From the traveling desk of Alain Pineau — A full day in Saskatoon and off to Regina

Jan­u­ary 23, 2012

REGINA — So here I am, finally set­tled into my hotel room after a three hour bus ride that took me from Saska­toon to Regina with my knees pressed against the seat in front of me. At least I had inter­net access along the way so I could catch up on the day’s e-mails and read an excel­lent inter­view by Greg O’Brien from cartt.ca with Kon­rad Von Finck­en­stein, the chair­man of the CRTC whose term is fin­ish­ing up in a few days.

It was a long and busy day! I was up at 6 a.m. for a tele­phone inter­view with Radio-Canada in Win­nipeg in advance of my visit to Man­i­toba at the end of the week. At 8 a.m. I had break­fast with Kevin Kitchen, the Com­mu­nity Ini­tia­tives Man­ager with the City of Saska­toon, and Marnie Glad­well, the Exec­u­tive Direc­tor of the Saskatchewan Arts Alliance. Kevin shared the city’s cul­tural devel­op­ment plan with us and we could clearly see the pas­sion that ani­mated this munic­i­pal bureau­crat whose career also included sev­eral years of ser­vice in the City of Ottawa. It seems that all roads lead to Saska­toon. The city’s devel­op­ment plan stems from its des­ig­na­tion as Canada’s cul­tural cap­i­tal for 2007 by the Depart­ment of Cana­dian Her­itage. There are many rea­sons to hope that this plan will lead to action. Indeed, it seems that the city coun­cil, with the mayor in the lead, is sen­si­tive to the insis­tence of the min­ing indus­try and the Uni­ver­sity of Saskatchewan that this rapidly grow­ing city offer a qual­ity of life that includes art and culture.

Poached eggs com­pleted, Marnie and I went to Perse­phone The­atre to meet the gen­eral man­ager and the artis­tic direc­tor, and were joined by rep­re­sen­ta­tives of the Saska­toon Sym­phony Orches­tra and the Mendel Art Gallery. What fol­lowed was an inter­est­ing exchange on the impor­tance of devel­op­ing coher­ent strate­gies to bet­ter posi­tion the arts in our com­mu­ni­ties and of con­vinc­ing decision-makers at all lev­els of the role of cul­ture and its mul­ti­ple con­tri­bu­tions to our qual­ity of life. Inter­est­ing echoes of our ear­lier con­ver­sa­tion! Again, I feel this gives us a good idea of the con­tri­bu­tion that an orga­ni­za­tion such as the CCA could make towards achiev­ing these goals, all tem­pered by the affir­ma­tion that Saska­toon is far from Ottawa!

I have encoun­tered this sense of iso­la­tion from the national cap­i­tal more than once dur­ing my vis­its to the West­ern provinces, par­tic­u­larly in British Colum­bia. It resur­faced dur­ing this afternoon’s pub­lic ses­sion at the beau­ti­ful site of the the­atre La Troupe du Jour, which gath­ered about twenty peo­ple from var­i­ous sec­tors of cul­tural activ­i­ties, pre­dom­i­nantly anglo­phone, rang­ing from visual arts to her­itage to edu­ca­tion. Here again, I received pos­i­tive reac­tions to my pre­sen­ta­tion (prob­a­bly too long in spite of my efforts, but how do you do an overview in thirty min­utes of the state of the arts and cul­ture and the role that the CCA can play when so lit­tle is known about this unique orga­ni­za­tion?) How to ade­quately respond to crit­i­cism to the effect that few so-called national orga­ni­za­tions ade­quately reflect the con­cerns and inter­ests of artists and cul­tural orga­ni­za­tions west of Ontario? What to respond when, for the third time in twenty-four hours, I am told that the cul­tural sec­tor in Saskatchewan receives the least fund­ing from Ottawa? But the ses­sion ended pos­i­tively with warm words of encour­age­ment and, dare I hope?, the pos­si­bil­ity that this will lead to a num­ber of new mem­bers of the CCA!

The day promises to be as rich and full in Regina tomor­row, so it is more than past my bed­time! I will return Thurs­day, after my visit to Saskatchewan is com­pleted. You can also fol­low the progress of my tour via Twit­ter.

Alain