BUDGET SCORE: PRUDENCE $4 BILLION; CTF $100 MILLION

Ottawa , March 23, 2003 — It’s clear that cul­ture is not on the new government’s radar! Even though there was news to announce, it was hid­den deep within the bud­get plan.

In Novem­ber the Depart­ment of Cana­dian Her­itage revealed the Tomor­row Starts Today ini­tia­tive would con­tinue at full fund­ing for the 2004-05 fis­cal year, and the Main Esti­mates (released 23 Feb­ru­ary) appear to sup­port this.   That mes­sage was excel­lent news for the cul­tural sec­tor, which the gov­ern­ment chose to ignore in a Bud­get speech that had lit­tle other men­tion of cul­ture, arts, or her­itage.   The fate of the sec­tor af ter the 2004-05 fis­cal year remains clouded in obscurity.

Although CCA pre­sented its pre-Budget sub­mis­sion as usual last fall, Bud­get con­sul­ta­tions this year were halted by the pro­ro­ga­tion of Par­lia­ment; there was there­fore no report from the Stand­ing Com­mit­tee on Finance and no rec­om­men­da­tions to the Depart­ment of Finance.

The Main Esti­mates also indi­cated an amount of $200 mil­lion “for pro­grams that sup­port a cohe­sive and cre­ative Canada such as the Canada Tele­vi­sion Fund, Offi­cial Lan­guages pro­grams, and sev­eral pro­grams for Abo­rig­i­nal peo­ples”.   While there is no indi­ca­tion of how this will be parsed out, this is prob­a­bly the Tomor­row Starts Today fund­ing (one fur­ther year) and the top-up for the CTF.   As usual, CCA will be embark­ing on a detailed Bud­get analy­sis over the com­ing weeks, in an attempt to untan­gle the line items, monies, and other arcane men­tions in the Main Esti­mates — this doc­u­ment should be avail­able towards the end of April.

CCA was expect­ing at least some men­tion of fund­ing for the inter­na­tional con­ven­tion to enshrine the rights (and oblig­a­tions) of gov­ern­ments to enact cul­tural poli­cies that pro­mote and develop national cul­tural diver­sity, given that the con­ven­tion was men­tioned in the Speech from the Throne. The fund­ing for this work, which will af fect the bud­get plan­ning for the Inter­na­tional Net­work for Cul­tural Diver­sity (an ini­ti­ate of the CCA ), may yet be dis­cov­ered when the bud­get analy­sis is complete.

Cana­dian Tele­vi­sion Fund

The only direct men­tion relat­ing to the cul­tural sec­tor was in ref­er­ence to the Cana­dian Tele­vi­sion Fund whose fund­ing will be restored, although the Bud­get doc­u­ments imply this will only be as of the 2005-06 fis­cal year ($100 mil­lion).   The Main Esti­mates show the CTF at $63 mil­lion for 2004-05; how­ever, CCA has learned that this fig­ure will be topped up to $100 million.

Sup­port for Vol­un­tary Sector

This year’s Bud­get con­tains monies for cer­tain ini­tia­tives which will ben­e­fit the non-profit sec­tor and the social economy:

 

 

 

•  a new not-for-profit Cor­po­ra­tions Act to “build a solid foun­da­tion upon which Canada’s social econ­omy can con­tinue to develop”;

•  devel­op­ment of a bank for the char­i­ta­ble sec­tor to “broaden the range of finan­cial instru­ments avail­able to the sec­tor”.   This will be estab­lished with pri­vate and vol­un­tary sec­tor sup­port, rather than fund­ing from the government.

There may be access to fund­ing for cul­tural orga­ni­za­tions under the infra­struc­ture money in the new deal for com­mu­ni­ties, although no specifics are given.

A wor­ri­some theme is the com­mer­cial­iza­tion of research.   The gov­ern­ment will be divert­ing monies into improv­ing “our com­mer­cial­iza­tion per­for­mance by increas­ingly trans­form­ing research out­comes into eco­nomic ben­e­fits for Cana­di­ans”.   This is a wor­thy out­come of research but it should never be the sole rai­son d’être.   To quote author Sil­ver Don­ald Cameron, dur­ing the CCA ‘s national pol­icy con­fer­ence in Hal­i­fax last Novem­ber: “Is it pos­si­ble for inno­va­tion to flower when its free­dom is cur­tailed and its objec­tives are nar­rowly defined at the out­set? Ask the sci­en­tists, who are deeply wor­ried that cor­po­rate fund­ing of research means the neglect of all lines of inquiry that are unlikely to lead quickly to com­mer­cial appli­ca­tions. If Einstein’s lab had relied on the arms indus­try, would its fund­ing have been con­tin­ued? And yet, its even­tual result was the great­est ‘inno­va­tion’, in arma­ments, of all time: the nuclear bomb.”

The CCA , its mem­bers, and a coali­tion involv­ing the Canada Coun­cil, UNESCO and some of its mem­bers, are work­ing together to develop a national strat­egy for arts and edu­ca­tion. This work is fueled by dis­cus­sions at CCA ‘s last pol­icy con­fer­ence which linked the impor­tance of a cre­ative edu­ca­tion to the devel­op­ment of an inno­v­a­tive work­force.   The gov­ern­ment has not yet made the link between cre­ativ­ity and inno­va­tion and con­tin­ues to pour money into inno­va­tion with­out regard to the cre­ative infra­struc­ture.   For exam­ple three fed­eral grant­ing coun­cils* received huge increases bring­ing their com­bined bud­gets to $1.4 bil­lion, a 90% increase from 1997–98, while the Canada Coun­cil strug­gled to main­tain a hard won $25 mil­lion increase.    

* Cana­dian Insti­tutes of Health Research, Nat­ural Sci­ences and Engi­neer­ing Research Coun­cil of Canada , and Social Sci­ences and Human­i­ties Research Coun­cil of Canada