New Policies, Not Restored Funding

In October 1973, the Arts Access* conference was convened at Simon Fraser University (SFU) to discuss provincial arts policies and practices. Nini Baird, wearer of many hats, chaired the conference. She was, at the time, a board member of the Canadian Conference of the Arts and the Canada Council, but it was because she was Director of the Centre for Communications and the Arts at SFU that she was able to amass the resources required to host and organize the conference.

That was then and this is now: Government funding of the arts has been drastically cut in BC. Technological change, malfeasance in the investment and banking industries and environmental/infrastructure degradation are forcing governments to cut all “non-essential” expenses, and so the arts have lost all the advances in government funding gained during the past several decades. Worse is the lack of updated policy guiding government arts funding and that is why I believe we need another Arts Access Conference for BC.

I hope, as I have all my life, that funding to the arts is increased But my greater hope is that arts funding is distributed through programs that have been rethought to better achieve revised policy objectives; ones which foster increased contact and involvement between the arts and the wider population of BC. I also believe a public debate on the merits of an independent arts council would be valuable.

Our current arts policies are responsive – created too quickly out of urgent need. Many public policies developed in this way, responding to an explosion of demand created by the Baby Boom population. First Boomers forced the education system to vastly expand and that is why so many schools are now closing and so many school boards are in a fiscal jam due to too much overhead.

Then, when the Boomers graduated from high school and university, thousands of grants flowed out of provincial and federal labour budgets to create jobs for them that were adjudicated on their ability to create jobs and to socially benefit their communities. For those of us with an artistic and entrepreneurial orientation, it was a golden age.

We created galleries and theatres and the shows and exhibitions to fill them – all on the plethora of job creation program grants available at the time. And then, when those programs ended, governments inherited our expectation that these new cultural enterprises would continue to be underwritten: for a while, that worked.

Those government job creation programs created a large population of arts workers and audiences for the cultural products they produced. The population of arts producers and consumers was hugely expanded by labour policy. And when those labour programs stopped, government arts budgets and policies were forced to pick up the slack as best they could: this is responsive policy making.

Now, all that is over and my esteemed arts colleagues are screaming for reinstatement of the funding. But not all of them; some, like me, see these cuts as an opportunity to change provincial arts policies and that is why it occurs to me to have another provincial arts conference.

I have always admired BC’s commitment to regional arts councils. But the arts council model for arts delivery does not fit with large urban populations. The arts councils of large cities have had a rough time of adjusting to coexistence with professional arts organizations.

When public policy shifts funding from amateur arts activities to professionals they change public involvement in the arts from active to passive. Urban citizens largely become a community of arts watchers instead of art makers; arts consumers instead of art makers or art “doers.” Then, when governments withdraw their financial support, the products of arts makers become more expensive, market-driven (and non-experimental) and the consumers become more and more financially elite. This is weak arts policy.

The need is for leadership, not money. Thoughtful long-term planning for the development of the arts is never going to happen from a provincial government. It is more likely to happen if leadership for the arts in BC is vested in an independent provincial arts council – a council responsible to its constituency as well as to government. (A council that could be demanded by delegates to, say, a provincial arts conference.)

If the government cannot afford to give arts producers and all our communities the money they need for the arts, they should give us enough to manage our adaptation to change in the context of a public conference designed to inform revised arts policies. I would rather fight for a conference and a reinvention of BC arts policy than the restoration of funding to the arts. It is time to rethink our arts delivery policies and develop programs that reflect current socio-economic realities.

Besides, I think that everyone screaming about cuts to the arts is wasting their breath. In my opinion, the people of BC are far more engaged in the problems of education, health care, the environment and the HST to care about the arts. Sad but true!

My major criticism of the current government’s cuts to arts funding is with how they cut and not the cuts themselves. After all, there has been a huge infusion of money to the arts in the past few years through Olympic and Legacy funding programs. But the lack of warning or responsible stewardship through adjustment to operations with smaller (or no) grants reveals a lack of concern or respect for their program clients and the arts consumers of BC. We can change that by coming together, visioning new policies and building a huge constituency of support for change in a provincial conference for arts renewal.

Another Arts Access, anyone?

Chris Tyrell is an arts writer and educator. His opinion piece has appeared in our newsletter since it began in 1986.

*To read about the objectives of the Arts Access conference of 1973 written by its chair and organizer, Nini Baird, please visit http://www.opusframing.com/community/opinion/arts-access-40th-anniversary