A Message from Margaret Atwood

[Daniel Mroz]

And no flowers bloomed

 

 

Why did the Conservatives take the weed whacker to Canadian arts promotion
abroad? asks MARGARET ATWOOD

 

 

MARGARET ATWOOD

 

During the last days of September, I was at a trilingual literary festival
in Vincennes, near Paris. It's called Festival America: Littératures et
Cultures d'Amérique du Nord. It was Canada's year of honour, so there were
26 Canadian writers there, as opposed to two Cubans, four Mexicans, and 24
Americans. The festival was attended by 23,000 people over three days, and
generated a million mentions of Canada in the French press.

 

The Canadian Embassy staff in Paris did a lot of work for the festival but
the embassy didn't spend much money. It couldn't even afford to throw its
own reception. Thus it was while attending the U.S. Embassy's reception for
its own authors that I first heard an astonishing fact: The Canadian
government had just cut every penny once budgeted for the promotion of
Canadian artists abroad.

 

That's it -- every penny, for everything cultural and Canadian, around the
world. Some of those pennies have now been "unfrozen" but they're not enough
to save the programs and networks that have been built up over the past 40
years (in part by art-savvy Tory cabinet ministers such as Flora MacDonald,
Marcel Masse and Barbara McDougall). Staff remain in place, but they can't
do much. It's like a dance floor with no more dancers.

 

Not that there were that many pennies to begin with. The amounts of money
removed were minute -- a fraction of a fraction of a per cent of Canada's
federal budget. And the Harper government had just posted a $13-billion
surplus. So why had they taken this bizarre step?

 

The axing of culture abroad is even stranger when you consider the following
facts: The money generated by Canadian-based artists' works that sell abroad
flows into the country and is taxed here, a net gain to the economy. The
arts and creative industries in Europe now earn "more than double the cash
produced by European car-makers and contribute more to the economy than the
chemical industry, property or the food and drink business," according to
The Independent of Dec. 26. There are comparable statistics for Canada --
some say $40-billion, but even if it were half that it wouldn't be a number
to blow off easily. Or so you'd think.

 

So why had the Conservatives taken the weed whacker to Canadian arts
promotion abroad? Was it just part of Finance Minister Jim Flaherty's
shoot-first, ask-afterwards habit -- familiar now to anyone with money in an
income trust -- of slicing the heads off anything in sight, leaving the
mangled stems to be dealt with by later regimes?

 

Due to the impenetrability of Fortress Harper -- colder than the Kremlin,
more secret than the Inquisition -- it was unlikely we'd get any answers.
But we are still free to speculate, so here's what I came up with to explain
why they did it:

 

1) Ignorance. The Harperites have no idea how much money the arts generate.

 

2) Willed ignorance. They've seen the figures, but have labelled them "junk
economics" in the same way they once labelled global-warming statistics as
"junk science."

 

3) Hatred. The Harper Conservatives think artists are a bunch of whiners who
don't have real jobs, and that any money spent on the arts is a degenerate
frill.

 

4) Frugality. There's lots of arts around. We can get them cheaper from
across the border than it costs to make them here, and if you've seen one
art, you've seen them all.

 

5) Stupidity. They thought they were gassing a hornet's nest, not poking it
with a stick.

 

6) More hatred. They tried to slash local museums, until too many people
screamed. They've cut the Canada Council top-up proposed by the Liberals
down to a sixth of its size. They've stuck the knife into the National
Literacy Program, perhaps on the theory that they won't be able to set up a
working dictatorship if too many people can read. And that's just for
starters. If these things can be done in a minority government, lo, I say
unto you, what things shall be done in a majority?

 

The banner under which the Conservatives have been ditching stuff that
displeases them has been "waste." They're trashing programs that "don't
work." They want things that "get results." (That went for the environmental
plans they once binned, and have now hastily revivified.) Arts promotion is
like supporting entrepreneurs, or local hockey teams, or school systems. But
how do we define "results" in relation to the arts? And what exactly does
"work" mean? Does it mean that money must flow back in the same year it's
invested? If so, the Conservatives should get rid of all primary education,
since no 10-year-old marches right out of Grade Five and gets an executive
job.

 

Typically, cultural money is arranged so that younger artists who need to
build their audiences can piggyback on old poops like me who have already
done that. That's how you support the next generation, and the one after
that. Not to do so is truly wasteful. Yes, you might save a lot of money by
killing all the children: You'd cancel those pesky education expenses. But
you wouldn't survive long as a society.

 

But maybe the Harper Conservatives don't want a society in which the arts
and the creative industries are important. Maybe they don't want the jobs in
those fields to exist. Maybe, as in so many other areas of their thinking,
they want to turn back the clock to the good old days -- some time back in
the golden fifties, when there wasn't all this bilingualism and
multiculturalism, or indeed any lingualism or culturalism at all, and most
Canadian artists left the country, and those who remained could be referred
to jokingly in Parliament as a bunch of fruits jumping around in long
underwear.

 

That's a lot of maybes. But maybes are all we have in the absence of any
coherent cultural policy or even any explanation for the lack of one. Who
was it said that there's more culture in a cup of yoghurt than in the Harper
Conservatives? Let's hope that person was wrong.

Margaret Atwood is the author of more than 40 volumes of poetry, fiction and
nonfiction. Her latest is a collection of short stories, Moral Disord 

 

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