Senate of Canada, Senator James S. Cowan on the Closure of the Canadian Conference of the Arts

Why did the gov­ern­ment not at least pro­vide a rea­son­able period of time to allow the Cana­dian Con­fer­ence of the Arts to tran­si­tion to a new fund­ing model?

Octo­ber 31st, 2012

Hon. James S. Cowan (Leader of the Oppo­si­tion): Hon­ourable sen­a­tors, my ques­tion is also for the Leader of the Gov­ern­ment in the Sen­ate. Yes­ter­day, the Cana­dian Con­fer­ence of the Arts, the largest national alliance of the arts, cul­ture and her­itage sec­tor in Canada, announced that it will be shut­ting its doors after 67 years. Since 1965, that orga­ni­za­tion has received a por­tion of its fund­ing from Cana­dian Her­itage, but the Harper gov­ern­ment has decided to ter­mi­nate and elim­i­nate its funding.

The CCA made what seemed to most peo­ple to be a rea­son­able request for time to tran­si­tion to self-financing; they asked for two years. They began to work on a plan to become self-financing within that time.

How­ever, in April the gov­ern­ment announced its deci­sion to cut off fund­ing after six months. After 67 years, the gov­ern­ment has decided that six months is all that is required for that orga­ni­za­tion to retool its financing.

In Bud­get 2012, the gov­ern­ment said:

The Gov­ern­ment believes that sup­port­ing the arts is essen­tial to sup­port­ing Canada’s econ­omy and qual­ity of life and will con­tinue strong sup­port for Cana­dian culture.

Why did the gov­ern­ment not at least pro­vide a rea­son­able period of time to allow the Cana­dian Con­fer­ence of the Arts to tran­si­tion to a new fund­ing model?

Hon. Mar­jory LeBre­ton (Leader of the Gov­ern­ment): Hon­ourable sen­a­tors, the fact of the mat­ter is that the gov­ern­ment pro­vided the Cana­dian Con­fer­ence of the Arts with 18 months’ notice and hun­dreds of thou­sands of dol­lars in bridge money to help them tran­si­tion to a sus­tain­able model. That is 18 months. Our gov­ern­ment has deliv­ered unprece­dented lev­els of sup­port to the arts, and we will con­tinue to invest in afford­able, effec­tive pro­grams that sup­port cul­ture in Canada.

The hon­ourable sen­a­tor asked for exam­ples. Our gov­ern­ment increased fund­ing for the Canada Coun­cil for the Arts, a world-class orga­ni­za­tion that fos­ters and pro­motes the arts, by 20 per cent, the largest increase in decades. We have also cre­ated two new muse­ums in Canada.

Sen­a­tor Cowan: I did not ask for exam­ples, but I appre­ci­ate the min­is­ter pro­vid­ing them. Per­haps in my sup­ple­men­tary I will pro­vide examples.

The gov­ern­ment spent some $30 mil­lion to cel­e­brate the two-hundredth anniver­sary of the War of 1812. It is spend­ing $25 mil­lion to rebrand the Museum of Civ­i­liza­tion as the Cana­dian Museum of His­tory. Bud­get 2012 talked exten­sively about the gov­ern­ment help­ing gal­leries and muse­ums to “attract more internationally-acclaimed trea­sures to Canada.” Mean­while the leader’s gov­ern­ment has approved more than $64 mil­lion to adver­tise itself to Cana­di­ans. Those are examples.

Why is this gov­ern­ment so eager to spend tax­pay­ers’ money to pro­mote itself, to rebrand Cana­dian his­tory and to sup­port for­eign artists show­ing their works in Canada but then shuts the door on an orga­ni­za­tion ded­i­cated to advo­cat­ing for Cana­dian artists and per­form­ers work­ing today, in 2012, here in Canada?

Sen­a­tor LeBre­ton: I could ask why the Lib­eral Party of Canada and the offi­cial oppo­si­tion in the Sen­ate have such an aver­sion to Cana­di­ans being edu­cated about our own his­tory. The War of 1812 is a tremen­dous Cana­dian his­tor­i­cal story. There are events asso­ci­ated with the War of 1812 that are impor­tant to the makeup and char­ac­ter of Canada. I believe that the effort to edu­cate Cana­di­ans about our his­tory is not par­ti­san. This is an impor­tant Cana­dian issue that we should all be celebrating.

As I have already pointed out, we have mas­sively increased fund­ing to the Canada Coun­cil for the Arts. As I said ear­lier, the Cana­dian Con­fer­ence of the Arts was given 18 months and con­sid­er­able fund­ing to bridge over to new resources.

Sen­a­tor Cowan: The Cana­dian Con­fer­ence of the Arts com­piles sta­tis­tics on the impact that the arts, cul­ture and her­itage sec­tor has on our econ­omy. Once again this is another exam­ple where the gov­ern­ment does not like Cana­di­ans hav­ing easy access to facts and evi­dence. How­ever, the mate­ri­als this orga­ni­za­tion has pro­vided show that the median earn­ings for artists in Canada are $12,900, less than half the aver­age earn­ings of all Cana­dian work­ers, which stands at $26,900.

This is who we are talk­ing about. These are not peo­ple, as Prime Min­is­ter Harper referred to awhile ago, who are “‘rich’ artists who gather at galas.”

Some have sug­gested that the real rea­son for the government’s deci­sion was its dis­plea­sure at the posi­tion of the Cana­dian Con­fer­ence of the Arts in rec­om­mend­ing amend­ments to Bill C-11, which was the government’s copy­right bill. This was the bill, the leader will recall, that was rushed through this cham­ber in 11 days.

Why does the hon­ourable senator’s gov­ern­ment con­tinue to stamp out any­one whose views are not per­fectly aligned with its own?

Sen­a­tor LeBre­ton: Again, hon­ourable sen­a­tors, I will repeat what I have said many times. I do wish that peo­ple would not get up and ask ques­tions they know are bla­tantly false.

As a mat­ter of fact, Min­is­ter James Moore, our Min­is­ter of Cana­dian Her­itage, has gone to great lengths to pro­mote the arts and Cana­dian artists. We are pro­mot­ing Cana­dian his­tory and cul­ture. There is no evi­dence what­so­ever that this gov­ern­ment in any way does not sup­port Cana­dian artists.

Sen­a­tor Cowan: Hon­ourable sen­a­tors, let me read two quotes. There are many, but I will put sim­ply two on the record. They are from peo­ple who are mem­bers of this orga­ni­za­tion. I remind hon­ourable sen­a­tors that this orga­ni­za­tion rep­re­sents 200 arts and cul­tural asso­ci­a­tions from coast to coast to coast, such as arts coun­cils, gal­leries, the Arts Net­work for Chil­dren & Youth, book pub­lish­ing asso­ci­a­tions, musi­cians, dancers, and the­atre com­pa­nies such as the Cirque du Soleil, which per­formed the other day in Que­bec City for the IPU. The list goes on and on.

Here are two state­ments, the first from the Pres­i­dent of the Cana­dian Musi­cal Repro­duc­tion Rights Agency, the CMRRA:

We sup­port the work of the CCA because it’s the only voice in Canada for the entire spec­trum of Cana­dian cre­ators, rights own­ers and investors in cul­ture. Only the CCA can speak for such a broad con­stituency, and only the CCA has a track record of hav­ing done so for decades.

The sec­ond quote is from Gerry Barr, the exec­u­tive direc­tor of the Direc­tors Guild of Canada:

There is only one orga­ni­za­tion in the coun­try that brings together the whole of the Arts com­mu­nity — that’s the Cana­dian Con­fer­ence of the Arts. Sup­port for the CCA is really a way of keep­ing Canada’s cul­tural nar­ra­tive alive and relevant.

I ask again: Why did the gov­ern­ment decide to shut down its sup­port for this orga­ni­za­tion that has car­ried on and done good work for more than 65 years? Why did it do so with­out pro­vid­ing an ade­quate tran­si­tional period to enable the orga­ni­za­tion to move to a self-financing model?

Sen­a­tor LeBre­ton: Hon­ourable sen­a­tors, I already answered the ques­tion about the bridge fund­ing. All I can say again is that this gov­ern­ment will con­tinue to invest in afford­able, effec­tive pro­grams in sup­port of Cana­dian arts and culture.