AND THEY’RE OFF! The country goes to the polls on June 28th. And the CCA is ready!

Ottawa, May 25th 2004 — As indi­cated in CCA Bul­letin 19/04, Culture’s Just “Squeak­ing By” , the key mes­sage that emerged from the 2004 Chalmers Con­fer­ence was the require­ment for a com­mit­ment by the fed­eral gov­ern­ment to ade­quate, sta­ble, multi-year fund­ing for the arts and cul­tural sec­tor as a whole.

Elec­tion mate­ri­als now available

A com­pendium of elec­tion mate­ri­als has been devel­oped to assist CCA mem­bers and oth­ers in get­ting the message(s) across.   The mate­ri­als are avail­able, in Eng­lish and in French, by click­ing on the “what’s new” but­ton at www.ccarts.ca .   These include:

• a short-list of six cur­rent cul­tural issues, com­pris­ing a brief back­ground and rel­e­vant ques­tions to ask the var­i­ous candidates
• an elec­tion primer to assist with how, when and where to get your mes­sages across, together with impor­tant links to other advo­cacy sites, the major polit­i­cal par­ties, and more
• user-friendly sta­tis­tics to help inform your mes­sages and questions
• a selec­tion of “arts for life” sto­ries, firmly posi­tion­ing the arts and cul­ture in the wider social context
• pithy quotes on the value of the arts in society

Rid­ing information

CCA can pro­vide you with infor­ma­tion regard­ing cul­tural grants that have been awarded in your rid­ing over the past year (using the old rid­ing bound­aries); please con­tact Philippa Bor­gal (exten­sion 19, philippa.borgal@ccarts.ca ) or James Mis­sen (exten­sion 14, james.missen@ccarts.ca ) for details.   A chrono­log­i­cal list is also avail­able on the Canada Coun­cil web­site.   This infor­ma­tion is use­ful in point­ing out to can­di­dates the impor­tance of cul­ture in your community.

Infor­ma­tion on who is run­ning in which rid­ings is also avail­able at the CCA offices; con­tact either Philippa or James.

Next steps

The CCA will con­tact the major polit­i­cal par­ties in order to obtain their cul­tural plat­forms, which will then be devel­oped into a matrix for CCA mem­bers to read­ily com­pare and con­trast the var­i­ous promises and posi­tions (or lack thereof).

CCA will add to and update its elec­tion mate­r­ial as required through­out the 2004 fed­eral elec­tion period.   Stay tuned!