Good afternoon, Madam Chair and members of the Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage.

My name is Judd Palmer. I am one of the three co-artistic directors of The Old Trout Puppet Workshop, a collective of artists based in Calgary, Alberta.

Our main focus is the creation of experimental puppet theatre, mostly for adults, which we tour across the country and abroad, but we also make sculptures, paintings, illustrated children's books, operas and films, teach widely, and curate an international puppet festival in our hometown.

The founding of our company almost 20 years ago is a tale that resonates with the mandate of this hearing. Nowadays, Alberta's theatre scene is thriving and cosmopolitan and brimming with world-class talents, but in the late 1990s when I was young and given to brooding, I believed that any artist worth their salt had to move east. Therefore, full of grandiose ambitions, I packed up a rickety orange Volvo station wagon and drove to Toronto to hurl myself at the great walls of central Canadian theatre.

The great walls of central Canadian theatre did not exactly crumble under my onslaught. I found myself wandering the streets forlornly in search of a community that would take me in, and as my courage dwindled, I felt more and more as though maybe I just wasn't up to standard. I yearned for the community I knew, the people I grew up with, out in the far-flung wilderness, distant from the intimidating institutions of cultural power.

Then one pivotal day it dawned on me that maybe that distance was actually an opportunity. Maybe there was something unique and wondrous about being an Albertan artist that needed nurturing by friends and family and shared experience and that couldn't sprout in other lonelier climes. Maybe we could invent our own traditions, our own strange styles, our own institutions. I called up all my oldest friends, who by now were scattered across the globe on similar sorrow-stricken missions, and asked if they wanted to move back home and start a company together.

I had two things I could offer. The first was a coal-heated shack on my family's ranch in southern Alberta, where we could live and work in exchange for feeding the pigs and collecting the eggs. The second was a Canada Council grant I had managed to secure for $8,000 to create a show. To us, that was a staggering sum. We managed to live for months on that grant and premiered our first production in the bunkhouse to an audience of cowboys and Hutterites, with frost-rimed cattle snorting steam outside the windows against a backdrop of the howling winter prairie beyond.

Thus, our company was born, a company founded in provincial patriotism, out of a new-found love for hearth and home, and a revitalized sense of who we were and who we might become, supported, ironically, by a national institution that saw better through our own fears than we did. It was the Canada Council that gave us both the resources and the confidence we needed to begin, a gesture of approval given precisely because we were willing to stake a claim in the literal wilderness for Albertan arts and culture.

In other words, the Canada Council made it possible for our company to exist. Without the confidence of those long-forgotten jurors, I would probably still be lost and alone in some alley in Toronto, making children sad with a puppet show out the back of the same old Volvo.

My testimony today is principally this: To me, the Canada Council has always been an impossibly beautiful institution to which I owe, in many ways, my whole life. One of the things I love dearly about it is that it is an expression of the grand foundational Canadian idea that a country in its entirety is made stronger by taking care of all of its parts.

I'm not really able to offer an educated high-level analysis regarding regional inequities under the old or new funding model. Other witnesses have testified to a disparity between council funding for Alberta and for the rest of the country, and I fully support their desire for that disparity to be rectified. I believe the council is honestly working to do so. However, I must also speak to our own experience.

Our company has prospered since the days on the ranch, with significant support from the council throughout our history. We have rarely been turned down for a grant. Under the new model, our core funding has tripled. We're not sure why we have received council support where others apparently haven't, but we are enormously grateful for it and dearly hope in the coming years that the council finds ways to extend the same support to more artists from our province.

Of course, we do have some suggestions.

One thing that has always been a bit of an issue with funders at all three levels of government is how long it takes between making an application and receiving a decision. It can take three to six months for the council to tell you whether you got the money to go ahead with your project, and then another month to actually receive it. As a company that does a certain amount of international touring, that can be problematic, since presenters abroad often make their decisions on much tighter timelines. We had hoped that the new online portal and funding model would streamline the decision-making process at the council, but it doesn't appear to help, at least not yet, anyway.

As a small company with minimal administrative support, anything that reduces the amount of work involved in accessing council funds is a huge boon. Grant writing takes up a significant portion of my time, and although, of course, it's a necessary step in the process of public funding, it's not what I'm trained to do or necessarily good at. I think that's a significant obstacle for many people in the industry, especially those working at a grassroots, independent level.

The strides the council made under its new model towards efficiencies in this area are, I believe, truly impactful, and I hope the council will remember this important objective as it continues to hone its programs and processes.

Here's a small thing. Each level of government has its own funding body and each funding body has roughly the same programs, but the actual application process is just different enough so that you have to rewrite applications for the same project three times—or more, if you count private foundations—reframing it to meet slightly different criteria or to fit different formats, even though the substance is the same.

This is obviously not the direct purview of the council, but council could act as a leader in solving this problem, advocating with provincial and municipal funders to standardize the application process across all three levels, as they have with CADAC, the financial and statistical format adopted by many granting agencies.

If it were possible to write one application and then send it to multiple funders, this would save a truly amazing amount of unnecessary work for artists across the country.

There's one last thing. A few years ago, the Canada Council launched a program called “new chapter”, a one-time only project grant program in commemoration of Canada's 150th anniversary, with a maximum ask of up to half a million dollars—much larger than any previous project grant maximum, in my lifetime, at least.

There were over 2,000 applicants from across the country and my company was one of the 200 or so successful ones. Using that grant and additional support leveraged through it from the National Arts Centre creation fund, we created our own puppet opera in partnership with the Calgary Opera and the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity. It is playing in Calgary as we speak. Through the new chapter program, we were given an opportunity to make something bigger and more wonderful than anything we've ever attempted before, and we believe it has enormously enlarged our potential as an organization.

My wish is that our national political leaders, all of you attending these hearings, and the council, recognize the vast impact this program has had and will continue to have on the national arts ecology, and find a way to keep the program going somehow. Maybe it's only every few years and maybe it continues in a more limited scope, but I dearly hope for more chances for more artists—artists of the future—to be given the same opportunity.

We don't have the same system of private profit-based investment that drives the American theatre economy, and I'm glad for it. But for our artists to create work at a truly global level, it must be possible to access transformative developmental support at that scale without leaving the country, even if it's only once in a lifetime.

I and my company have been recipients of enormous support from the Canada Council and other funders. We would like to express heartfelt gratitude to the people who administrate those programs. It can't be easy, but we are certainly striving with honesty and great diligence for the common good of all Canadians.

We would also like to thank the people of Canada, Alberta and Calgary, who entrust us with their faith and support. We do our best to deserve it.

Thank you for listening.

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