While it's not exactly good news for Canadian arts companies that parity may be the new normal for the Canadian dollar, it's not causing the same panic as the last time the loonie matched the greenback.
When the Canadian dollar crept above its U.S. counterpart in 2008, it shocked some Canadian festivals and theatres that depend on spending from patrons south of the border. It also hurt the film and television industry, which relies heavily on revenues from U.S. productions shot and finished in Canada. Just six years earlier, the Canadian dollar had been worth 61 cents (U.S.).
Since then, with the loonie fluttering within a dime of parity, arts organizations understood they had to replace their casual, bargain-hunting American visitors with more dedicated, focused tourists who are less concerned about exchange rates and more with quality.
"If the dollar's gone up, it isn't good, that's for sure," said Brian Baker, director of directors' affairs at the Directors Guild of Canada (DGC), which represents workers in film and television across the country. "Now, how not good is it? Parity's a psychological number that scares us all the time, but when you get down to pen and paper, we're only a couple of cents [higher] than we were a couple of months ago."
For the Stratford Shakespeare Festival, a combination of a stronger loonie, longer border wait times and stricter passport restrictions has hurt U.S. ticket sales. In 2002, about 38 to 40 per cent of its box-office sales were foreign, and mostly American. That figure fell to 32 per cent last year and again to 31 per cent this year. (Fortunately for the festival, Canadian ticket sales have risen.)
According to the festival's general director, Antoni Cimolino, the Americans who came up by the busload from near the border, looking for a cheap day out, have been in sharp decline. So, instead, he has been promoting the festival in farther-flung cities such as Chicago and Cleveland, hoping to lure more committed classical-theatre patrons.
"They will be there for years to come. The price won't matter as much to them, and they'll bring their children," he said, adding: "I think [the dollar is] already less of an issue [for Americans]than it was two years ago, when it was on American news all the time."
Colleen Blake, executive director of the competing Shaw Festival in Niagara-on-the-Lake (considerably closer to the U.S. border than Stratford), said, "We've had some time to get used to this, and so has our audience." The Shaw has not seen its U.S. audiences dwindle - its average of roughly 40 per cent foreign sales has held - and Blake said the festival has always tried to steer clear of marketing itself as a "bargain" destination.
But where a rising dollar hurts both the large theatre festivals, and many other arts
organizations, is in fundraising. More than 30 per cent of Stratford's donations come from the United States, and when the loonie was at 61 cents (U.S.), a $1,000 donation from America was nearly $1,600 after conversion.
Still, Luminato Festival CEO Janice Price points out, there is one bright spot to parity: A Canadian festival paying some artists in U.S. dollars is getting a much better deal than it used to.
Not long ago, the cultural industries taking the hardest hit from a high dollar might have been film and television -more than 80 per cent of film production in British Columbia, for example, still comes from the U.S. But now, production incentives offered by provinces and states, such as loans and tax credits, have become the overwhelming factor determining where a U.S. project will land for filming, post-production work or both.
"The dollar's the least of our worries," said Crawford Hawkins, the executive director of the DGC's British Columbia District Council. "They've [U.S. producers]become accustomed to the fact that it's not going back to 72 cents. A U.S. dollar is a U.S. dollar here and in Michigan. The issue will be what the bigger production incentive will be."