CCA Publishes its 2012–2013 Analyses of Provincial and Territorial Budgets

The Cana­dian Con­fer­ence of the Arts (CCA) is happy to meet its com­mit­ment to pub­lish its Analy­ses of the Provin­cial and Ter­ri­to­r­ial 2012–13 Bud­gets from the per­spec­tive of arts, cul­ture and her­itage.

For sev­eral years, the CCA has pro­duced an Analy­sis of the Fed­eral Bud­get’s impact on the cul­tural sec­tor widely used by pol­icy mak­ers and aca­d­e­mics. As part of the 2012–2017 Busi­ness Plan, the CCA had iden­ti­fied the need for a sim­i­lar type of pub­li­ca­tion look­ing at how provin­cial and ter­ri­to­r­ial Bud­gets affect the var­i­ous cul­tural sec­tors across the country.

There are many dif­fi­cul­ties in mak­ing inter-provincial and inter-territorial com­par­isons of cul­tural pol­icy and cul­tural fund­ing.  First, each province and ter­ri­tory has a dif­fer­ent “bas­ket” of cul­tural poli­cies and pro­grams.  Sec­ond, not all expen­di­tures and rev­enues that can be con­sid­ered “cul­tural” are counted.  Third, each province and ter­ri­tory admin­is­ters its cul­tural rev­enues and expen­di­tures in a dif­fer­ent way.  And fourth, and per­haps most impor­tant, each province and ter­ri­tory has a dif­fer­ent his­tory of cul­tural sup­port which springs from dif­fer­ing polit­i­cal, eco­nomic and social contexts.

Why have we under­taken this study? No pan-Canadian ana­lyt­i­cal overviews on this sub­ject exist, and as Sta­tis­tics Canada recently ter­mi­nated its annual sur­vey on Gov­ern­ment Expen­di­tures on Cul­ture, it seemed timely to begin a series that would at the very least exam­ine annual fluc­tu­a­tions in cul­tural sup­port by the two senior lev­els of gov­ern­ment, and attempt to dis­cern trends in funding.

This report was sched­uled to be pub­lished in the fall of 2012. Fur­ther to the CCA hav­ing had to shut down its Sec­re­tariat at the begin­ning of Novem­ber, the work had been delayed, but thanks to the part­ner­ship with the Cen­tre on Gov­er­nance of the Uni­ver­sity of Ottawa, and with the gen­er­ous sup­port of vol­un­teers, these Analy­ses are now avail­able on the web­sites of both orga­ni­za­tions. We take this oppor­tu­nity to thank the Saskatchewan Arts Alliance for hav­ing vol­un­teered to host the CCA web­site until fur­ther notice, so that doc­u­men­ta­tion can remain acces­si­ble to all.

It is our hope that such an overview, even if it is only a snap­shot, will become more crit­i­cal as other sources of infor­ma­tion about the over­all health of the cul­tural sec­tor in Canada dis­ap­pear or become less fre­quent. Pend­ing the ulti­mate fate of the CCA, the Cen­tre on Gov­er­nance is explor­ing alter­na­tive sources of rev­enue in hopes that a means may be found to con­tinue both the fed­eral and provin­cial Bud­get analy­ses in future years.

Kath­leen Sharpe

Pres­i­dent