Sidewalks Good, Theatre Bad

Because axing a piddling $47,000 grant to a renowned theatre festival will solve all the country's budgetary woes.

Last week, the Conservative brain trust decided that Canada's Walk of Fame, basically a paean to Canadians who've made it big in the U.S., was worthy of $500,000, while the theatre festival SummerWorks wasn't worth the $47,000 it had applied for. John Doyle of The Globe and Mail handily dismantles the logic, if there ever was any, behind the decision, saying the government “must think we are airheads, as they dole out our money to fund the celebration of the already rich and famous.” Funding the Walk of Fame, a “pale imitation” of the one in Hollywood, “was a screw-you to the arts and a thumbs-up, here’s-the-money to a celebration of well-off celebrities and, mostly, very rich mediocrities.” We're not even going to try to top that. Doyle's fast becoming the nation's top defender of arts funding, and just in time – Lord knows we'll be needing more of him over the next four years.

Charles Mandel of Here NB, New Brunswick's alternative weekly, can't help but worry over what this means for controversial art across the country. Last year, SummerWorks raised the ire of the PMO by staging a (Dora-nominated) play about the Toronto 18 would-be terrorists, and now it's $47,000 short of what it usually has to put on some of the best plays in the country. “The message seems pretty clear: toe the line or expect to lose your funding,” writes Mandel. “Clearly, art threatens the Right. They don't like stories they can't control or culture they can't comprehend.” So that magnum opus you've been penning about last year's human rights abuses during the G20 protests? Yeah, might want to wait a few years before asking Heritage Canada to bankroll it. Safer to write a musical about hockey.

Before public funding becomes a full-blown crisis for the creative economy, The Halifax Chronicle Herald's Dan Leger offers some advice to artists looking for handouts. Namely, “do a better job explaining their role in the economy,” as dollars and cents seem to be about the only standard by which the Tories can measure value (gazebos rank very high on that list, apparently). Which shouldn't be too hard, as the arts sector employs 600,000 people and generates $40 billion each year. By contrast, “the auto industry employs fewer than 130,000 and governments bent themselves into pretzels trying to keep those jobs alive during the recent recession,” says Leger. Making a conservative case for the arts ought to be at the top of the list for every arts group – their livelihood, and that of artistic expression in this country, depends on it.