Telefilm Canada: The Impacts Remain Difficult to Evaluate

In 2011–2012 Tele­film received $105.7 mil­lion from the Her­itage Depart­ment. For 2012–2013, their bud­get will be cut $10.6 mil­lion over 3 years, a reduc­tion of 10%. Since last sum­mer, the gov­ern­ment has been telling agen­cies that they will need to cut 5–10% from their bud­gets. If observers weren’t sur­prised by the cuts to CBC – they were announced and expected from many mem­bers of gov­ern­ment – the cuts to Tele­film and NFB caused a bit more sur­prise. Some have won­dered if the other audio-visual...

Special Budget Edition: A First Look at the Federal Budget

We are very proud to present this spe­cial fed­eral bud­get edi­tion. Our in depth bud­get analy­sis will be pub­lished in a few weeks when the Her­itage Min­is­ter pub­lishes the esti­mates and report on plans and pri­or­i­ties. Nor­mally the gov­ern­ment announces the plans and pri­or­i­ties before the fed­eral bud­get drops, but not this year. Spe­cific impacts are begin­ning to emerge as to which pro­grams are being main­tained, but there is no guar­an­tee that pri­or­i­ties will remain the same. Sev­eral...

CCA President’s Blog – All together now!

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April 23, 2012 After months of silence, we finally know where we stand: the fed­eral gov­ern­ment has con­firmed offi­cially it will put an end to 46 years of fund­ing to the Cana­dian Con­fer­ence of the Arts by March 31, 2013. The good news is: we can count on some tran­si­tion fund­ing. We trust that Min­is­ter Moore’s deci­sion to grant final fund­ing to the CCA is an acknowl­edg­ment of the per­ti­nence of our busi­ness plan and of our seri­ous intent to trans­form the organ­i­sa­tion. I won’t deny how­ever...

National Arts Center

Of the eight orga­ni­za­tions that were cut in the recent fed­eral bud­get, the reduc­tions to the National Arts Cen­tre have received very lit­tle reac­tion. The cut­backs to the orga­ni­za­tion may have been over­shad­owed by the much larger cuts to the CBC and the Her­itage Depart­ment and the fact that fund­ing was main­tained for the Canada Coun­cil for the Arts. However the cuts of $1.9 mil­lion over 3 years add up to just over 5% of the NAC’s bud­get — and this does not include hav­ing to cover infla­tion on...

The National Film Board

One of the 2012–13 Budget’s main dis­ap­point­ments for the cul­tural sec­tor were the cuts imposed on the audio­vi­sual sec­tor. “Effi­cien­cies” or not, the reper­cus­sions from the cuts to CBC, Tele­film and the National Film Board will have impor­tant con­se­quences for the pro­duc­tion food chain of this impor­tant sec­tor of cul­tural expression. Let’s look at the case of the National Film Board which will lose 10% of its bud­get ($6.7 mil­lion) on top of hav­ing to absorb infla­tion on goods,...

CBC: The Cuts Expected by All

If the fed­eral bud­get con­tained some sur­prises, the cuts to the CBC weren’t one of them. It has been a num­ber of months that we have been expect­ing these cuts to the crown cor­po­ra­tion. Min­is­ter James Moore has con­tin­ued to reaf­firm that the CBC needs to make cuts between 5–10% like all the other agen­cies. You didn’t need to be psy­chic to pre­dict the cuts of approx­i­mately $115 mil­lion. You also have to add to this the oblig­a­tion to absorb the increased costs of doing busi­ness, just like at the...

National Museums Saved

In the her­itage sec­tor, muse­ums were cer­tainly priv­i­leged by Min­is­ter Flaherty’s budget. Not only did we see the bud­get for national muse­ums renewed with­out any cuts, but the gov­ern­ment has reserved a beau­ti­ful trib­ute to all Cana­dian museums. “Cana­di­ans are proud of their muse­ums. Taken together, national and local muse­ums in com­mu­ni­ties all across Canada are some of the best in the world.” The gov­ern­ment responded to the major­ity of the expec­ta­tions of the national...

Canada Council for the Arts

The great news for the cul­tural sec­tor in the new fed­eral bud­get is def­i­nitely that the Canada Council’s bud­get was kept intact at $181 mil­lion. The news was met with delight by the cul­tural sec­tor. We had pre­pared for sig­nif­i­cant cuts in all sec­tors and the cul­tural milieu was on the alert, despite reas­sur­ances from the Her­itage Min­is­ter. We would like to point out that Canada Council’s bud­get accounts for 0.08% of the total fed­eral bud­get. [1] Despite hav­ing their bud­get main­tained,...

Art + Law Conference

Those of you who fol­low us on Twit­ter and/or Face­book may have already heard of the upcom­ing Art + Law con­fer­ence orga­nized by CARFAC National that will be held in Ottawa from June 8–10. From read­ing our bul­letins and Mag­a­zine, you would also know that we have been par­tic­u­larly active on the copy­right file dur­ing the last few years in Canada and inter­na­tion­ally, avidly watch­ing, report­ing and analysing the devel­op­ments of C-11. It seemed nat­ural then that we would part­ner with CARFAC and...

The Federal Budget 2012–13 and Culture

CCA Bulletin 06/12

Budget day has finally arrived. The verdict has been handed down. Much of the economic news was eclipsed by the abolition of the penny. However there was good news and bad news. Read on to find out how the new budget will affect the arts, culture and heritage.