Upcoming Federal Budget and End of Peak Season for Festivals and Events: FAME Calls for Greater Tourism Revenue, Security and Promotion of Culture
October 13, 2026
As part of the federal government’s pre-budget consultations, the Festivals and Major Events Canada (FAME) coalition is making three key recommendations this year that would enable hundreds of events to generate more tourism revenue, enhance and fund security, and better promote culture.
FAME’s brief includes letters of support from dozens of tourism and cultural organizations from coast to coast, including the Tourism Industry Association of Canada, as well as those of British Columbia, Manitoba and New Brunswick, Destination Vancouver and Tourisme Montréal, the BC Music Festival Collective, the Regroupement des événements majeurs internationaux, the Ottawa Festival Network, Événements Attractions Québec, Event Atlantic and the Atlantic Presenters Association. In recent months, the cities of Toronto and Vancouver have also issued public calls for increased federal funding for festivals and events, and the Alliance de l’industrie touristique du Québec has endorsed FAME’s first recommendation in its own brief.
This recommendation aims to establish a program or fund dedicated to the growth and tourism appeal of Canadian festivals and events, in light of the recent global rise in event tourism and to boost both domestic and international tourism in Canada within the current geopolitical context.
The music tourism sector alone is set to more than triple in size by 2033, and FAME is daring to ask whether the federal government will seize this opportunity or be content to sit in the nosebleed seats while the rest of the world takes to the stage. In the United States, the American Music Tourism Act bill recognizes this phenomenon. This initiative could serve as inspiration here, according to Festivals and Major Events.
At the start of the 2010s, with the establishment of the Marquee Tourism Events Program, the Conservative government was investing a total of $100M a year in the sector, both through this program and those run by Canadian Heritage. Converted to 2026 constant dollars, this amount is double what the Liberal government invests annually ($148M versus $73M).
In the wake of the recent shooting at Salsa on St. Clair and the van-ramming attack at the Lapu-Lapu Festival in 2025, FAME’s second recommendation is for festivals and events to be eligible for the Canada Community Security Program.
Regarding security, the former mayor of Toronto, John Tory, recently said that governments must commit to providing multiyear funding, so that event organizers know they can ‘stay in our cities’. Currently, FAME notes that many festivals have to invest more in security than the amount they receive in funding from the federal government. A recent analysis shows that security accounts for an average of 4.42% of event budgets.
Finally, the brief outlines the many current challenges in the sector, including operating costs that are generally rising faster than revenue, creating a ‘scissor effect’ that has ‘cut’ tens of festivals and events.
Citing figures, FAME demonstrates that the Liberal government’s funding for Canadian Heritage is already lower than that of the Harper government, when adjusted for constant dollars. This is despite the fact that the number of individual Canada Arts Presentation Fund (CAPF) recipients has risen significantly, by more than 20% between 2018-2019 and 2024-2025 alone. For Building Communities through Arts and Heritage (BCAH), over the same period, the number of festivals receiving funding increased by 21%. The coalition’s third recommendation is therefore to invest an additional $15M in the CAPF and $10M in BCAH, bringing the total for both programs to just under $98M.
FAME acknowledges that the Liberal government has increased cultural funding since 2015; however, for festivals and events, it has not substantially increased the base funding established in 2008. It has only indexed this amount, and even then, not fully.
View the document