hamburg Ballet and the Bolshoi Ballet to bring to life John Neumeier’s new Anna Karenina, which will have its North American premiere in Toronto next fall.
The National Ballet of Canada has also been a leader in bringing together North American and European arts executives to engage in a global conversation about the future of our sector. In 2015, the National Ballet helped to convene 22 dance executives from nine countries over three days, the first major leadership summit of its kind. This group has expanded significantly and now meets every other year to discuss common challenges and opportunities, including artistic collaboration, audience building, diversity and technology.
On the digital front, the National Ballet has partnered with ballet companies from around the world — the Australian Ballet, the Bolshoi Ballet, Royal Ballet and San Francisco Ballet — to produce World Ballet Day. This 20-hour continuous live stream was shown on Facebook Live, becoming the longest broadcast ever shown on the platform. The reach was staggering, with a total of over 1.2 million views.
As we continue to pursue our international strategy to bring the National Ballet of Canada to the world, and the world to Canada, we look forward to working with our partners in government. We should attempt to align our international relationship building in the arts with Canada’s diplomatic priorities whenever possible.
The performing arts provide an opportunity to help build unique bridges to broader diplomatic efforts. Perhaps, where there are deep political differences, a transformative shared arts experience can be instrumental in breaking the ice and finding common ground.
Thank you for your time.
Senator Ataullahjan: Thank you for your presentations.
Mr. Hughson, your recent tour in October, when you went to Paris and London, how did that go? And do you get support from Global Affairs or the missions abroad at all?
Mr. Hughson: It went extremely well. Touring the National Ballet of Canada is a very expensive proposition. We travel with an average of 110 people. A European tour costs somewhere near $1 million per week. The revenue for those tours largely comes from fees paid by presenters and private philanthropy. We do receive small touring grants from the Province of Ontario and Canada Council for the Arts. But to give you a sense of the scale of that, in a million-dollar-a-week budget, that represents about $75,000 of the budget.
We did meet with Global Affairs to talk about the tour in advance. They put us in contact with missions both in Paris and London.
Canada House was particularly helpful on the London side of the tour, because they were looking to build celebrations around Canada 150 and this was a wonderful opportunity to leverage that. So they were quite helpful. There was really no money to put on the table, but they were able to help us in terms of networking contacts in launching the UK Friends of the National Ballet of Canada. We held a large-scale gala and invited expats from throughout the area, and they were instrumental in making those connections for us.
In Paris, the mission held a large-scale dinner for all of the Canadian VIPs who were on tour with us. We had about 50 philanthropists from Toronto and Canada who joined us on the tour, and we were treated to a beautiful dinner at the mission in Paris. But, again, no funding to support the tour.
Senator Ataullahjan: Was that a disappointment for you, no funding?
Mr. Hughson: Yes, absolutely.
There was an interesting conversation about Canada 150 because we had hoped that each mission would have some kind of meaningful budget to invest in celebrating the one hundred and fiftieth anniversary. What we learned, there were grants in the amount of about $5,000 per grant, which in the scheme of the scale we’re talking about is not terribly helpful. But certainly the dinner in terms of hosting the VIPs from Canada was a wonderful opportunity in Paris.
I can’t really say enough about the staff at Canada House. They were outstanding.
Senator Ataullahjan: My second question is for the Writers’ Union of Canada. I asked this of a witness before.
As someone who likes to hold a book when I read, is this the last century that we’ll be seeing written books, given the sales of e-books?
Mr. Degen: I don’t think so at all. I think the trend is moving back and forth. We saw an awful lot of interest in e-books for a while, and then that interest plateaued at a certain level. It’s reached a segment of the market that is not really growing; it’s staying static. Print books are still the heart and the core of the market and I have the feeling that they will remain so.
I came here on the train this morning. I always count books. There were a lot of print books on the train this morning. Even though everyone also had their phone beside their book, I don’t see the hard-copy print book going away any time soon.
Senator Ataullahjan: I’m happy to hear that, because I’ve even seen it in my own home where my girls were going to e-books. Now I find that they are back to buying books.
Mr. Degen: I think e-books are an addition, not a replacement. That’s what we’re finding.
Senator Bovey: I want to thank you all for coming and adding to our discussion. You all talked about the importance of Canada’s artistic cultural endeavours being on that international stage.
I want to ask Mr. Degen if you can tell us more about how you’re planning for Frankfurt and what you hope will be the takeaways for Canada, in its multi-dimensions, from being the Nation of Honour at the 2020 Frankfurt Book Fair.
Mr. Degen: First of all, it is a huge honour that Canada has been selected as the Nation of Honour. This was offered to us in the past, and for one reason or another we couldn’t put the funding together. This government has provided the funding towards 2020, and the entire industry is very grateful for that.
I can’t really speak for the planning committee. I’m not on the planning committee. A separate, arms-length organization is working it. From what I understand, there’s a goal coming out of Frankfurt 2020 which is a broad dissemination of Canadian literature to the world, which has already begun, but also the bringing of business back to Canada in the sense that we would like rights deals with international publishers for the translation and publication of Canadian works in other countries. Since it’s in Frankfurt, I would say specifically Germany in 2020. That’s the big goal.
Also, I believe there will be lots of parties. Our sector does like the parties.
Senator Bovey: Mr. Berthiaume, you talked about the exchanges of expertise, professional staff. I wonder if you can dig a little deeper on that for us and talk about — I don’t want to sound crass — the value for Canada of these international exchanges of professionals.
As part of that, we’ve heard about the role Canada House played with the National Ballet. In this work, are you tying it into Canada’s missions abroad?
Mr. Berthiaume: The fact that we are really at the forefront of our two disciplines gives us opportunities way beyond the relative size of our country. If we were able to host the experts from around the world for a couple of weeks in our facility in Gatineau, or present our experts to the libraries and the archives we have memoranda of understanding with, that would give us much better leeway into what they are doing.
To give you a concrete example, the French archives, every April, for three weeks they have a school for archivists. They come from all over the francophone world. For three weeks they’re being taught the way the French do their archiving and their principles, et cetera. So when they’re back in their country, they’re total ambassadors of the French way of doing it.
So we have that opportunity. What is missing for us is the means to have people come here or for our experts to go.
So far, in the list I gave you in my presentation, only Korea has found the means to send somebody who will spend a couple of weeks with us. The other countries do not have such mechanisms. I reached out to embassies in those countries, and they do not have mechanisms that would allow us to go or to help their nationals to come here.
Senator Bovey: If the Trade Routes program were reinstated or something like it, how would that — or if there’s a better way, tell us — benefit Canada’s cultural diplomacy?
Mr. Berthiaume: Frankly, I don’t know the way it ran, when it ran. I get it that most of what we do is around live performances, the ballet, et cetera, which is totally right. But if there was a small opening in those types of programs to help us send our staff abroad or get foreign nationals to come to Ottawa — Gatineau, actually — for very little cost, that would be a tremendous help to us and to Canada.
Senator Bovey: Anybody else?
Mr. Degen: To flip it around, a few years ago the Ottawa International Writers Festival, which is a wonderful festival here in the nation’s capital, brought American novelists north and held a wonderful get-together at the American Embassy. The cultural exchange from that one event, I think, was very significant. Certainly I learned an awful lot about American authors I wasn’t aware of. This kind of subtle cultural diplomacy at that level can be quite powerful, certainly very powerful for an individual author’s career.
Senator Oh: Thank you, witnesses, for your informative presentations.
I want to talk a little bit about diversity. I would like to talk about two outstanding Chinese Canadians that I know personally.
Chan Hon Goh is the first Chinese Canadian principal dancer with the National Ballet of Canada. Her biography, entitled Beyond the Dance: A Ballerina’s Life, was a finalist for the Norma Fleck Award for Canadian Children’s Non-Fiction.
Member of the Writers’ Union of Canada, Denise Chong, an internationally published and award-winning writer, is best known for The Concubine’s Children, a memoir of three generations of her family set between Canada and China. The Concubine’s Children won a number of awards, including the Edna Staebler Award for Creative Non-Fiction. Translated into many languages, it touched a core among readers far beyond the Chinese Canadian world. The book celebrates the contributions immigrants have made to a country that may not have welcomed them warmly but did allow them to make their way in life. Her nationalist feelings are captured in her 1994 speech, “Being Canadian,” which has been widely anthologized.
Canada is a country with over 100 ethnic groups. I wanted to know more about the diversity of our nation being captured in your cultural diplomacy efforts.
Mr. Hughson: First of all, Chan Hon Goh was one of the finest ballerinas at the National Ballet of Canada, and she is still well loved and missed on stage and doing great things, I believe, in Vancouver now.
Senator Oh: Yes.
Mr. Hughson: Obviously diversity is a conversation. Particularly in the world of classical ballet, it’s a complicated conversation, one that has really been cracked open, I would say, in the last decade. There has been serious conversation about how to create — most importantly, how to have our audience and our artists reflect the community that we live and work in. There’s a great deal of work happening not only in Canada but around the world to address that, largely at the training level.
We have a number of brilliant young dancers in the company right now that are Chinese-born and are now working in Canada. It starts with childhood training and education. There has to be a pipeline of diverse talent rising to the elite level of training required to get a job at a company of the stature of the National Ballet. So we continue to work on that.
What we’re finding around the world is that the face of classical ballet is changing. More and more we are seeing that where major companies historically had a handful of visibly diverse minorities in their ranks, now it’s a much larger percentage and growing.
At the National Ballet of Canada, currently 19 per cent of our dancers self-identify as visibly diverse. So we’re making progress, but there’s tremendous work to be done.
I would say in terms of our work internationally, in the meetings with the groups of executives that I described that are happening amongst the major ballet companies, this is the top topic. This is the number one topic at every convening, talking about diversity initiatives and what we need to do to transform the art form. I think those international dialogues are very powerful in driving change across the industry.
Senator Oh: Any comments?
Mr. Degen: In the writing and publishing sector, this is a conversation we’ve been having for a very long time — for a couple of decades, in fact — and it has circled around to become a major focus over the last five years, I would say.
There is a growing focus within publishing on publishing diverse voices and having our literature better reflect the population of Canada. I think that is filtering all the way through the industry.
The Writers’ Union of Canada recently passed an equity implementation plan, which is really about making all of our work look like Canada an awful lot more than it has in the past.
I do have to mention the Festival of Literary Diversity in Brampton, Ontario, which has really been driving this change over the last three years and has provided tremendous leadership for the sector on that.
Senator Oh: Any comments from you, sir?
Mr. Berthiaume: We have a very diverse staff because few people across the world have mastered the techniques we use. We have a very diverse workforce. Of course, we’re not a public institution as much as you are, but the mere nature of our work creates a diverse environment.
Senator Oh: I’m happy to hear that you have put diversity in cultural diplomacy. That’s good.
Senator Cormier: Welcome and thank you for your presentations. Thank you for your work and for the high standards of your organizations and for the quality of work you do here in Canada and elsewhere. We’re very proud of our institutions, and you’re part of that. I’ll ask my questions in French.
[Translation]
My first question is for Mr. Degen. You presented a very strong case regarding the Copyright Act and its issues. It was obvious from what you said that if we want to allow our authors to take part in cultural diplomacy, first they have to be able to earn a living in Canada, and that seems to be a big issue when we look at the challenges presented by the Copyright Act, which I know well. This underscores the issues involved in aligning our policies and Canadian legislation with the challenge of working with other countries.
How do you envisage that work? If tomorrow morning there were an international cultural diplomacy strategy proposal, how could we solve these issues that involve authors and copyright? And how could that amended legislation align with the strategy? If you could comment and suggest specific measures to the government, what ideas would you suggest?
[English]
Mr. Degen: Thank you for the question. Copyright is a very complicated question. The core issue for us is educational copying and whether or not we are being paid licence royalties for that copying. Since the change to the act in 2012, at the K to 12 and the post-secondary levels, we have not been paid our collective licensing royalties.
To put that into perspective, Alice Munro won the Nobel Prize in 2013. In that same year, our education system stopped paying authors for the hundreds of millions of pages of work that they have been copying in the schools, colleges and universities. Imagine how much more our industry could have grown in the intervening five years with the attention of the world on us because of the Nobel Prize. While our industry does continue to grow, it could have grown a great deal more. That is our core issue.
In terms of our international relationships, it’s time for us to listen rather than to talk. There are much better models for this kind of situation around the world. Extended collective licensing models in England and throughout Scandinavia would be very easy for our government to implement within our Copyright Act and the regulations surrounding the act. So I think it’s time for Canada to look at models outside of our borders and bring them home.
[Translation]
Senator Cormier: Thank you, Mr. Degen.
My question is addressed to Mr. Hughson. You mentioned all of the international activity and all of the international outreach of your work, as well as the co-productions you do with foreign companies. In your statement, you said that you would be willing to align your outreach and co-production projects with government cultural diplomacy strategies. We know that the Grands Ballets canadiens have an extremely strong artistic signature, an extremely strong artistic personality, which would not necessarily be overly compatible with the objectives or the countries the Canadian government seeks to reach. In a cultural diplomacy strategy, what should the Canadian government take into account in order to include your artistic personality and the artistic outreach objectives of your organization?
[English]
Mr. Hughson: I will not try to reply in French. It won’t go well.
I’m a new Canadian. I moved here from the United States four years ago, so I’m still on a learning curve. What I have found most frustrating, quite honestly, is there have been positive conversations at different levels of government about the concept of finding ways to align diplomacy with cultural diplomacy and how the National Ballet can play a role in that. Generally, the conversations at Global Affairs, at Canadian Heritage and across the government are always quite positive, but no one quite knows what to do with it. That would be something I would hope this committee would take into consideration, namely, helping to create clearer pathways of engagement with our government around this issue.
I personally don’t have the answers as to how best the National Ballet can play a role. I believe we can, but I think it might be interesting to convene a group of major arts institutions in Canada and have a round table to talk about this issue in the context of the work we do as artistic institutions and to put it in the context of what the government is doing in terms of diplomacy. I think the one-on-one conversations are friendly but they’re not productive. If we could gather a group of executives from organizations that have skin in the game around international touring and international work and really have an open conversation about how to make this work, I think that would be productive, because right now it’s the pathway that’s not clear.
[Translation]
Senator Cormier: Is there is a difference in the way you prepare, organize and design a work for international presentation, and the way in which you would do so for international presentation in the context of cultural diplomacy?
[English]
Mr. Hughson: No, I don’t think there’s a difference in preparing the work. I think artistic integrity and excellence, period, that is the mandate. I think that’s what speaks, regardless of where we are in the world.
I often find that artistic projects that attempt to conform to specific diplomatic initiatives border on pandering. It’s not authentic. I think the role major arts institutions can play in diplomacy is to do their best work and represent their country with their best work. How do we leverage that to move things forward?
I don’t necessarily think we’re talking about developing specific programs to drive specific kinds of diplomatic initiatives. I’d be open to the conversation, but that’s how I feel about it.
Senator Cordy: Thank you very much for all the work that you do behind the scenes in the arts and culture fields. I think we all just expect that Canadian books are going to be on the shelves, that the National Ballet is going to be there and our artists just do what they have to do, but we don’t always understand what goes on behind the scenes, so thank you very much.
Mr. Degen, I was glad to hear you say that real books are going to continue. I’m like Senator Ataullahjan; I like to hold a book in my hand, despite the fact my daughters wanted to buy me a Kindle for Christmas. I said no because it will just sit on the shelf.
I just finished reading books for the Dartmouth Book Awards. I was a judge. I love looking at writers, particularly those from Atlantic Canada, because the excellence we have in writers across the country is phenomenal. Margaret Atwood certainly gave a boost to Canadian writers and Alice Munro did the same thing. They’re not all going to be up for international awards, but nonetheless, we have excellent writers across the country.
Do we have assistance in helping the Canadian book industry — the writers, the publishers — to enter new export markets? Is that part of a government mandate? I’m not seeing it if it is. Is it just the writers federation that is working on it or are there paths for you to follow?
Mr. Degen: We do have the Canada Council for the Arts, and their budget has been increased significantly. They’ve done great work in putting together new programs doing exactly what you’ve just described — to get Canadian books into international attention and markets.
There’s also the Canada Book Fund, which does significant work with publishers rather than the writer side on translation and export markets as well.
Senator Cordy: Do e-books make it easier to —
Mr. Degen: Cross borders?
Senator Cordy: Yes.
Mr. Degen: They do because they’re on the Internet and you don’t have to put them on a truck or an airplane. But just as important are these moments that we’ve just been talking about, the international television adaptations of Canadian works and the significant international prizes.
I’ll go back to the young adult author I was talking about, Cherie Dimaline. This is a wonderful instance of a high-level recognition of wonderful Canadian work, both in Canada and in the United States at the exact same time, independent of maybe an effort on our part to make that happen. That’s a significant moment for our literature, and I think we need to take advantage of it.
Senator Cordy: And the writers in the school program in Halifax, which is where I’m from, is superb. I used to be an elementary schoolteacher. You would have a writer in to speak to the children, and they all thought they would be writers, which they were; they all write. It was just exceptional for them to see someone who had a printed book that the teacher had read to them before the writer came. It’s just wonderful to have real people coming in and talking to the students.
Mr. Degen: We do the administration of that program in Ontario. The provincial guilds and organizations do that administration outside of Ontario. And the money comes from the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council and those funding public bodies. We’re very grateful for that. Those mechanisms do exist. That’s why the irony that I was discussing earlier of us not getting our copying royalties is so dramatic at this point.
Senator Cordy: I remember being in Paris, and there had been a big book fair of Canadian books the week before. I’ve been to other embassies where they’ve had cultural events taking place. Does it depend on the embassy and the staff as to how much they’re going to help out with cultural events, or is it part of every embassy staff to facilitate those kinds of things?
Mr. Degen: Certainly our industry does benefit from individual interest in books here and there, but an organized program like Trade Routes or Promarts, which we talked about before, to get those books into international attention is essential at this point.
Senator Cordy: Thank you.
The Chair: Mr. Berthiaume, we do have your strategy. Is this the shortened version or is there a longer version?
Mr. Berthiaume: That’s the whole strategy.
The Chair: You indicate that part of your strategy is to support the Government of Canada’s foreign policy objectives, including cultural diplomacy. Are you part of the network of the government? Is there some formal way that you work with the departments or agencies of government?
Mr. Berthiaume: Well, we’re part of the so-called Heritage Portfolio; so we’re at the same table as the Canada Council, the national museums. Yes, we are.
Us being neutral, as it were, because we’re working with the support rather than the content, it’s very easy for us when there’s an accent on China, South America or Mexico to adapt to that because all countries have national libraries. We all share the same problems of authenticity. Can you imagine the number of documents, e-documents, tweets and Facebook posts that are being created every day by government and our society in general?
We all share these problems. It’s fairly easy for us, if there is a focus on individual countries, to adapt to that and to work with them more closely.
Senator Bovey: I would ask you each to think about this and get back to the clerk. One of the things we’re wrestling with is knowing what really needs to be done to increase the substance and benefits of cultural diplomacy, whether it’s having cultural attachés or whatever mechanisms you might think, all tied into different parts of the world. If you come up with strategies that will be useful for us as we write the report, please let us know, because we’re trying to make recommendations to the government as to whether cultural diplomacy is important and, if so, what needs to be done to increase the return and the depth of the experiences.
Mr. Degen: Can do.
The Chair: Thank you, Senator Bovey, for putting it in those terms, to provide feedback to us if you have any specifics.
I think someone mentioned that it’s difficult to define cultural diplomacy because we’re a vast country with many regions. We have amateurs, as we call them in some areas, and professionals in others, and they all want to be included. I think all governments have struggled to define cultural diplomacy. It’s one of those fudgy things that moves around. Now, of course, with new technologies, it’s almost a creative business.
We’re going to be tackling all of this. How does it play into things? Some of you have referred to cultural diplomacy fitting into diplomacy, which is an interesting new way. We haven’t heard that from other witnesses. That’s been helpful.
Number one, I would say to Mr. Berthiaume, you’re a well-kept secret. Only when one gets to Ottawa does one realize that you have the documents no one else has. I can speak from the point of view of one cultural heritage where documents were there that weren’t anywhere else.
There’s also a message out to Canadians about what’s going on in Canada as well as cultural diplomacy. How do we tie all that together? How do we foster more activity? How do we highlight it? What is the role of government? I think that’s where we’re all going.
Thank you very much for increasing our awareness and giving us more to think about. If you have any further thoughts, please pass them forward.
Senators, Global Affairs sent us answers to questions when they appeared on December 6. Those were circulated to you. Please check your emails.
We’ve also received the long-awaited report of Mr. Gaston Barban, who was a former Canadian diplomat. The report is lengthy, but we have translated the executive summary, and we will be disseminating it in both official languages. We have some other briefs that will be circulated.
I have to remind committee members that we have a mandate from the Senate to study the international aspects of Bill C-45. I have a plan that we’ve been working with. We have to file our report by May 1, which means we have to back up for translation, back up for the report and hear witnesses.
We have a lengthy list put together on some of the international perspectives. I’ve only seen it today. It will be coming to the committee, but if you have any other witnesses that you think need to be heard, please let us know.
If Bill C-45 goes forward, we must remember that we have signed, as a country, international conventions and treaties on drug-related matters. To what extent are those conventions and treaties in compliance? Is Canada in compliance should we pass Bill C-45? There are already witnesses coming forward saying that we’re not in compliance. Others are saying, “Here’s how we could be in compliance.” So if you have any thoughts in that area, I’d appreciate it.
Again, to our witnesses, thank you. You’ve contributed to our debate and we appreciate it.
Senators, we will now move on to our video conference. For our witness, who has just been connected to our meeting, I’m Senator Andreychuk, chair of the committee. Welcome to the committee. We are, under this mandate, studying the impact and utilization of Canadian culture and arts in Canadian foreign policy and diplomacy and other related matters.
We welcome, for a second time Mr. Carlos Enríquez Verdura, Chargé d’Affaires of Culture, Deputy Director of Exhibitions and Special Projects at the Secretariat of Foreign Affairs, Mexico.
Mr. Verdura, can you hear us this time?
Carlos Enríquez Verdura, Chargé d’Affaires of Culture, Deputy Director, Exhibitions and Special Projects, Secretariat of Foreign Affairs, Mexico: Yes, I can. Loud and clear.
The Chair: Thank you. We trust the video conference will continue, and we will have no further difficulties. I’m hearing a lot of background noise. It’s on the Mexican side.
Mr. Verdura: Yes, it’s here.
The Chair: Okay, there is some background noise. We’re going to speak up, and hopefully the interpreters can operate somewhat. All right.
Mr. Verdura: Do you want me to give it a try?
The Chair: We’re going to give it a try; that’s true. So without further points, I’m going to ask the senators to introduce themselves to Mr. Verdura, starting on my left.
Senator Massicotte: Paul Massicotte from Quebec.
Senator Dawson: Dennis Dawson, Quebec.
Senator Cordy: I’m Jane Cordy from Nova Scotia.
Senator Bovey: Pat Bovey from Manitoba.
Senator Cormier: René Cormier from New Brunswick.
Senator Cools: Senator Anne Cools from Toronto. That’s in Ontario.
Senator Ataullahjan: Salma Ataullahjan from Ontario.
The Chair: I’m from Saskatchewan.
We welcome you and hope we can overcome some of these technical difficulties. We’ll ask you to speak slowly so that the interpreters can hear you, despite the noise in the background. So we hope we can get through this session.
Mr. Verdura: Thank you very much. It’s a pleasure being with you, even from a long distance. I want to thank the Canadian Senate for this invitation. I’m pleased to be able to talk to you about what we do in cultural diplomacy.
As you have heard, I’m the Deputy Director General for International Cultural Promotion at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. We are part of the Mexican Agency for International Development Cooperation.
I have divided my presentation into four points. First, I’ll tell you a little bit about what we do. Then I will tell you a little bit as well on the comparative advantages that Mexican culture has in order to be promoted. Then I’ll talk about the evolution of international promotion of Mexican culture abroad.
Regarding the direction of international cultural promotion at the foreign office, we promote Mexican culture abroad by several instances. First of all, we supply resources, services and content to our embassies and consulates abroad. Mexico has around 165 embassies, consulates and special offices around the world. It’s important to mention that, in the case of Mexico, which might make it different from other countries, we have special attention to North America. We have around 14 consulates in the United States and around 11 in Canada. North America is our priority in terms of foreign policies.
We also have 15 institutes of Mexican culture around the world. In Canada, we have one in Montreal, but we also have one in Washington, D.C., San Antonio, Tuscon, Miami. We recently opened one in New Orleans, and we have one in Los Angeles. In Latin America, we have special Mexican cultural institutes in Guatemala, Belize and Costa Rica, and in Europe we have them in Paris, Madrid, Berlin, Vienna and Copenhagen.
Part of our mission is to sponsor the internationalization of Mexican artists through specific grants. We receive specific requests from the artistic media. They come to us because they’ve been invited to participate in numerous events around the world. It can go from film festivals to performing arts festivals to exhibitions that are taking place abroad, and we support them in one way or the other. This support can either be with travel expenses, plane tickets or even the shipment of exhibitions.
We also develop special projects around the year, because we recognize these special projects to be privileged means to sponsor, support or foster a very specific relationship. For example, in recent years, as a special project, we had the dual year between Mexico and the U.K. That was 2015. In 2016 and 2017, it was a dual year with Germany, and now we’re undergoing a dual year with Colombia.
We work together with different public Mexican institutions, especially with the Ministry of Culture. We’re very much partners in this effort. They have an international affairs office there, and we work together with them, especially because they have the content. It’s the Ministry of Culture that runs most of the Mexican public museums and collections in terms of exhibitions, but they also sponsor most of our national arts, such as the national ballet, the national opera, different performing arts groups. We have to work together with them to provide us with some of the contents we need as we travel around the world.
But we also work with private collections, NGOs, the private sector sometimes, as well as sponsors of specific projects.
Showing Mexican art and culture around the world gives us a bit of an advantage sometimes. In my experience, I have noticed — it sounds weird for me to say it like this — how attractive Mexican culture is. That has to do with the uniqueness and originality of our culture. As you might all know, we come from the mixture of the pre-Hispanic world and civilizations that blended into European civilizations, especially the Spanish civilization. But we also have African blood. There’s oriental blood as well that came through Mexico and mixed together through the last 500 years. That, together with our natural diversity — Mexico is one of the most diverse countries in the world, so that gives us an advantage and that has a role in cultural and artistic diversity.
To my view, this has given us an advantage in terms of what we can show to the world. We can go from a broad variety of arts and to different cultural manifestations in anthropological or ethnographic terms. That can be said about music, dance and different cultural manifestations.
We have in Mexico 68 mother tongues apart from Spanish. That gives you an idea of the broadness of our culture.
We’re lucky to have iconic figures that have become popular in the world, such as the pre-Hispanic civilizations I was talking to you about — Maya, Aztec, Zapotec, Mixtec. All of these civilizations are known worldwide and create curiosity around the world. We profit from that international or global curiosity to promote our culture.
We also have great masters of world art, such as Orozco, Rivera, Siqueiros and of course Frida Kahlo, who is known worldwide. For every exhibition, we receive letters from different institutions all around the world asking us to host a Frida Kahlo exhibition. Unfortunately, the Mexican government only owns three paintings from Frida Kahlo. But we work together with collections, and we have these kinds of images.
Pop culture, especially in Latin America, has given us quite an advantage, too. Mexican soap operas, Latin music performers and Mexican cinema of a golden age in Latin America have given us lots of gains and unlocked doors to be able to still be present with contemporary manifestations of our art and culture in order to let the world know who we are. Soap operas, whether we like it, and popular characters of Mexican television travel easily around Latin America.
Also, we have emblematic food and drink, such as chili, tequila and mezcal. These are known worldwide. When people hear about tequila, they will think about Mexico, and that opens for us lots of gains.
Also, traditions are opening doors and being more well-known around the world, like the Day of the Dead celebration. In those terms, things like the 007 James Bond film Spectre made visible this very traditional, ancient celebration that we’ve had for centuries. It is a mixture of several pre-Hispanic and Catholic celebrations. It is now blended into what we call the Day of the Dead celebration.
After the film, the Mexico City government recreated the parade that is shown in the film, something that didn’t happen some years ago. We never had a Day of the Dead parade, but now we do. So that, in a way, tells you a bit about the impact this kind of celebration, which talks about the uniqueness of Mexico, is having around the world.
Something those abroad don’t necessarily think of when they think about Mexico is the vibrant, contemporary scene that one now sees in many Mexico cities. There is Mexico City, considered by The New York Times at the end of last year as the best travel destination in the world for tourists; the city that has it all, is what they say. I’m a Mexico City citizen, and I’m very proud to have been born there. It has become a contemporary, cosmopolitan and vibrant city. This year, Mexico City has been declared the world capital design city of the year. This has evolved in other ways, by design, but also music and the urban arts scene. It’s interesting how the city is evolving and the country is evolving.
I’m now going to tell you a bit about the evolution of the international promotion of Mexican culture. There was a conscious promotion of Mexican culture abroad from the 1950s onwards. Before that, we were trying to settle down ourselves, after the Mexican Revolution, which was finished around the 1920s. But the real, contemporary or modern Mexico started around the 1940s, where an idea of nationalism or an idea of Mexican identity was solidified and conceived.
While doing that, the idea of making the world know who we were started. There’s a very good example of the first big exhibition that took place at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. That one exhibition in the 1940s, which talked about 20 years of Mexican art and culture, was the first conscious governmental exercise to let the world know who we were.
By the 1950s and 1960s, several exhibitions took place as well, though there was something else going on — the Ballet Folklórico, which was privately owned but state-sponsored and it still exists. It displayed a mosaic and tried to give a broad panorama of Mexican music and dances from different parts of the country. We tried to show the variety of cultural and artistic manifestations all around the country. This ballet is a very good example of how we thought of promoting Mexican culture abroad.
The government created tours that went from Moscow, to Beijing, to Europe, to North America and South America. Every year, the ballet would tour, most of the time only sponsored by the Mexican government. Treaties had been signed for venues to receive and host the ballet. But it was mainly Mexican resources and Mexican effort to make the world know who we were.
And it worked very well. In 2005, for example, I organized a one-year event that took place in China. It was the year of Mexico in China. And Chinese authorities kept asking for the Ballet Folklórico that had been going there since the 1960s. So it did play its trick.
By the 1990s, there was another idea. This is right before signing NAFTA, and this is what I would call self-power at its most. When we were about to sign NAFTA and the negotiations were taking place, the Mexican government decided to have a large travelling Mexican art exhibition, which was shown in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in LACMA and in the San Antonio Museum. This exhibition was called Mexico: Thirty Centuries of Splendour. It was Mexican art history — 3,000 years of Mexican art and culture.
We were trying to tell the Americans at this point who they were signing NAFTA with, and that was important. Again, I think it played its trick. It was strict self-power.
By the 2000s, the world was changing. I have promoted Mexican culture abroad most of my career, and I have to tell you that things are changing a lot. There’s no budget that can deal with what we need to move around the world. The schemes are changing. Now it’s no longer the Mexican government on its own “travelling” what needs to be travelled or showing what needs to be shown. Now large exhibitions, like the Frida Kahlo shows or the pre-Hispanic shows, travel on their own. They travel because of partnerships between large museums around the world, partnerships with private companies and with private money, and with large private sponsors. What we do, as the Mexican government, is accompany them. We help with all the negotiations that take place, especially with the art exhibitions. We might give some financial resources, but most of the time they’re only useful for the parallel programs, the educational programs. Our ambassadors or embassies abroad will help, as I was saying, with all the negotiations.
As well, it’s also special cases, like the dual year that I was talking about with Germany, and here I want to speak a bit about what I feel has also changed. As you might have experienced, several years ago it was only the governments that were in touch with one another, especially our governments that were in touch with one another. Now, because of the revolution in telecommunications, now we see individuals getting to know people all around the world quite easily. People are moving. This is a time of flux. This is a time of flow.
To give an example of what happened in the dual year that we had in Germany, the one that has just passed, we sat down in my office with my former boss. We saw our budgets that had been terribly cut, especially converted to the dual year with the U.K. The budget had been cut, and so we sat down and had this conversation with our embassy. We’re connected to our embassy. And we said, “We have this budget, these projects, and you have some managed, so let’s set out our problem.”
Our problem became a 39-events problem; that was it. We didn’t have money for more. We tried to look for events and venues that could prove their quality, their impact and their pertinence. After all this analysis, we came up with this 39-events problem.
By the end of the dual year, we had a problem of 504 events. You can imagine our surprise when we realized that we didn’t have to spend more money, because we didn’t have that money. What happened was that I started receiving in my office — as did the Mexican embassy in Berlin and the Mexican consulate in Frankfurt — all the people who asked for a meeting to present to us their projects, some of which were amazing.
One especially I always use as an example. I had come into my office to two 22-year-old guys who seemed quite relaxed, not as tense and as bureaucratic as myself. They started telling me about their project, which was some sort of urban art graffiti. One of the kids met this German girl. They went back to Germany, to Hamburg, and he went with her and started working as a graphic designer. He realized that he was popular because he was Mexican. He started talking about Mexican art and design. One thing led to another, and then suddenly he said, “Why don’t I organize a Mexican cultural urban festival?”
So he witnessed this friend of his, who is Mexican, living in Mexico. They both tell me the story, and the first thing I said was, “Sounds good, but sorry, I have no money. There’s no way I can support you, except for, of course, just spreading the word with all the promotion that our embassy does and with media; that’s it.” And they said, “No, thank you very much. We don’t need your money. We only need you to stamp the dual-year logo on our program.” I said, “That’s easy, let’s do it.”
So I talked to the embassy. I said, “These kids are going to talk to you. You can see if they’re worth it, if it’s a good event and if it works for us to give them the logo.”
The Chair: Mr. Verdura, I don’t want to interrupt. I think I’m getting the gist of your message. But we’re running out of time and the senators want to put questions to you. I think we’re getting the point that there’s a lot of activity that can be harnessed.
Mr. Verdura: Exactly. There are a lot of activities that can be harnessed and that has been our change in policies.
I just want to finish by saying we promote Mexican culture abroad so the world knows us better and trusts us more to whatever that may bring.
That’s it. I’m open to questions.
Senator Dawson: Thank you for your presentation. I had the pleasure of being in your capital last Monday. I spent a few days in Mexico last week, and I had the pleasure of visiting museums, in particular the Museo Tamayo. I was very impressed.
How do you sell the distinction between Mexican and Spanish? You’re like us. We share a language with the Americans and the British, so we have to prove that on a cultural level we are different from a linguistic point of view. Because sometimes you’ll say, “Oh, this is a wonderful Mexican song,” but it isn’t. It’s Spanish, from Puerto Rico. How do you distinguish, when you sell your culture, the Spanish language versus the Mexican culture? We have that problem.
This is more a comment. I had the pleasure of being there in January as well. My wife is semi-retired and once a year she spends a month in Mexico. We went to Puerto Vallarta, where the Cirque du Soleil, our major cultural export, is building a multi-million-dollar resort that will be exporting our culture to your community. I’m quite proud of that relationship between the Mexicans and the Canadians. I was there with the Canadian and Mexican parliamentary group.
How do you make that distinction between Spanish and Mexican versus our problem of being Canadian versus anglophone versus American versus British? How do you sell that distinction?
Mr. Verdura: In terms of culture, I would say that most parts of the world would distinguish Spanish from Mexican, because as I was saying, Mexican is the mixture of something that was totally original but the Spanish culture doesn’t have, which is the pre-Hispanic cultures. So there are no Mayans or Aztecs in Spain. I would say that a large part of our Mexican heritage comes from the Indigenous side of things.
Of course, we’re very Spanish as well. The influence and presence of Spain has been a constant since the conquest in Mexico maybe more than any other country in Latin America. The immigration of Spanish individuals to Mexico has been a constant, even today.
In terms of language, we don’t say we speak Mexican. We say we speak Spanish. For example, there is something going on just now. A very important agreement for the testing of the Spanish language has been just signed between the Cervantes Institute in Spain and the National Autonomous University of Mexico to have a common Spanish-language examination, a little bit like TOEFL or the first certificate of proficiency exams from Cambridge in the U.K.
But we now have a common exam so that our embassies, our cultural institutes and the Spanish Cervantes Institutes around the world can use the same examinations. Of course, Mexican Spanish and Spanish Spanish, but it has been agreed to have a common examination.
Senator Bovey: Thank you very much for your comprehensive presentation. It’s clear that over the decades you’ve had a consistent approach to taking Mexican culture elsewhere. I congratulate you on Mexico City being the World Design Capital centre. It shows how well you’re known internationally.
I’ve got a couple of questions. I found your talk about the young artists very interesting.
How much of this international work do you do digitally? I’m going to go back now to 2002, I think it was, when the art gallery I was running at the time did the first international online exhibition. It was between the Winnipeg Art Gallery, the Smithsonian and your national gallery. Have you kept up that kind of digital, shall I say, collaborations or export of art in all disciplines?
Mr. Verdura: Yes. It’s good that you mentioned it, because we have found technology, especially with the cuts in our budget, to be our best ally. For example, we provide the contents to our embassies and consulates, and we now have a catalogue for them to find interesting or important venues, galleries, museums and cultural centres abroad.
What we have found is, through digital exhibitions, we’ve talked to artists and collectors who have given us the rights to use those exhibitions. So we forget about shipping and freighting, and the only thing we do is upload a WeTransfer link that they download in whatever country they are. They go with a USB to the museum or the exhibition and they print there. For example, we have a very good Frida Kahlo/Diego Rivera photographic history of a couple. It’s called “A Smile in the Middle of the Way,” and we send it like that. It has been shown in 60 different venues. Sometimes they print it and then protect it.
Senator Bovey: I want to pick up on this for a minute. Of course, with these digital exchanges we’re not seeing the real thing. The audiences aren’t seeing the paintings in the right scale. So you’re obviously sending the actual works and the actual performances around the world.
I’d like you to tell us how you tangibly measure the benefits of the cultural diplomacy you’re doing. I’ve seen the work at the various places I’ve travelled. When you do the evaluation at the end, how are you measuring the benefit?
Mr. Verdura: You’ve asked the most impossible question. My theory and dream would be to bring a good and inspiring exhibition around the world, to have a German man or woman walk into a museum, watch a piece made by a Mexican artist, and feel so touched, or listen to Mexican music or drink tequila, and to be so touched and so curious that they want to come to Mexico. That would be my dream: imagine everyone seeing something like that and wanting to come.
But the truth is, it’s very difficult to measure. We’re very sorry to tell you, but we are very well organized now. Every event organized by any of our consulates or embassies, or at least those they are involved in, has to be uploaded in a digital platform that we have, where we report every event they’re involved with. We take the number of events that happen in the world — last year we had around 2,500 Mexican cultural events sponsored, organized or that we were in some way involved. That amounted to around 8 million people.
How do we know this? Well, in a museum it’s easy to count the number of visitors, but if you have an exhibition in an open space — for example, we had pictures of Mexican cuisine shown in the New Delhi metro. One particular station was covered with pictures of Mexican dishes . How do we know how many people saw that, were interested in it and realized it was Mexican? Impossible to tell, but we do our best.
Or if we were guests of honour at the London Book Fair, for example, we can count how many people went to the book fair and even count the number of people who stopped at our booth, but we can’t really tell, so it’s complicated. So we have sort of come with these kinds of figures and indicators.
The Chair: Thank you. We’ll have time very quickly for Senator Cormier. I’m going to plead for short questions and short answers.
Senator Cormier: Thank you, Madam Chair.
Thank you for your presentation. You talked about the private sector being involved in certain presentations. Is that part of your strategy? Do you have as part of your cultural diplomacy strategy specific actions with the private sector?
Mr. Verdura: Yes, we do. For example, we tend to get together with private collections. Private collections have evolved very much in Mexico in recent years, private collections owned by enterprises, by companies. Companies want to have them shown around the world, especially when those companies have interests in other countries, like in the case of Latin America and the Mexican company that bottles Pepsi. It’s super large, and they have an amazing Latin American and Mexican art collection. We work together with them. We help them with permits. We help them with customs. We help them institutionally and governmentally.
We talk to the governments of Guatemala and now Chile. We talked to the Chilean government, telling them this was happening — open the doors to these companies and to cultural sectors to which they’re not necessarily linked. They might be linked to their partners.
Senator Cormier: It’s easy, I guess, to promote Frida Kahlo, but for young contemporary artists, who decides and what are the criteria of selection? Is it your department or the cultural department? How does it work, briefly?
Mr. Verdura: It’s my department, especially for sponsorships, plane tickets and artists. We talk all the time with the Ministry of Culture and with the National Institute of Fine Arts. We are in constant communications with them.
If the artist is popular and we know who he is, then we are very much interested in seeing what the venue is. So we talk to our embassies and say, “Can you please go see if this Biennale is interesting, or if this venue is important?” If we have doubts, we talk to specialists. We have a group of specialists close to our office and we constantly consult them. They’re not part of the office. They’re honorary. We don’t pay them, but we have the liberty to talk to them and ask questions whenever we’re in doubt. We try to sponsor that very much.
Senator Cormier: Thank you very much.
The Chair: Mr. Verdura, I want to thank you on behalf of the committee for coming before us a second time. It seems we have survived the video conferencing. Thank you for the information.
We are interested in our own cultural diplomacy and furthering it, and it’s important for us to receive information from other countries, particularly one that we’re so closely associated with — Mexico.
Thank you for your time, both today and the previous time. Upon reflection, if there is anything you want to add, please contact our clerk, who has been in touch with you. On behalf of the committee, we appreciate your input.
Mr. Verdura: Thank you very much.
(The committee adjourned.)