House of Commons, MP Andrew Cash on the Canadian Conference of the Arts

Andrew Cash’s Ques­tion on the Clo­sure of the Cana­dian Con­fer­ence of the Arts and the Nature of Cul­tural Funding

Octo­ber 30th, 2012

Mr. Andrew Cash (Dav­en­port, NDP): 

Mr. Speaker, there are two sets of rules gov­ern­ing arts and cul­ture: one if the artists are liked by the Con­ser­v­a­tives, and one if they are not. The Cana­dian Con­fer­ence of the Arts is the lat­est example.

When the min­is­ter does not like an art exhibit or an orga­ni­za­tion or the name of a rock band, an unmis­take­able chill gets sent out across the land.

Canada is big, com­plex and diverse. Do we really want to have our arts and cul­ture sec­tor gov­erned out of the office of one politi­cian in this country?

Mr. Paul Calan­dra (Par­lia­men­tary Sec­re­tary to the Min­is­ter of Cana­dian Her­itage, CPC): 

Mr. Speaker, as I said with respect to this orga­ni­za­tion, after 35 years it is still receiv­ing some 60% of its bud­get from hard-working tax­pay­ers. It is time it moved to a dif­fer­ent sys­tem of financ­ing, one where it asks the peo­ple who sup­port it, the stake­hold­ers, to con­tribute a lit­tle more.

This gov­ern­ment is mak­ing a lot of invest­ments in arts and cul­ture. The NDP con­tin­ues to vote against all of those invest­ments. We are bring­ing our invest­ments through­out the coun­try. We are sup­port­ing fes­ti­vals. We are sup­port­ing com­mu­nity the­atre. We are mak­ing the types of invest­ments that will lead to bet­ter jobs, bet­ter oppor­tu­ni­ties and bet­ter results for our artists across this country.