House of Commons, MP Pierre Nantel on the Canadian Conference of the Arts

Pierre Nantel’s Ques­tion in the House of Com­mons on the Clo­sure of the Cana­dian Con­fer­ence of the Arts

Octo­ber 30th, 2012

Mr. Pierre Nan­tel (Longueuil—Pierre-Boucher, NDP): 

Mr. Speaker, the demise of the Cana­dian Con­fer­ence of the Arts is directly related to its crit­i­cal opin­ion of the con­tro­ver­sial copy­right reform. When the orga­ni­za­tion shared the con­cerns of artists from across the coun­try, it sud­denly lost its fund­ing. The tran­si­tional assis­tance pro­vided and the time allo­cated for the tran­si­tion were insuf­fi­cient, which was fatal for the organization.

The Cana­dian Con­fer­ence of the Arts lost its fund­ing because it expressed a dis­sent­ing opin­ion. The min­is­ter had a choice between spend­ing $25 mil­lion to rename a museum or spend­ing less than $400,000 to save an orga­ni­za­tion that helps hun­dreds of thou­sands of artists.

How can the min­is­ter jus­tify his choice?

[Eng­lish]

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

Mr. Speaker, after 35 years, this orga­ni­za­tion is still receiv­ing some 60% of its oper­at­ing fund­ing from the hard-working tax­pay­ers of this country.

We did pro­vide some tran­si­tion fund­ing for this orga­ni­za­tion this year, so that it could actu­ally go to a new sys­tem of financ­ing and ask its stake­hold­ers and the peo­ple who actu­ally sup­port this orga­ni­za­tion to play a big­ger role in help­ing them move forward.

Cana­di­ans work very hard in this time of eco­nomic cri­sis, and we want to make sure that those funds are used wisely for all Canadians.