News

Arts and culture have never been a priority for the Harper government but with yesterday's federal budget the sector seems to have achieved a new level of non-recognition.

There is only one direct allocation to an arts and culture initiative, and it targets the country's extant national museums - that is, the four Ottawa-area institutions that already receive hundreds of millions of dollars annually from the federal government.

Over the next two years, the government says it will spend $9.4-million - $2.7-million in this fiscal year, $6.7-million in 2009-2010 - to address what it calls "operating and infrastructure pressures" on the National Gallery of Canada, the Canadian Museum of Nature, the Canada Science and Technology Museum, and the Canadian Museum of Civilization (which includes the Canadian War Museum.)

No mention was made of a restoration of the $4.6-million Museums Assistance Program that the Conservatives killed in 2006, or of a continuation of the $60-million-per-year Tomorrow Starts Today scheme that expires in 2009-2010.

There were no specific commitments to the Portrait Gallery of Canada or to a new copyright regime or to the Harper government's much-promised, long-anticipated museums policy or to tax relief specifically for artists.

There was nothing about the Canadian Television Fund or Telefilm Canada or enhancing Canada's cultural presence abroad or "topping up" capital investments to organizations such as the Canadian Opera Company and the Royal Conservatory of Music.

In short, yesterday's budget, in the name of maintaining what Finance Minister Jim Flaherty called "strong fiscal management," seemed to duck virtually every concern that the Canadian cultural community has been voicing in the past five years.

Even the $9.4-million allocation seems less than it first appears.

Last year the four national museums were among 17 organizations that Mr. Flaherty ordered to find millions of dollars in "improvements and efficiencies" to be redirected to other federal programs. Yesterday's budget shows that the $9.4-million being targeted to the four is coming largely from the museums themselves: For the next two fiscal years, they are scheduled to give the federal government a total of $8.5-million in "strategic review savings" to "reinvest" in their own infrastructure and related operating costs.

Even Canadian Heritage, the department that is the nominal overseer of the national museums, not to mention the Canada Council for the Arts, the CBC and Telefilm, has been compelled to provide strategic review savings.

Except in its case the $32.8-million it's providing for reinvestment over two years isn't going to arts and culture, but to train Canadian athletes for the 2008 Beijing and 2010 London summer Olympics and to finance the cross-country torch relays for B.C.'s 2010 Games.

For Alain Pineau, national director of the Canadian Conference of the Arts, the country's largest arts lobby, the budget held "no surprises," including the lack of the word "arts" anywhere in the budget text. (The words "culture" and "cultural" each appear twice.)

While weak on offering new resources or articulating a long-range vision for arts and culture, the one piece of "good news," Mr. Pineau said, "is ... there doesn't appear to have been any major cuts in the reallocation action" that six culture-related organizations, including Library and Archives Canada, were asked to undertake last year.

Mr. Pineau had been predicting the budget would provide "pretty much nothing" for arts and culture, and his prediction proved correct.

As ever, managers and boards of Canadian arts organizations will be poring over the budget book in the days ahead to find possibilities and portents. Some might find hope in the planned creation of a new Crown corporation, PPP Canada Inc., which is supposed to facilitate more public-private partnerships.

Others might see potential funding, at least for bricks and mortar, in the continuation of the $8.8-billion Building Canada Fund.

Still, the budget has to be a disappointment to artists, cultural organizations and art lovers.

To view this interactive, you need to upgrade your Flash Player

Download Flash Player from the Adobe website.