JOY TO THE (CULTURAL) WORLD? Tomorrow Starts Today renewed for one year

 

Ottawa , Decem­ber 15, 2004 — A col­lec­tive sigh of relief can be heard across the land!   Just in time for the hol­i­day sea­son of giv­ing and good cheer, the gov­ern­ment of Canada has announced a rein­vest­ment in the cul­tural sec­tor of $192 mil­lion for the 2005-06 fis­cal year.   [Note: The Tomor­row Starts Today (TST) invest­ment, orig­i­nally announced in May 2001 for a three year period, was extended for one year (fis­cal 2004-05) at $207 mil­lion.   The Depart­ment of Cana­dian Her­itage ( DCH ) news release explains that $15 mil­lion has been per­ma­nently trans­ferred to Envi­ron­ment Canada and Inter­na­tional Trade Canada .]

The com­mu­nity was hop­ing for news of at least a multi-year com­mit­ment, prefer­ably at increased lev­els.   How­ever, the Cana­dian Con­fer­ence of the Arts has learned that the 2005 Bud­get should con­tain details of an addi­tional two years fund­ing beyond the 2005-06 fis­cal year, bring­ing the total invest­ment pack­age to a three year period, and ensur­ing that cul­ture is not left out of Bud­get largesse.

This is an issue on which CCA, together with many, many cul­tural orga­ni­za­tions all across the coun­try, has been work­ing for a cou­ple of years now (see our lat­est Bul­letin 61/04, issued just last Fri­day).   Those in the sec­tor — indi­vid­u­als, orga­ni­za­tions, and asso­ci­a­tions — who lob­bied MPs, min­is­ters, and other deci­sion mak­ers, are to be con­grat­u­lated for their efforts.

Jean Malavoy, CCA’s National Direc­tor, stated “I’m delighted that at last the gov­ern­ment has announced the con­tin­u­a­tion of this impor­tant invest­ment.   This ini­tial one-year exten­sion will now per­mit arts orga­ni­za­tions to plan their com­ing sea­sons.   CCA will be fol­low­ing the details of Bud­get 2005 very closely in the hope that the fund­ing will indeed become multi-year.   TST is mak­ing a clear dif­fer­ence in the cul­tural sec­tor, and we see no rea­son not to make this invest­ment permanent.”

The TST invest­ment has been extremely impor­tant to the sec­tor in a num­ber of ways, includ­ing: pro­mot­ing sus­tain­abil­ity and capac­ity build­ing; adding much needed fund­ing to exist­ing pro­grammes such as those which assist Canada’s national train­ing insti­tu­tions, the book pub­lish­ing indus­try, and the Canada Music Fund; funds to allow arts venues to update their facil­i­ties with new tech­nol­ogy; and pro­mo­tion of the Trade Routes pro­gramme for cul­tural exports.   The fund­ing also per­mit­ted devel­op­ment of new pro­grammes, such as Cul­tural Cap­i­tals of Canada, an incen­tive for munic­i­pal­i­ties to invest in cul­ture in their com­mu­ni­ties and to develop munic­i­pal cul­tural policies.

How­ever, CCA adds a caveat for future renewal: it is extremely impor­tant that the renewal process begin much ear­lier in the cycle in future, as con­fir­ma­tion only three and a half months before the fund­ing is due to ter­mi­nate only results in poor man­age­ment both for those in the sec­tor try­ing to plan, and for those in DCH try­ing to keep pro­grammes run­ning smoothly.   Pro­vid­ing such fund­ing in short “hic­cups” demon­strates a lack of long term vision and cer­tainly doesn’t meet the needs of the com­mu­nity.   Ide­ally, the fund­ing should cover at least a five-year period, with suf­fi­cient time allowed for the renewal process — oth­er­wise, the cul­tural sec­tor will find itself in exactly the same pre­car­i­ous sit­u­a­tion in a cou­ple of years.   Bev Oda (MP for Durham, CPC ) indi­cated in the course of a meet­ing with Jean Malavoy in Octo­ber that the main prob­lem with TST is that it is a 3-year pro­gram with short term objec­tives; it would be much bet­ter to build this fund­ing into the on-going bud­get of DCH .   Hear, hear!

WHAT WAS SAID

The fol­low­ing are excerpts from the third read­ing of Bill C-18, an act to amend the Tele­film Canada Act, which took place in The House on 13 Decem­ber 2004 .   The excerpts relate to the Bill, to the Tomor­row Starts Today fund­ing, to gov­ern­ment pri­or­i­ties, and to cul­ture in gen­eral.   (The full tran­script is avail­able at www.parl.gc.ca ; go to House of Com­mons lat­est debates, then Com­plete Hansard, start­ing at approx­i­mately #1250.)

Hon. Sar­mite Bulte (Par­lia­men­tary Sec­re­tary to the Min­is­ter of Cana­dian Her­itage; Park­dale — High Park , Lib.):

… the gov­ern­ment will be respond­ing in detail to the Lin­coln report on Cana­dian broad­cast­ing…. by the end of April the gov­ern­ment will have made clear its over­reach­ing pri­or­i­ties con­cern­ing broad­cast­ing and how it plans to act on these priorities.

…Let there be no doubt about where the gov­ern­ment stands on cul­tural mat­ters, whether it is film, TV, music or new media, our cul­tural prod­ucts speak for us in words and images that rever­ber­ate across our coun­try, in cities and in rural and remote areas, but most impor­tant, around the world. They reflect our aspi­ra­tions, our val­ues and our vision as a coun­try. They deepen our mutual under­stand­ing across diverse cul­tural back­grounds. They enrich our lives and con­tribute to our economy.

Bev Oda ( Durham . CPC ):

…I look for­ward to a review of the Cana­dian film indus­try to be under­taken by the her­itage com­mit­tee in the new year….   The bill finally pro­vides the leg­isla­tive author­ity to expand Telefilm’s man­date from only fea­ture film into tele­vi­sion pro­gram­ming, new media and sound recording.

…If the gov­ern­ment were seri­ous about gov­ern­ing and not only address­ing incon­sis­ten­cies when it is caught, this leg­is­la­tion would be bring­ing for­ward a new vision for Tele­film and not sim­ply cor­rect­ing the past.…   What will hap­pen to Tele­film Canada if its tele­vi­sion pro­duc­tion sup­port pro­gram is now moved to the Cana­dian Tele­vi­sion Fund to address the chal­lenges faced by that fund?

…What Cana­di­ans need from our fed­eral gov­ern­ment is a vision and the courage to take hold of the future and to ensure that Cana­dian cre­ators have a sig­nif­i­cant part to play in that future.

Maka Kotto (Saint-Lambert, BQ):

…all Bill C-18 does is to update and make offi­cial the increased respon­si­bil­i­ties Tele­film Canada already has. The cur­rent leg­is­la­tion does not reflect the real man­date of this intru­sive agency, Tele­film Canada and needs to be updated. So Bill C-18 makes offi­cial the new Tele­film mis­sion that has been in place for years.

Essen­tially the bill replaces the expres­sions “pecu­niary inter­est in film activ­ity” and “fea­ture film pro­duc­tion” with “audio­vi­sual indus­try” and “film” with “audio­vi­sual”. Let us also recall that it pro­vides Tele­film with the author­ity to act in the sound record­ing indus­try under agree­ments made with the Depart­ment of Cana­dian Heritage….

Char­lie Angus ( Tim­mins – James Bay , NDP):

We have to view cul­ture as a multi-dimensional aspect of life. It is not sim­ply our leg­ends. It is not sim­ply our songs. It is a whole fab­ric of the way a com­mu­nity inter­prets who it is.

…I fully sup­port where we are going in terms of the Tele­film direc­tion. To give an exam­ple of what we are look­ing at, we are talk­ing about $85 mil­lion that would be going to film; $95 mil­lion to $100 mil­lion to tele­vi­sion; $8 mil­lion to $9 mil­lion to sound record­ings; and $9 mil­lion to new media, which could be web­sites or video games and other new tech­nolo­gies…   How­ever, I am very con­cerned that what we are doing is not nearly enough.

…There have been major cuts to arts, which have desta­bi­lized numer­ous of our grass­roots, the incu­ba­tors of cul­ture… the fact is that a lot of Cana­dian sto­ries are not being told because there is not the needed fund­ing in the areas where these sto­ries are com­ing up.

…It is par­tic­u­larly dis­tress­ing when we have such major indus­tries as film, tele­vi­sion and the Cana­dian book pub­lish­ing indus­try now three and a half or maybe four months away from the new fis­cal year and look­ing at zero in front of all their bud­get lines because they are being told there is no money…   The months are tick­ing down to the new fis­cal year and nobody is being hired, tours are not being planned, books are not being pub­lished and films are not being made.

Note : Char­lie Angus put for­ward an amend­ment to C-18, which was not accepted, regard­ing patron­age appoint­ments to the boards of cul­tural insti­tu­tions.   “We are talk­ing about our sup­port for the artists and we are talk­ing about how much we value them. Yet when these bills come for­ward and we are talk­ing about who sits on these boards, who sits on Tele­film, who sits on CBC , who sits on CRTC, we have no abil­ity to guar­an­tee that peo­ple who are com­mit­ted to the arts com­mu­nity, peo­ple who are com­mit­ted to arts and know the grass­roots issues, the front line issues, have any rep­re­sen­ta­tion on these boards.”

Extract from a state­ment on Arts and Cul­ture made by Maka Kotto fol­low­ing the debate on C-18:

…can we envi­sion cul­ture with­out arts and let­ters, the­atre, music, dance, lit­er­a­ture, art crafts, and visual and media arts? No. Cul­ture is the heart of every people.

In Que­bec , the Mou­ve­ment pour les arts et les let­ters [ MAL ], which rep­re­sents 15,000 pro­fes­sional artists, has long been cam­paign­ing for increased sup­port for artists, the major­ity of whom are liv­ing below the poverty line.

The gov­ern­ment must under­stand cul­tural issues and the need for more sup­port to our pro­fes­sional artists. Artists and arti­sans are not free to cre­ate. They gen­er­ally have a dou­ble life imposed upon them by the oblig­a­tion to earn enough to live on.

So that they may have that free­dom to cre­ate a cul­ture that will be wor­thy of pro­tec­tion by an even­tual con­ven­tion on cul­tural diver­sity, the bud­get of the Canada Coun­cil for the Arts needs to be raised to $300 mil­lion this very year, and the pro­gram “Tomor­row Starts Today” must be restored per­ma­nently, and enhanced as well.