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Arden's Notebook

May 15, 2009

The Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage's Report On The Analysis Of The Arts Programs That Were Cancelled In Summer 2008

Looking through the wrong end of the binoculars...

Binoculars are an interesting and useful invention. Designed to help you see distant objects in close up, they perform the same function in reverse if you should happen to look through the other end. You're looking at the same object – it's actual true physical distance from you hasn't changed an inch, but your perspective on it is radically different, depending on which side you hold up to your eyes. It's much the same with how you see the "Report On The Analysis Of The Arts Programs That Were Cancelled In Summer 2008" from the Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage.

Last summer when the Conservative government announced nearly $45 million dollars in cuts to arts funding, the community went, well… we all started to yell and scream about it. Within a very short period of time, a couple of arts-friendly MPs (including the now returned to private life Peggy Nash) pushed to have the Standing Committee hold public hearings on the cuts. The Standing Committee is made up of 12 MPs of all political persuasions and is tasked with hearing issues of concern to the Heritage portfolio. The hearings were put together very, very quickly. And cancelled just as fast. As it turned out, we were only days away from an election call.

Last month, the Committee reconvened those hearings and has now issued their report. The report is interesting for a variety of reasons. The first is for the consistent message that was sent by every discipline of the arts community. No matter what kind of work they did, everyone talked about the significant impact that the cuts will have on not just their own work but the entire arts community. The second interesting thing was that the entire group of Conservative MPs banded together to issue a "dissenting opinion" that not only disagreed with the conclusions of the report but in fact quarrelled with the veracity of the information presented. They suggested that only those with a negative opinion of the cuts were asked to appear (ok then – please show me someone in our community who actually thought the cuts were a GOOD thing!) and that the Committee had not appropriately categorized how the money had been reapportioned.

This is not an unimportant part of the discussion; one side says the money went down, the other side says it went both sideways and up. The Conservative MPs stated, as did the Prime Minister during the last election campaign, that the budgetary allotment for the Department of Canadian Heritage actually went up. Based on the analysis of the Standing Committee and work done at the time by the Canadian Conference of the Arts (full disclosure here – I sit on the Board of Directors) the money did indeed go up. But when you look at all the various things that actually fall into the Department’s portfolio (Citizenship and Heritage, Cultural Affairs, International and Intergovernmental Affairs, Sport, Planning and Corporate Affairs, Public and Regional Affairs) and you look at the money, none of it went into any of the "arts" programs. The additional money has gone towards the Olympic and Paralympic Torch Relays and a program called "The Road to Excellence" for Olympic athletes. According to the figures in the report, spending was decreased (most of that for arts funding) for a total of $61.9 million but $72.5 was allotted to the two Olympic programs. I'm not suggesting for a moment that spending on the Olympics isn't a valid use of taxpayer’s money. I am suggesting that I am smart enough to read the figures presented to me by the Standing Committee and have the cognitive skills to understand that someone won and someone lost in this transaction. And the arts community lost.

While it is true that this is indeed money allocated to the Heritage budget, it cannot – no matter how you look at it – be considered as spending on the arts.

Maybe this is another example of seeing things differently depending on which end of the binoculars you look through. But looking in from my end? We lost.

•	Report on federal arts programs cancelled in summer 2008 released

All the best,

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