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The Masses like the arts - Globe opinion
By Miriam Mittermaier | October 7, 2008
In justifying the $45-million in cuts to grants for artists his government announced just before the election, Stephen Harper has repeatedly stressed his concern for the sensibilities of a notional everyman. He said last month that “ordinary working people” were unconcerned by the elimination of grants. He also complained that unchecked subsidies could encourage “creators or producers who are entirely cut off from public need or public demand.”
The Conservative Leader must have been surprised if he saw the attendance figures for last weekend’s Scotiabank Nuit Blanche, a “free all-night contemporary art thing” in Toronto with 155 works by some seriously strange creators and producers: just under one million.
Surely some of the hundreds of thousands who braved a chilly night to see an army of rubber duckies floated onto a pond at Ryerson University, or the City Hall turned into a giant video-game display, were “ordinary working people.”
Such individuals were undoubtedly among the estimated 175,000 who turned out for Montreal’s Nuit Blanche in March, or among the millions of Canadians who enjoy the work of the many recipients of the granting programs cut by Mr. Harper, some controversial-sounding (Toronto rock act Holy Fuck, for example) and others not (The Royal Winnipeg Ballet).
The logical flaw at the heart of the government’s rhetoric on grant elimination - is that the cultural sector, and the subsidies and tax credits that help sustain it, represent what Mr. Harper calls a “niche issue.”
An oft-quoted report by the Conference Board of Canada published this year pegged the value of culture to our economy at $84.6-billion a year. About 1.1 million people earn their livings from it directly or indirectly, and have cause to worry about the Conservatives, though Margaret Atwood, for one, went too far when she endorsed the cultural policies of the separatist Bloc Québecois.
The Conservative government has increased net funding for the Department of Canadian Heritage. But that gain has largely gone to one-off events like the 2010 Olympics, rather than to working artists.
Given the great value and popularity of their output, Mr. Harper’s cavalier view of the arts should concern the rest of the country, too.
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