CCA Bul­letin 39/07

Decem­ber 10, 2007

Just the Facts

CCA National Direc­tor Alain Pineau appeared before the Stand­ing Com­mit­tee on Finance on Fri­day Decem­ber 7 as part of the Committee’s pre-budget con­sul­ta­tions. The meet­ing, held in Mon­treal, was the last one in this year’s process.

The Cana­dian Con­fer­ence of the Arts (CCA) thanked the gov­ern­ment for a series of invest­ments in the cul­tural sec­tor that included;

• a $ 30 mil­lion increase to the base bud­get of the Canada Coun­cil for the Arts, first step towards a proper level of invest­ment in cul­tural creativity;
• a new $ 30 mil­lion pro­gram Build­ing Com­mu­ni­ties Through Arts and Her­itage , $ 7 mil­lion of which is added to the Arts Pre­sen­ta­tion Canada pro­gram budget;
• a $ 5 mil­lion sum­mer intern­ship pro­gram for museums;
• a renewed com­mit­ment (at the 1995 level how­ever) of the fed­eral con­tri­bu­tion to the Cana­dian Tele­vi­sion Fund;
• addi­tional cap­i­tal funds to the National Arts Cen­tre, the National Gallery and sev­eral national muse­ums for urgent repairs, a pru­dent invest­ment of pub­lic funds.

The CCA argues how­ever that there are still cru­cial areas where addi­tional progress and invest­ment are required from the fed­eral gov­ern­ment. They are;

• the long awaited museum pol­icy is still miss­ing in action despite the sup­port of the gov­ern­ing party when it formed the Offi­cial  Opposition;
• funds for the inter­na­tion­al­iza­tion of the arts at the fed­eral level need coher­ence and higher lev­els of invest­ment (“inter­na­tion­al­iza­tion of the arts” is the new bureau­cratic lan­guage to refer to cul­tural diplomacy);
• there is a need to develop a national men­tor­ship pro­gram to assist in suc­ces­sion and knowl­edge trans­fer as baby boomers in all sec­tors  of the labour force pre­pare to retire;
• we require new strate­gies to deal with the grow­ing num­ber of self-employed and their access to social ben­e­fit pro­grams designed for tra­di­tional employ­ees: the CCA rec­om­mends that the gov­ern­ment appoint a task force to address this real­ity and exam­ine tax­a­tion issues, as well;
• the devel­op­ment of a new device to deal with fluc­tu­at­ing income lev­els in the tax­a­tion sys­tem: since the Depart­ment of Finance has rou­tinely rejected the con­cept of income aver­ag­ing, some other approach must be devel­oped to ensure equity in the system;
• a tax based incen­tive for cre­ativ­ity rel­a­tive to copy­right and resid­ual income for cre­ators and copy­right own­ers, a con­cept whose effi­ciency has already been proven in Ire­land, which already exists in part in Que­bec and which has received last year the sup­port of the Cana­dian Coun­cil of Chief Executives.

Tell Me More

The CCA has par­tic­i­pated in these pre-budget con­sul­ta­tions for three decades and regards them as impor­tant oppor­tu­nity to inform Par­lia­men­tar­i­ans about the pri­or­i­ties and changes within the arts and cul­ture sec­tor. This year’s pre­sen­ta­tion was based on the writ­ten CCA pre-budget brief sent to the Com­mit­tee in August

The CCA was one of eight orga­ni­za­tions mak­ing simul­ta­ne­ous pre­sen­ta­tions to six mem­bers of the Stand­ing Com­mit­tee on Finance. The only other pre­sen­ter related to cul­ture was Mag­a­zines Canada: its Pres­i­dent, Robert Goyette, con­cen­trated on the remark­able suc­cesses of the Cana­dian mag­a­zine indus­try and on the vital impor­tance of main­tain­ing the Canada Post sub­sidy for the dis­tri­b­u­tion of Cana­dian mag­a­zines, a posi­tion fully shared by the CCA. It must be noted that other arts and cul­ture inter­ven­ers have appeared in front of the Stand­ing Com­mit­tee dur­ing its var­i­ous hear­ings across the country.

The next impor­tant piece of bud­get related news before the 2008 fed­eral bud­get will be details regard­ing the bil­lion dol­lar real­lo­ca­tion pro­gram. As reported by the CCA, the 2007 pro­gram has tar­geted the Depart­ment of Cana­dian Her­itage and sev­eral Port­fo­lio agen­cies . The poten­tial to affect pro­grams and ser­vices is a real one which the CCA is fol­low­ing with interest.

What Can I Do?

Stay tuned to the CCA for addi­tional news on these and other fed­eral pol­icy developments.