The 2008-09 Federal Budget: Much Ado about Nothing

CCA Bul­letin 05/08

Feb­ru­ary 27, 2008

Just the Facts

The chal­lenge that the Min­is­ter of Finance, the Hon. James Fla­herty, grap­pled with in his third bud­get was how to build in mea­sures to advance the government’s pri­or­i­ties while leav­ing some maneu­ver­ing room to deal with any spill-over from Amer­i­can eco­nomic woes.

To do this, the Min­is­ter opted for a pru­dent amount of new spend­ing and a sim­i­lar econ­omy with the Bud­get Speech itself, which was among the short­est in recent mem­ory, tak­ing only 450 lines of text.

For those in the arts and cul­ture sec­tor, the Bud­get con­tained no sur­prise, except maybe that most of the money com­ing out of Cana­dian Her­itage Port­fo­lio in the bud­get review exer­cise seems to have been rein­vested there. There is also the slim hope that the infra­struc­ture money might be applied to arts and cul­tural insti­tu­tions as these funds are invested. There is a Public-Private Part­ner­ship Office with a bud­get of $1.257 bil­lion. We have seen this public/private model recently applied in the cre­ation of the Cana­dian Museum of Human Rights and the on-going bid­ding process to host the Por­trait Gallery of Canada.

The $ 30 mil­lion that the gov­ern­ment added to the base bud­get of the Canada Coun­cil for the Arts was not men­tioned in the Bud­get but it will be found in the Main Esti­mates expected in the com­ing days.

The bud­get added resources in rel­a­tively mod­est amounts for senior cit­i­zens  ($60 mil­lion), Abo­rig­i­nal Cana­di­ans ($ 560 mil­lion) and post sec­ondary edu­ca­tion and advanced research ($ 419 mil­lion), some of which may trickle to artists and creators.

The gov­ern­ment will also invest $ 9 mil­lion over two years in the renewal of four of its National Muse­ums (The National Gallery of Canada, The Cana­dian Museum of Civ­i­liza­tion, the Canada Sci­ence and Tech­nol­ogy Museum and the Cana­dian Museum of Nature) to address oper­at­ing and infra­struc­ture pres­sures. This invest­ment is not new as such since it appears to come from money in the Muse­ums enve­lope iden­ti­fied in the $ 1 bil­lion real­lo­ca­tion exer­cise which pre­ceded the budget.

Another area that may have ben­e­fits for the arts is the invest­ment by the gov­ern­ment in the run-up to The Van­cou­ver 2010 Win­ter Games and the Bei­jing Olympics in 2008. The host nation is required to stage cul­tural fes­ti­vals and spe­cial events as a part of the Olympic cel­e­bra­tions. The bud­get pro­vides  $ 140 mil­lion for ama­teur ath­letes and $ 25 mil­lion for the 2010 Olympic and Par­a­lympics Torch Relays. This is in addi­tion to fed­eral fund­ing for the Olympics that has pre­vi­ously been announced, includ­ing fund­ing for the cul­tural com­po­nent of the Games.

Tell Me More

The brevity of the bud­get speech pro­vides a clear pic­ture of the scope of the 2008-09 fed­eral budget.

While the arts and cul­ture sec­tor may won­der what became of the fed­eral muse­ums pol­icy, of invest­ments in the expanded cul­tural facil­i­ties in Toronto and Mon­treal or of other new ini­tia­tives, the good news is that at least, fed­eral spend­ing on the arts and cul­ture was not reduced against the con­tin­gency of an eco­nomic slow-down.

It is clear that the Min­is­ter of Finance and his Cab­i­net col­leagues faced the prospect of mar­ginal sur­pluses in the com­ing years as their prin­ci­pal pre­oc­cu­pa­tion. Pre­serv­ing the sta­tus quo may well be the most the cul­tural sec­tor may hope for.

In the com­ing days, the CCA will ana­lyze the Main Esti­mates, which will give us a more com­pre­hen­sive look at the impli­ca­tions of the 2008-09 Bud­get on pro­grams and ser­vices within the fed­eral gov­ern­ment that ben­e­fit the arts and cul­ture sector.

And as usual, in the near future, the CCA will pro­duce its annual, more com­pre­hen­sive, analy­sis of the fed­eral bud­get and the host of eco­nomic data that the Depart­ment of Finance has included as back­ground infor­ma­tion to Budget.