Musical Diversity Funding: a pre-Holiday Discordant Report

CCA Bul­letin 30/09

Decem­ber 14, 2009

Just the facts

On Decem­ber 9, the Stand­ing Com­mit­tee on Her­itage pre­sented its report on the three hear­ings on the abo­li­tion of the Musi­cal Diver­sity Pro­grams ($ 1.3m) admin­is­tered by the Canada  Coun­cil of the Arts on behalf of the Depart­ment of Cana­dian Heritage.

The pro­grams abol­ished tar­geted the record­ing and dis­tri­b­u­tion of so-called “spe­cial­ized” music, i.e. “music whose intent or con­tent is not shaped by the desire for wide mar­ket appeal – instead, it places cre­ativ­ity, self-expression or exper­i­men­ta­tion above the demands and for­mat expec­ta­tions of the main­stream record­ing indus­try. Spe­cial­ized music has sig­nif­i­cance beyond being just enter­tain­ment.” (Report, p.2) Fund­ing will be trans­ferred to FACTOR/MusicAction to sup­port dig­i­tal mar­ket devel­op­ment and inter­na­tional mar­ket development.

The Report calls for a return of these funds to the Canada Coun­cil for the Arts, for dis­tri­b­u­tion to the sec­tor. The three spe­cific rec­om­men­da­tions include:

Rec­om­men­da­tion 1

The Stand­ing Com­mit­tee on Cana­dian Her­itage com­mends the work of FACTOR, Musi­cAc­tion, the Canada Music Fund and the Canada Coun­cil of the Arts for pro­mot­ing and devel­op­ing Cana­dian tal­ent.

Rec­om­men­da­tion 2

The Stand­ing Com­mit­tee on Cana­dian Her­itage rec­om­mends that the Depart­ment of Cana­dian Her­itage restore, in its entirety, the Cana­dian Musi­cal Diver­sity Com­po­nent within the Canada Music Fund. In addi­tion, the com­mit­tee rec­om­mends that addi­tional fund­ing be allo­cated to the Canada Coun­cil for the Arts to fur­ther sup­port the grants pro­gram for record­ing and dis­trib­ut­ing spe­cial­ized music.

Rec­om­men­da­tion 3

The Stand­ing Com­mit­tee on Cana­dian Her­itage did not hear evi­dence from the wit­nesses or from the Eval­u­a­tion of 2007 that jus­ti­fied the cuts to the Cana­dian Musi­cal Diver­sity Com­po­nent.  (Report, p.8)

This set of hear­ings was imposed by Oppo­si­tion mem­bers of the Com­mit­tee and the result­ing report is illus­tra­tive of the atmos­phere that reigned through­out the pro­ceed­ings. Despite the attempt of sev­eral wit­nesses to por­tray a clear vision of the sys­tem with­out a polit­i­cal agenda, it was clear from the begin­ning that Com­mit­tee mem­bers were set on stag­ing the cuts in a polit­i­cal light.

One of the regret­table side-effects of this process is that it pit­ted FACTOR/MusicAction and the Canada Coun­cil for the Arts against each other. The result was that the issue at hand became mud­dled, digress­ing from the impor­tance of fund­ing exper­i­men­ta­tion and explo­ration from a non-commercial per­spec­tive in art and cul­ture in gen­eral and in music in par­tic­u­lar, just as in other sec­tors of activity.

This was the point made in the Cana­dian Con­fer­ence of the Arts’ pre­sen­ta­tion to the Stand­ing Com­mit­tee which the Report sum­ma­rizes this way:

“The Cana­dian Con­fer­ence of the Arts was very pleased that the Canada Music Fund had been renewed for five years, but did not want this fund­ing to come at the expense of other sec­tors of the music indus­try. Alain Pineau, the organization’s Direc­tor Gen­eral, said he is very con­cerned about the elim­i­na­tion of the musi­cal diver­sity com­po­nent. More­over, he stated that ask­ing the Canada Coun­cil to use its own annual bud­get to com­pen­sate for the elim­i­na­tion of the pro­gram would ?in fact amount to some kind of cut.” (p.5)

It is worth not­ing that FACTOR/MusicAction rep­re­sen­ta­tives have stated that they actu­ally attach great impor­tance to emerg­ing artists and orga­ni­za­tions that sup­port their devel­op­ment — an asser­tion which appar­ently does not reas­sure a num­ber of stake­hold­ers. Time will tell.

Tell me more

On July 31, 2009, the Depart­ment of Cana­dian Her­itage announced that the num­ber of CMF com­po­nents would be reduced from seven to five, with cur­rent sup­port for the Cana­dian Musi­cal Diver­sity Com­po­nent and the Sup­port to Sec­tor Asso­ci­a­tions Com­po­nent real­lo­cated to the five remain­ing com­po­nents. Accord­ing to the Department’s news release, “this will result in the elim­i­na­tion of over­lap in pro­gram deliv­ery, a reduc­tion of the admin­is­tra­tive bur­den cur­rently placed on a num­ber of appli­cants, and bet­ter tar­get­ing of pub­lic funds to emerg­ing pri­or­ity activ­i­ties.” The two emerg­ing activ­i­ties are dig­i­tal mar­ket devel­op­ment and inter­na­tional mar­ket development.

One of pur­poses of the Committee’s study was to “deter­mine how and why the Depart­ment of Cana­dian Her­itage decided to make these cuts.” Dur­ing the hear­ing, the NDP seri­ously chal­lenged the value of the 2007 eval­u­a­tion, which was put for­ward by Her­itage offi­cials to jus­tify the decision.

This approach was taken also by the Bloc Québé­cois, both dur­ing the hear­ings and in the Bloc’s Com­ple­men­tary Opin­ion, where it accuses gov­ern­ment offi­cials of mis­repere­sent­ing the eval­u­a­tion report to cover what it calls an ide­o­log­i­cal deci­sion by the government:

“Feel­ing the need to jus­tify an unjus­ti­fi­able deci­sion after the fact, the Depart­ment quoted sen­tences from the 2007 report out of con­text and, when it could not find what it needed, it changed words and thereby the mean­ing and even con­tra­dicted state­ments in the report to jus­tify the deci­sion it had already made.” (p. 13)

The Bloc con­cludes its Opin­ion by ask­ing once again that “nego­ti­a­tions be under­taken with the Gov­ern­ment of Que­bec towards an admin­is­tra­tive agree­ment in order to trans­fer as soon as pos­si­ble juris­dic­tion for the arts, cul­ture and com­mu­ni­ca­tions to the Gov­ern­ment of Que­bec, with the asso­ci­ated budgets.”

The gov­ern­ment side of the Stand­ing Com­mit­tee voiced their stance by uphold­ing the cuts. They say that they can­not agree that the sum­mary of evi­dence pre­sented in the Report pro­vides a full enough pic­ture of what was pre­sented dur­ing the study, nor do they agree with the rec­om­men­da­tions made in the Stand­ing Com­mit­tee report. They reit­er­ate that the changes made to the Canada Music Fund were the results of a thor­ough and wide­spread con­sul­ta­tion, con­trary to what the report states.

The Dis­sent­ing Opin­ion repeats what had been a mantra through­out the hear­ings, namely a recita­tion of the actions taken by the gov­ern­ment in renew­ing the Canada Music Fund, pep­pered with a series of selected quotes. One of those was from the CCA:

“The CCA has pub­licly rejoiced in the fact that the gov­ern­ment has com­mit­ted to a five-year renewal of the Canada Music Fund. We wel­come the fact that the Min­is­ter of Cana­dian Her­itage has rec­og­nized the need to increase the money avail­able for dig­i­tal and inter­na­tional mar­ket devel­op­ment. Those two sec­tors of activ­ity will cer­tainly ben­e­fit from the increased money they will receive through FACTOR and MUSICACTION.” (p. 16)

While this absolutely exact, it over­looks the CCA’s stance that the most wel­comed increases to sup­port the excel­lent work of FACTOR/MusicAction should not have been made at the expense of invest­ing in musi­cal diver­sity in a non-commercial context.

The gov­ern­ment mem­bers con­clude with assur­ance that: “Our Con­ser­v­a­tive Gov­ern­ment under­stands the value of arts and cul­ture to our com­mu­ni­ties, our iden­tity, and our econ­omy. That is why we have made unpar­al­leled invest­ments in this sec­tor – invest­ing more dol­lars in arts and cul­ture than any Gov­ern­ment in history.”