The Standing Committee on Finance Report and the Arts

CCA Bul­letin 34/11

Just the facts

The Stand­ing Com­mit­tee on Finance pre­sented this week a report on its pan-Canadian con­sul­ta­tions. The Cana­dian Con­fer­ence of the Arts was the first of five cul­tural orga­ni­za­tions[1] to appear before the Com­mit­tee. This report com­prises 53 pro­pos­als tar­get­ing four areas: fed­eral finances, busi­nesses, com­mu­ni­ties and individuals.

In the intro­duc­tion, the Com­mit­tee describes arts and cul­ture as one of the fac­tors con­tribut­ing to the strength of a com­mu­nity. Addi­tion­ally, three pages out of this 77-page report are ded­i­cated to arts and cul­ture, thereby plac­ing the sec­tor on par with the prin­ci­pal play­ers in the Cana­dian econ­omy. This chap­ter presents a very good sum­mary of the pre­sen­ta­tions made by wit­nesses but, unfor­tu­nately, the Committee’s report did not take up any of the rec­om­men­da­tions put for­ward by the CCA and other witnesses.

Coin­ci­dent with the issuance of this report, the Com­mit­tee announced that a study on char­i­ta­ble giv­ing in Canada will be launched when Par­lia­ment returns at the end of Jan­u­ary. This study will be of great inter­est to sev­eral of the 6,600 or so Cana­dian arts orga­ni­za­tions with not-for-profit sta­tus. This is par­tic­u­larly so at a time when cuts of 10% are antic­i­pated to impact bud­gets for Canada Arts Coun­cil, Cana­dian Her­itage and agen­cies and cor­po­ra­tions attached to the Min­istry. Those who wish to sub­mit a brief to the Com­mit­tee on the topic of tax incen­tives for char­i­ta­ble giv­ing should do so no later than noon on Tues­day, Jan­u­ary 17, 2012. Briefs should be no longer than five pages in length and may be pub­lished by the House of Com­mons on the Committee’s Web site.

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In its minor­ity report, the Offi­cial Oppo­si­tion (NDP) ded­i­cates only one para­graph to culture.

Strengthen Arts and Cul­ture: Accord­ing to the Con­fer­ence Board of Canada, for every $1 of real value added GDP pro­duced by Canada’s cul­tural indus­tries, roughly $1.84 is added to the over­all real GDP. The Fed­eral gov­ern­ment should estab­lish a tax credit pro­gram to stim­u­late pro­duc­tion of the arts and main­tain fund­ing of CBC/Radio-Canada at the 2010 level ($1.1 bil­lion) and index it annu­ally to inflation.

The Lib­eral Party of Canada makes no men­tion of arts or cul­ture in its sup­ple­men­tary opinion.

We have exam­ined cer­tain of the report’s rec­om­men­da­tions in order to iden­tify pos­si­ble actions.

In the sec­tion on tax reform, the report includes a para­graph stat­ing the CCA’s request for income aver­ag­ing but omits any such rec­om­men­da­tion. How­ever, it might be pos­si­ble to relaunch the debate if the fol­low­ing rec­om­men­da­tion is retained:

That the fed­eral gov­ern­ment con­vene an expert panel to review, mod­ern­ize and sim­plify the fed­eral cor­po­rate tax system.

Another pro­posal is  wor­thy of atten­tion: “that the fed­eral gov­ern­ment con­tinue to open up new mar­kets to Cana­dian goods and ser­vices by work­ing toward the com­ple­tion of trad­ing agree­ments with for­eign gov­ern­ments, and also work­ing to elim­i­nate trade bar­ri­ers involv­ing the US-Canada bor­der.” Unfor­tu­nately, the Com­mit­tee is mute on the CCA’s pro­posal to ded­i­cate, as soon as pos­si­ble, $40 mil­lion to the devel­op­ment of inter­nal and for­eign mar­kets for our artists, cre­ators and cul­tural industries.

The CCA will fol­low the progress of this last pro­posal that could relate to the open­ing of the telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions or pub­lish­ing mar­kets to for­eign own­er­ship. It is cer­tain that the gov­ern­ment main­tains its desire to under­take free-trade nego­ti­a­tions with sev­eral coun­tries and regions of the world, with the Euro­pean Union and Asia-Pacific region being par­tic­u­larly targeted.