Victoria City councillor Chris Coleman is confident Victoria has the ability to pull off a successful Juno Awards, even if he’s unsure if the City will bid for the 2013 or 2014 award show.

A loosely organized committee of local and British Columbia business, industry and government leaders, as well as key organizers of past Juno Awards in Vancouver, closed a four-week online questionnaire process that sampled local reaction to the idea of holding the awards ceremony in Greater Victoria.

While the committee has just begun reviewing the roughly 600 responses, Coleman says the results look positive.  Complete findings of the questionnaire are expected soon.

The annual awards ceremony is the biggest music-industry event in Canada for composers, performers, and other artists, as well as for the organizing body CARAS (Canadian Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences).  It is also a key fundraiser to support CARAS’s operations, and as such carries an overall budget of nearly $2M.  CARAS takes the majority of the proceeds from ticket sales and television rights from the gala televised event on the final day of festivities.

CARAS also brings with them several national sponsors, but it is up to the local organizing team to line up all levels of government support.  The local group also prepares music and social events for the week, and brings in sponsors and partners for those.  Coleman notes that the 2009 awards in Vancouver brought with them 5200 room-nights for local hotels at full rack-rates, and Victoria hotels are already on board for the Victoria bid.

Coleman and his team have done their research.  He indicates that he has stacks of information and statistics in his office on previous Junos.  And he says that he has personally spoken to members of host committees from all recent awards (before 1990 they were held only in Toronto) in cities such as Ottawa, Saskatoon, Calgary, Edmonton, Winnipeg, and St. John’s (home to this year’s awards, April 18th).  The response has been the same from all of them.  They will invariably detail the difficulties, hiccups and surprises they encountered along the way, but will always indicate that they’d host them again in a heartbeat if the opportunity presented itself.

Coleman stresses that the way CARAS wants the week-long festival set up is to include local performers as part of the side events that lead up to the nationally-televised ceremony.  And although most of the activities will be in and around Greater Victoria, he says we have plenty of talent on the whole Island from which to pull from.

And he says we will need to do it that way if he is to get buy-in even from the CRD municipalities.  Coleman suggests that if framed properly, as an economic generator for the whole area, it should not be hard for municipal councils to see the benefits and opportunities of apportioning part of their yearly cultural spending to the event.  He suggests that just $10,000 from each surrounding municipality, in each of the next three years leading up to the hosting date can generate as much as $400,000, or one fifth of the budget.

In exchange for the financial commitment, the organizers would be sure to spread some events out throughout the region.  For example, a part of Juno week often includes a “celebrities vs. locals” hockey game, and that could be held at Bear Mountain Arena.  A celebrity golf tournament, unheard of in winter-bound cities previously hosting the event, can be held in, say, Oak Bay.  Coleman points out that although the official event takes place over a week, once the Junos are secured for Victoria there will be the possibility of creating “Juno-linked” musical events for an entire year leading up to them.

The host city is typically announced one year prior to the event.  For example if the awards are granted to Victoria in early 2012, it will be for the awards to be held in March or April of 2013.

Coleman says he has a simple formula to do the job right.  “For me, the test is, if six weeks after we host the awards, and we approach CARAS and ask them how they feel it went, they say ‘Super, when can we do it again in Victoria?’  That’s the response we’d love to see”.

More information on CARAS and the Juno Awards can be found on the CARAS website here.

To discuss the Victoria Juno Awards bid on the VibrantVictoria.ca discussion forum, click here.

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