Governor General's Performing Arts Award
Administered by the Governor General’s Performing Arts Awards Foundation in association with the National Arts Centre, they present lifetime achievement awards for work in all performing arts domains, including theatre, dance, film, television and radio broadcasting and both popular and classical music; the awards are, however, not necessarily presented exclusively to performers, and may also honour people who have had distinguished careers in the business side of cultural industries, such as film, television and theatre directors and producers.The awards are presented at a live gala at the National Arts Centre, and are typically recorded for broadcast by CBC Television at a later date.[3] In 2001 he criticized the awards for paying lip service to diversity in Canadian arts despite the fact that only two people of colour, pianists Oscar Peterson and Jon Kimura Parker, had ever been named as honorees as of that time.[4] One named honoree in 2005, singer-songwriter and poet Raymond Lévesque, declined the honour due to his support of the Quebec sovereignty movement.[7] Payette offered little clarification of her reasons for not attending, but had faced some criticism since the beginning of her term around her apparently limited workload.