Hooray for the funding -- shame about the dance by Kate Taylor
Source : Globe & Mail
December 22, 2004
Hallelujah! God, our great leader and his wise ministers be praised. Just in time for Christmas, the federal government has renewed Tomorrow Starts Today.
With a name suspiciously if not maliciously devoid of meaning, it may sound like a refrain to be sung by Little Orphan Annie or, worse yet, the Hitler Youth, but in fact Tomorrow Starts Today is chockfull of meanings, 192 million of them. It's the new federal funding for arts and culture, initially announced as a $500-million, three-year package in 2001 and now being given its second annual renewal.
Groups as diverse as the Canada Council, the Edmonton Fringe, Calgary's One Yellow Rabbit Theatre, the London International Children's Festival, the Hot Docs film festival in Toronto and dozens of small societies and events across the country can start planning their 2005-2006 seasons, secure in the knowledge the feds will be there.
Like many of the initiatives that came out of the Department of Canadian Heritage in the Jean Chrétien/Sheila Copps years, Tomorrow Starts Today is a good if imperfect thing wrapped in gag-inducing language. From its own name on down -- why can't it be called the Department of Canadian Culture? -- the ministry is always using the most tedious circumlocutions as it blithers away about diversity, impacts, investments and communities.
But leave aside the obnoxious title because nobody in the arts is looking this gift horse in the mouth.
On the contrary, general rejoicing has greeted the news that Heritage Minister Liza Frulla has secured another year's extension of the money. The Canada Council, which gets $25-million to increase its grants to artists, says hooray; the Canadian Conference of the Arts, the cultural sector's lobby group, says huzzah. Only Conservative finance critic Monty Solberg can be heard carping, telling the Sun newspapers that the announcement in advance of February's federal budget was disrespectful of Parliament. Truth is, Frulla not only lobbied for the money, she lobbied to get an announcement now so that arts groups could start planning their new seasons.
The arts community has high hopes for Frulla, a former Quebec culture minister, as a more focused and sophisticated advocate than the ever-enthusiastic Copps, and with this money she has delivered. Despite predictions that the not-always-tactful and occasionally impatient Frulla might not get Anglo Ottawa and that she was the weak link in cabinet, it was Immigration Minister Judy Sgro who imploded. With all eyes riveted to that embarrassing controversy over strippers, Frulla quietly pulled her multimillion-dollar rabbit out of the hat with only Solberg left to complain.
Frulla encouraged what proved to be effective lobbying from arts groups, provincial culture ministers and municipalities, who were all asked to tell the federal government how much the arts mattered to their "communities." Tomorrow Starts Today has helped arts groups with building projects, marketing Canadian art and culture abroad, increasing Canadian content on the Internet, bolstering the recording industry and preserving heritage buildings. It has also awarded numerous small grants for everything from Toronto's Caribana Festival to a stage and curtains for a school gym used by local music groups in Iqaluit. So there were a lot of different people on board for this effort. It worked. There was an unusual degree of unanimity in the parliamentary committee on Tomorrow Starts Today: Culture is good. Give it the money.
Oh, yes, it's all super. I only wonder why the cultural sector has to keep playing this game, rallying the troops, declaring that art is health-giving for community life, and approaching government hat in hand. Did you notice an item in the paper earlier this month? The rate of increase in health-care spending is expected to slow to 5.9 per cent this year, from more than 7 per cent in previous years. Over in that world, this number is considered either very good news or very bad news, depending which way your perspective warps. Meanwhile, arts groups have to beg just to keep the money they have.
Not that health care isn't a glorious thing, and all that, it's just in these days of annual billion-dollar budget surpluses that always seem to surprise the finance minister of the day, the arts funding dance seems increasingly ridiculous. And we will go through another version of it once again come February's budget, when the cultural sector expects to secure the same funding for another two years.
In forcing arts groups to perform this dance and then express undying gratitude for the money -- why is it that we have to thank the politicians whom we elected to spend our money for doing precisely that? -- other issues get ignored. For example, why is most of the money directly dispersed by Canadian Heritage instead of going to the Canada Council, which gets only 25 of those $192-million? As the sponsorship scandal hearings have so grippingly illustrated, direct federal grants are easily subject to political manipulation whereas the council assures money is awarded at arm's length. That's the kind of niggling question that gets drowned out by the Hallelujah Chorus.
