CCA Bulletin 09/07

Ottawa, Friday, March 9, 2007

Report on CCA Policy and Advocacy 2006-07 Priorities and publication of the 2007-08 priorities

Just the Facts…

As the Canadian Conference of the Arts looks back at its National Policy Conference held just one year ago in early March 2006, this exercise provides us with the opportunity to report on the progress the organization has achieved in dealing with the priorities that conference delegates recommended to the CCA Board of Governors:

increased and stable funding for the arts and culture sector,
equity for artists, creators, and arts professionals,
Canadian content and ownership regulation in the cultural industries,
Cultural diversity and youth engagement
Federal election readiness.

Over the past year, the CCA has engaged all five areas of concern: a full report on activities can be found on our web site.

The first three policy and advocacy issues have taken us into places that may seem sometimes foreign to the traditional approaches to seeking increased and stable funding for the arts and culture sector. So today, we thought we would connect the dots, explain why preoccupations with the Canadian audiovisual sector are so prominent these days and publish the new list of CCA policy priorities for 2007-08 recently approved by the Board of Governors.

Tell Me More

The CCA is a member of the Canadian Arts Coalition requesting substantial and permanent increases to the budget of the Canada Council beyond the one-time, over two years $50M increase of the last federal budget. Increasing Canada’s investment in cultural creativity across the country through the Council is a fundamental tool for the government to ensure that there is such a thing as a distinctive Canadian culture to promote at home and abroad.

But there are other crucial ways of supporting the Canadian cultural sector and the Board of Governors of the CCA has instructed the Secretariat to address them in various ways throughout the year. This has led us, through the pre-budget consultation process, to press for increased funding to various Heritage Portfolio agencies and Crown Corporations; for an adequately funded new museums policy, for making Tomorrow Starts Today a permanent program, for copyright and residual revenue exemption, for so-called “soft” social benefits for artists and creators, etc…

Book and magazine publishers, sound recording artists and producers, film, video, and new media producers also enjoy access to a suite of funding programs at the Department of Canadian Heritage (DCH) that are seen to be critical to their survival and their success.

Many will have noticed that the audiovisual cultural sub-sector has mobilized a lot of our energy over the past year. In a sense, this is not surprising since it is under the provisions of the Broadcasting Act that we find the most clearly stated cultural objectives of Canadian society as a nation and it is under the same Act that the federal government has by far its largest financial impact on Canadian culture. Appropriations to the CBC, funding for Telefilm, the National Film Board, contributions to the Canadian Television Fund, these investments in Canadian cultural expression far outstrip any other financial implication Ottawa has in the Canadian cultural sector.

All of these broadcasters, independent producers, cable, satellite companies and other broadcast distribution undertakings also pay royalties and residual payments to artists, creators, and copyright owners to compensate them for the public use of their work. The precise amount is difficult to nail down but it is easily in the hundreds of millions of dollars.

Finally, it is in this sector that we witness tectonic plate movements which may rip apart the current system without any clear vision of where we are going in terms of the cultural objectives set by Parliament. Over the past year, large issues have indeed loomed over the audiovisual cultural sector which place serious pressure on the ecology of increased and stable funding for the arts and culture sector at large.

The recent Canadian Television Fund crisis, the upcoming mega-mergers in the sector, the revision of the mandate of the CBC, the still awaited CRTC “over-the air” Television Policy, the issues of concentration of ownership and of foreign ownership of the backbone of our audiovisual sector, the review role and performance of the regulator in supporting the objectives of the Broadcasting Act, all these events are taking place or about to take place against the backdrop of radical changes in the ways young Canadians are accessing the most widely consumed forms of cultural expression, and in a policy universe where, according to the Telecommunications Policy Review Panel,

The convergence of telecommunications and broadcasting markets brings into question the continued viability of maintaining two separate policy and regulatory frameworks, one for the telecommunications common carriers like the incumbent telephone companies and one for their competitors in most of the same markets, the cable telecommunications companies.

To complete the scene, after a six month study on the impact of new media on traditional broadcasting ordered by Cabinet, the CRTC has recently restated its1999 decision that new media need not be regulated. The very same new media are evoked in diverse forums to justify the positions raised by broadcasters, cable operators and conglomerates to deregulate the system put in place over the past century, with a patchwork of disconnected decisions being taken.

What strikes the observer of all this is that piece by piece, events are taking place in a seemingly disjointed and not always public process, a cause of concerns for many of the parties involved and for all Canadians who may remember what happened to our film industry when we let go of our distribution system in the 1920’s.

Faced with this, the CCA has taken a number of steps which will be detailed in a Bulletin coming out next week. For now, let us talk about our priorities for the coming year

CCA’s policy and advocacy priorities for 2007-08

At its February 2007 meeting, the Board of the CCA revisited the policy and advocacy priorities for 2007-08. It is quite clear that priorities have not changed much, not much having moved forward in the current unstable political federal environment.

The CCA 2007-08 Action Plan will be articulated around five broad policy priorities:

Increasing the levels of federal government investment in the arts and culture sector
Advancing the socio-economic status of artists, creators and other arts professionals
Enhancing the support for the production and distribution of Canadian cultural products at home and around the world
Affirming the role of the federal government in arts and culture policy
Developing cultural diversity at home and abroad

A detailed description of these priorities can be found on CCA’s @gora. Do not hesitate to share your views on them with us either through email or though the blog.