Conservatives and Culture: Let's review the file, shall we?

On Wednesday August 6, 2008, I received a tip from a Conservative government official about a soon-to-be axed program, run out of the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade, that helped Canadian artists export their work abroad. I was working for Canwest at the time and, the next day, in several papers in the Canwest chain, I broke the story of the so-called “Conservative arts cuts”:

OTTAWA AUG 7 2008– The federal government will cancel a program today that sent artists abroad to promote Canadian culture because the program’s grant recipients included “a general radical,” “a left-wing and anti-globalization think-tank” and a rock band that uses an expletive as part of its name.

Canwest News Service has learned that the Conservatives are cancelling the $4.7-million PromArt program administered by the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade because most of the money “went to groups that would raise the eyebrows of any typical Canadian,” said a government official, speaking on condition of anonymity.

The move is sure to provoke a backlash in the Canadian cultural community, already angry at the federal Conservatives for tinkering with the funding criteria for other arts programs, most famously for pending legislation which would prohibit federal funding of films and television shows the government might find offensive.

The cut is part of an ongoing government-wide review to cut spending but the department’s PromArt program became an easy target when senior Conservatives discovered that some recipients of taxpayer-funded foreign travel were “not exactly the foot that most Canadians would want to see put forward.”

The recipients singled out by the Conservatives include:

* $3,000 to Toronto-based experimental rock band Holy F— Music for a week- long tour of the United Kingdom.

* $5,000 was given to former CBCbroadcaster Avi Lewis, who now works for al Jazeera and who is described in a Conservative memo as “a general radical” to help pay for his travel to film festivals in Australia and Argentina;

* $16,500 to send Tal Bachman, a best-selling recording artist and the son of The Guess Who’s Randy Bachman, to South Africa and Zimbabwe for music festivals.

“I think there’s a reasonable expectation by taxpayers that they won’t fund the world travel of wealthy rock stars, ideological activists or fringe and alternative groups,” the source said.

… But the program also funded travel to promote what many Canadians might consider “mainstream” Canadian art. For example, the Canadian Museum of Civilization received $50,000 to help defray the costs of taking an exhibition of Inuit Art to Brazil; the Royal Winnipeg Ballet received assistance of $40, 000 for a U.S. tour; and former Supreme Court Justice Michel Bastarache received a $3,000 grant so he could travel to Cuba to give a lecture about the Canadian Charter of Rights.

.. More than 300 grants were awarded in 2006-07.

Among those who received a grant was author Gwynne Dyer, who received $3,000 to help him travel to Cuba for a series of lectures. The grant program’s annual report said Dyer’s funding application was approved “with the expected results of creating greater awareness and appreciation of Canadian foreign policy . . . within key audiences of Cuban decision makers and opinion leaders.”

But the Conservative talking points say Dyer is “a left-wing columnist and author who has plenty of money to travel on his own.”

The Conservatives also dismiss a grant given to The North South Institute, a non-profit foreign policy think-tank, that received $18,000 in federal travel assistance so its representatives could attend a conference in Cuba.

The North-South Institute is “a left-wing and anti-globalization think-tank, ” the Conservative memo said. “Why are we paying for these people to attend anti-western conferences in Cuba?” it asked.

Within a week, our organization and many others had scoured the federal government’s arts spending profile and, after all was said and done, it seemed the Conservatives were ready to cut or shelve programs which had provided as much as $50 million in support to Canadian artists.

Now it’s important to note that the federal government spends about $4 billion a year on what it calls cultural programs so $50 million worth of cuts was, in the grand scheme of things, pretty tiny, about 1 per cent. But “culture” to a government bureaucrat is a very broad umbrella – it includes, for example, spending on Olympic programs as well as funding purchases by the National Gallery of Canada.  A member of the Liberal Party of Canada whose name is Bryan and tweets under the moniker “Stratosphear” takes me to task for “a myopic assertion” on these culture numbers. Bryan says: “There’s one massive difference in accounting for cultural spending by the Chrétien/Martin governments and the Harper regime: the Cons count funding for Sport Canada as cultural, and the Libs did not.” Bryan does not provide a source that assertion but I am very pleased to provide my source: The Federal Government Estimates published by The Treasury Board from 2004 onwards. The Treasury Board, so far as I can tell from reading the estimates, did not change the defintion of “culture” from year-to-year or government to government.

In February, 2007 — well before breaking the culture cuts story in August 2008 — I looked at spending on whatever it is the government defines as culture. Comparing spending for the same categories, it seems unjustified to me to say that the Conservatives have cut spending on culture although they certainly have changed how money is spent on culture:

Spending on federal government cultural programs is often seen as the litmus test between liberals and conservatives. Conservatives often view such spending with a sceptical eye; liberals, particularly in Canada, tend to place a higher priority on such spending. Or at least that’s the theory.

In the Main Estimates for fiscal 2008, which ends on March 31, 2008, tabled this morning by the Conservative government, spending on all cultural programs will total about $3.87-billion, or about $1.84 for every $100 of government spending. So how does that compare to previous years? Well, overall spending in fiscal 2008 on cultural programs like Parks Canada or the CBC or federal museums, will be $14.5-million or 0.4 per cent less than Fiscal 2007. But spending on cultural programs in the second year of Stephen Harper’s Conservative government will be $509-million or 15.2 per cent more than it was in in fiscal 2006, the last year of Paul Martin’s Liberal government.

After the 2008 “cuts”story broke, I went back to the Estimates (the Estimates are the government’s official line-by-line spending plan and not a federal penny can be spent unless the Estimates are passed by the House) and looked at the Conservative record on spending on what bureaucrats have defined as cultural spending. The definition has not changed. The resulting analysis shows the following: In nominal terms (and even if you adjust for inflation) the Conservatives were spending more on the baseket of cultural programs than the Liberals but as an overall percentage of all government spending, the Conservatives were spending less. Here’s the report I filed August 15, 2008, I reported (I have emphasized the two ways to look at the data):

The federal government, after three years with the Conservatives in charge, is spending more on cultural programs each year than it did during the last year of the Liberal government, according to a Canwest News Service analysis of government financial documents.

For the current fiscal year, which ends March 31, 2009, Parliament has voted to spend more than $4 billion on cultural programs, including the CBC, the Canada Arts Council, the National Gallery of Canada and the Department of Canadian Heritage. That amount is $660 million or 19.7 per cent more than was spent in fiscal 2006, the last year when the Liberals controlled the purse strings.

Overall program spending during that same period is up 18.6 per cent. In other words, Conservatives have boosted spending on arts programs faster than they have boosted overall government spending.

The analysis was prompted by a flurry of criticism prompted by the cancellation, first reported last week by Canwest News Service, of a program that gave Canadian artists and cultural workers small grants to travel abroad. News about the cancellation of the PromArt program, run out of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade for about $4.7 million a year, was quickly followed by news of cancellations of some other programs for artists.

.. The Canwest analysis of federal spending on cultural programs shows that Telefilm Canada has fared worst under the Conservatives. It will receive $107 million this year, most of which is used to help Canadian film and video artists, but that is a decrease of $16.7 million or 13.5 per cent compared to 2006, the last year of the last Liberal government.

The Conservatives have also reduced funding for the Canadian Radio- television and Telecommunications Commission to $5.7 million a year, a drop of $230,000 or four per cent compared to fiscal 2006.

But some agencies that have been viewed, at times, with suspicion by Conservative grassroots supporters, have actually done well financially under the Conservative government. The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, for example, will receive $1.1 billion from the Tories this year, an increase of $133 million or 13.5 per cent compared to the last year under the Liberals.

Other agencies include:

* The Department of Canadian Heritage will spend $1.4 billion this year, up $273 million or 24.4 per cent compared to 2006.

* The Canada Council for the Arts will spend $181 million this year, up $30. 3 million or 20.2 per cent.

* The National Arts Centre Corporation will spend nearly $50 million this year, up $18.3 million or nearly 60 per cent compared to the Liberals.

* The National Gallery of Canada will spend $53.3 million, up $8.8 million or nearly 20 per cent.

But the Conservative record on cultural spending when measured as a portion of all government spending shows that Conservatives, three years later, support the arts at about the same level that the Liberals did in their last year.

During the final budgetary year of former prime minister Paul Martin’s government, $18.06 of every $1,000 spent by the government was spent on cultural programs. That jumped in Harper’s first year in government to $19.54 but by this year it has fallen back to about where the Liberals were at $18.23 of every $1,000 spent by the government.

Using that measure – spending in one area compared to overall spending in any other area – cultural spending has fared worse than any other program in the three-year Conservative term.

The Tories have seen the portion of all spending they need to make on public debt drop by more than 22 per cent. But they have used the spending room created by smaller debt charges to boost spending, as a portion of all government spending, on security and public safety (up 15 per cent); environment and resource-based programs (up 14.4 percent) and general government services (13.7 per cent.)

Yesterday, on Twitter, there was an active discussion about this issue, with one individual, a Conservative supporter evidently, wondering why we didn’t just cut the all spending on Canadian Heritage. If you did that, you’d shut down the CBC, the National Gallery, our national museums, and our national parks system and all that to only take out about 1 per cent of the government’s overall annual spending of $220 billion.

During that Twitter discussion, even Heritage Minister James Moore chipped in:

@davidakin: Spending on cultural programs in the 2nd quarter of S.Harper’s govt is 15.2% more than in the last year of Liberal govt.

I replied that if you really want to get serious about cutting government spending, you have to look at the biggest ticket items: Transfers to Persons (i.e. cutting old age benefits or employment insurance benefits) or transfer to provinces for health care and the like. Jean Chretien took the latter route in the 1990s to balance the federal budget the Liberals are still criticized for that.

But back to culture:

The argument, it seems to me, should not be about whether any government of the day is spending more or less on “culture”. Anyone who spends the time reading through government financial information for the last five years, as I did, will see that the government is spending more.

The argument is really about what we define as culture. I suspect you will find a great many people who believe their tax dollars ought to fund culture that revolves around hockey, curling, and, for the really artsy in that crowd, a Stephen Leacock novel. My favourite literary critic (and, last I heard, Ottawa resident) John Metcalf complained about this in his 1986 essay collection Kicking Against the Pricks:

The arts in canada have never exactly flourished. Not long ago, one of our federal cabinet ministers, welcoming home a team from international competition, delcared with patriotic fervour that hockey was Canada’s national art form. This outrageous statement provoked only Irving Layton to public protest. The unremarked acceptance of this good minister’s paean suggests why Canada remains so very much the land of Anne Murray, Anne of Green Gables and Toller Cranston. …

Where is our Bregman?

Our Fellini?

That is to ask Inappropriate questions.

With the blessings, and indeed guidance, of the State, the Canadian film industry has been turned into a tax haven for dentists. (p. 53 of my edition of Metcalf’s book)

Of course, there are many voters who would sympathize with Metcalf and believe the current government of the day (or any government) be a bunch of Philistines that just don’t get “culture.”
How much we as a country choose to spend on culture and what we define as culture gets almost no serious discussion at election time. In 2008, of course, the Conservatives took a major hit in Quebec because of the perception that whatever was being spent, the Conservatives were determined to spend less. But there was no real discussion, particularly between the two major parties, about the arts in Canada, why they’re important, and what the priorities were for each party when it came to cultural spending. True enough: In 2008, with a recession just getting underway, the economy was the unavoidably dominant theme. But for next time, perhaps we can have a national discussion about the arts, armed with some clear facts about the numbers involved and some clear answers about what $4 billion on “culture” means and how that culture is to be fostered by each party.