St. John’s — last port of call!

Photo David P. Janes

Feb­ru­ary 19, 2012

For weeks, I have won­dered what kind of weather awaited me in the last leg of my pan­cana­dian tour. Hal­i­fax and St. John’s are two cities well known for their win­ter storms. Well, the Gods were kind to me all through­out my five weeks on the road! After spring-like tem­per­a­tures and sun­shine in Hal­i­fax, I arrived in St. John’s on Thurs­day night to the New­found­land ver­sion of spring, with above aver­age tem­per­a­tures, a thick fog and pour­ing rain! Another more recent con­cern of mine had to do with how many peo­ple would attend the pub­lic ses­sion sched­uled for Fri­day night at the Anna Tem­ple­ton Cen­tre on Duck­worth Street, not far from the har­bour. Accord­ing to the lat­est infor­ma­tion, only three had reg­is­tered. It was good of George Mur­ray, CCA Board mem­ber and Exec­u­tive Direc­tor of the Asso­ci­a­tion of Cul­tural Indus­tries of New­found­land and Labrador (ACI), to tell me not to worry, that peo­ple here do not RSVP very much, they just show up. Nonethe­less, I still wor­ried that my tour of the coun­try would end on a downer.

Fri­day started by enjoy­ing a typ­i­cal New­found­land fish-cake break­fast with Peter Gard­ner, for­mer CCA Board mem­ber and cur­rently Exec­u­tive Direc­tor of Fes­ti­val 500, the inter­na­tional choral fes­ti­vals which bring thou­sands of peo­ple to St. John’s every sec­ond year. Peter then kindly drove me to Memo­r­ial Uni­ver­sity, where I met Ron Romp­key, another for­mer CCA Board mem­ber. Both showed sus­tained inter­est in the future of the CCA and offered to help whichever way they could: I assured them this was not falling on deaf ears!

Ron took over from Peter and con­ducted me to The Rooms, a mod­ern cul­tural com­plex which, next to the dark stone cathe­dral, dom­i­nates old St. John’s. The Rooms host the provin­cial archives, a museum, an art gallery and … a nice café where I am meet­ing for lunch Dean Brin­ton, CEO of this impor­tant cul­tural insti­tu­tion. We savour one of the best chow­ders I have had in the Atlantic part of my tour, with a superb view of St. John’s Har­bour, that we dis­cuss the future of the CCA and the project for a 2013 National Pol­icy Con­fer­ence.  Before head­ing back to the hotel, I fol­low Dean’s advice and take the time to visit the inter­est­ing exhi­bi­tion, The New Roman­tics.

I am glad to report that George was quite right: twenty-eight peo­ple attended Fri­day night’s meet­ing. They lis­tened with atten­tion to a pre­sen­ta­tion which, I dare hope, was all the bet­ter for hav­ing been made thir­teen times before, depend­ing on the specifics of each cir­cum­stance! Peo­ple appar­ently appre­ci­ated the diag­nos­tic on the cul­tural sector’s cur­rent envi­ron­ment and the idea of a national pol­icy con­fer­ence to dis­cuss future direc­tions. The sec­tion con­cern­ing the future of the CCA res­onates par­tic­u­larly well here. After eigh­teen years of exis­tence, ACI New­found­land is fac­ing sim­i­lar chal­lenges: man­date, mem­bers’ engage­ment, pri­or­i­ties and financ­ing are all part of a cur­rent debate as part of its strate­gic plan­ning process. In fact, the date of my visit here was not for­tu­itous but had been planned to coin­cide with a sim­i­lar meet­ing the next morn­ing, fol­lowed by a meet­ing of the ACI Board con­cern­ing its organization’s strate­gic plan.  In this con­text, a lot of what I had to say echoed with the peo­ple in the room. Dur­ing the exchange that fol­lowed my pre­sen­ta­tion, many inter­ven­ers empha­sized the need for greater sol­i­dar­ity between cul­tural com­mu­ni­ties, at all lev­els. Peo­ple seemed to rec­og­nize clearly the unique con­tri­bu­tion that an orga­ni­za­tion like the CCA can make in the pur­suit of such an objec­tive. The key ques­tion is how to ensure its sur­vival? This leads us to talk about finan­cial mod­els and strate­gic orientation.

This theme con­tin­ued into the next morning‘s pub­lic meet­ing chaired by George, also relieved to see that thirty peo­ple had trav­eled to the meet­ing room on the third floor of the Rocket Bak­ery. I encour­age par­tic­i­pants not to aban­don the idea of ​​a mul­ti­dis­ci­pli­nary umbrella orga­ni­za­tion at the provin­cial level by empha­siz­ing the role that such a body could play in pro­mot­ing the inter­ests of the cul­tural sec­tor to the nation­ally. This mes­sage was def­i­nitely heard.

And now it’s time to go to the air­port to return home at last and to the office after five weeks of a tour from west to east began on Jan­u­ary 9 in Vic­to­ria and took me to the other end of the coun­try.  I have met about five hun­dred peo­ple on this jour­ney, pre­sented the pro­posal from the CCA in the cur­rent con­text of the cul­tural sec­tor, gath­ered sup­port, sug­ges­tions and, I hope, estab­lished con­tacts that can be uti­lized in our process of rein­ven­tion. Thank you to every­one who con­tributed to the suc­cess of this broad con­sul­ta­tion. The time has come to set­tle all this and inte­grate it into our strate­gic plan. I will fol­low up with you as things progress!

- Alain