With New Immigration Fees, Touring DJs Aren't Welcome in Canada

Rick Moranis says he created the canonical "Great White North" sketch on SCTV to protest Canadian government requirements that the show incorporate more "Canadian content." The sketch was a big middle finger to the CBC, with Moranis and his partner Dave Thomas portraying dim, Molson-swilling, toque-wearing, "eh"-saying, buffoonish Canadian stereotypes. Ironically, it became one of Canada's beloved cultural icons. Clearly, the Canadian government hasn't suffered from a good public shaming in a while, because in August it levied a new fee on employers hiring foreign temporary workers—touring bands and DJs included. Canadian promoters, booking agents, club managers, DJs, musicians and fans were blindsided. They fear that the new fee will upend the precarious equilibrium that keeps the small club circuit in business.

"No one saw this coming," said Miche Stirling, owner of the Calgary-based booking house the Stirling Agency, which represents Canadian, American, British and Australian acts, primarily in Canada, "it was announced quietly before the long weekend in August and no one was notified."

"The whole point of this fee is to encourage you to use a Canadian artist instead of an American," said Kevin Trosky, co-owner of two bustling, medium sized clubs in Winnipeg—Greenroom Cabaret and Union Sound Hall. "But it's not like we're going to swap out A.S.A.P. Ferg for Maestro Fresh West."

The Globe and Mail's Jacob Serebrin says the fee was a reaction to a scandal in which a company planned to import Chinese miners to resource-rich Western Canada, but the new fees impact a broad range of economic sectors, including the music industry.

You may be thinking to yourself—how could Canadian customs recognize a DJ attempting to cross NAFTA lines? Immigrations officials aren't shaking down club nights to check for proper paperwork, and touring DJs don't exactly need a crate of records to take their set on the road.

Here's the thing: Canada's customs are on point. They know what DJing hardware looks like and if you only carry a laptop they are known to Google people and turn them around if they don't have work permits. So things are done above board. The club submits, on the artist's behalf, a request for a "Labor Market Opinion" (LMO) from the Canadian Government. Essentially, the employer must testify that the artist is not redundant with any Canadian worker. This is designed to keep you from hiring, say, an American dog-catcher when there is an unemployed Canadian dog-catcher in Moose Jaw looking for work. With musicians and DJs, you basically say, "DJ Apt One is an artist, like Picasso, and therefore he is idiosyncratic and there is no possible Canadian substitute." (Which is absolutely true.) The Government says OK and gives you papers saying so. At border immigration, you present your LMOs and pay a $150 fee for a work permit per employer or gig. (All values in this article are CDN, which are roughly equivalent to US Dollars right now.)

The new fee requires employers to pay $275 when they submit the request for an LMO to the government. Since the $150 cost of the work permit is usually passed on to the booker in the artist's fee, this means that it costs $425 to book a foreign artist, before even accounting for any other travel, hotel or booking fees.

Consider the math: booking fees for many of the more popular "underground" artists THUMP readers know and love are in the high three figures all the way into mid-four figures. Consider the high cost of flights to most Canadian cities (Toronto excepted). If you want to book a DJ with a $1000 fee at a 300 person venue, and travel, hotel and government fees add an additional $1000 or more dollars to the promoter's cost the club's margins go to hell. Nobody wants to pay $20 to see somebody of that stature, so you basically have to sell the place out and pay the local DJs jack shit.

Since the fees are per-person, bands will really feel the squeeze. With the new fees, a band with five members now costs $2125 in fees per show. "If I'm bringing in a single DJ it's not so bad," Winnipeg's Trosky says, "but now if I'm trying to bring in a band or group costs go through the roof… This makes it hard to do, if not impossible."

Previously, according to Stirling, there was a $450 cap on temporary work permit costs for bands of three or more persons.

Independent business people were perhaps most incensed because loopholes in the fee structure make the new rules inherently regressive (meaning that the costs are proportionally larger for lower income businesses or individuals). Furthermore, large touring productions with over fifteen members are exempt from the process, which is limited to bars, restaurants and smaller businesses.

What a lot of people fear, on both sides of the border, is that not whether Kevin Trosky can book a star like A.S.A.P. Ferg in Winnipeg—it's whether the mid-level, working, touring acts can keep up the cultural exchange that has done great things for artists on both sides of the border. Anybody who has spent a day in the music business knows that it's as much about who you know as what you know. A lot of my career-long friendships and business relationships were solidified over brunch or dinner on a tour gig. That is where you talk shop, exchange ideas and connections and build bonds. Case-in-point: an American DJ who had toured Canada extensively urged me to book Vancouver's Pat Lok in Philly. I did. We hit it off. Later, he set me up with some advance DJ promos I had no previous access to, and I commissioned him to do some remixes for my label.

Stirling thinks that without these important connections, Canadian music fans, Canadian businesses and Canadian musicians are getting hurt.

"Canadians love to support arts and entertainment and if that means bringing in the hottest new music act from overseas, Canadians will pay to attend a show like this, small or large scale," she says, "but you can support small Canadian businesses and tourism by bringing these acts in. You can also give lesser-known Canadian acts the opportunity to open up for this better known acts and build up their fan base. They then have more of a chance to get on the road and tour and promote cultural exchange."

Canadian artists like Grandtheft, Smalltown DJs, and U-Tern (of Oliver) gained a lot of exposure from their interaction with American artists. I would have never found their music were it not for friends who had toured Canada in the mid-2000s and brought them into my sphere of awareness. Furthermore, the US is the world's cultural powerhouse, and the opportunities are far greater once you can tap into American channels. I don't think it's unfair to say that Smalltown DJs and Grandtheft have gained more from their relationship with Mad Decent than Mad Decent has gained from a toehold in Alberta. Their careers have taken off in ways that are a great credit to Canadian music and great evidence of their country's musical vitality.

Since the introduction of the new fee, backlash has been fierce. In early September, days after the fee's introduction, DJs, promoters and music lovers took to social media to alert their fans about the possible disruption of cross-border touring. One online petition calling for the fee's repeal had garnered over 137,000 signatures as of this writing.

The Employment and Social Development Ministry's explanation for the fee was two-fold: the fee would protect Canadian workers but it would also reduce the government's administrative costs. The Canadian Employment and Social Development Ministry frequently pointed out that 60% of LMOs never resulted in any employment outcome—that is to say, only 40% of temporary workers that the government vetted at the request of private employers ended up working in Canada.

Stirling bristles at the broad brush the government used to apply the fee. "They state that 60 percent of LMO applications were never actually turned into work permits so this is costing Canadian tax payers money. This is all LMOs, not just film and entertainment applications… These acts are paying taxes, not putting pressure on the system. I think there is a serious issue with lumping film and entertainment into the same category of live-in-care givers and agricultural workers. I read that the Royal Bank of Canada was accused of hiring foreign workers to run an IT center, let the big business cover the costs not the struggling artists."

Michael Fichman is a producer, DJ, writer living in Philadelphia. His Grandfather was Canadian. Follow him on twitter at @djaptone.