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We brought up our children in an artist-rich neighbourhood. We didn't plan it that way - it was just a bonus. Growing up, they overheard the sounds of our neighbour practising her flute before heading off to perform.

And while kids in other neighbourhoods bragged about the cars their parents drove, my children walked to school with kids who would crow, "My dad won a Genie last night," or "my mom's art show opened yesterday."

Through the miracle of best-friendship, my daughter went to the ballet countless times with a friend whose mother works at the National Ballet of Canada. After, she would casually tell me she had met "Rex" or chatted with "Karen."

"You met Karen Kain?" I would ask, standing in the kitchen in my mom sweatpants, wondering how my 10-year-old had achieved a better cultural life than I had.

As kids, they would not have comprehended a world in which arts and culture were seen as frills to be starved of funds every time a government wanted to score an ideological point, or as Prime Minister Stephen Harper recently dismissed it, a "niche" issue.

Of the outcry over his government's intention to cut $40-million from arts funding - including grants for Canadian artists who travel abroad - Mr. Harper opined this week that he didn't think "ordinary Canadians" would really care "about a bunch of people at a rich gala ... claiming their subsidies aren't high enough."

Well, my kids and their friends didn't know from galas. They saw artists as incredibly hard-working. With no safety net, no steady job, the artists were the ones who, as one parent did, worked all day composing music for theatre, and then cheerfully went off to what he called his "day job" at night - playing jazz piano at a swish restaurant. Another father, a gifted actor, worked as a butcher to support his family.

Not too long ago, that same Karen Kain who had dazzled my daughter and who is now the artistic director of the National Ballet, delivered a passionate plea for the arts to a packed press conference.

She made a point so obvious I don't know why it has to be periodically knocked into the heads of our leaders, particularly during elections: "Where the arts flourish, life flourishes. Where the arts are ignored, life is impoverished."

While Mr. Harper's almost aggressive derision of the arts funding issue is in a class by itself, no party in Canada has an unblemished record in standing up for the arts.

Remember when Bob Rae's provincial NDP government demurred in building Toronto's opera house? It pulled the plug in the midst of a massive deficit, and perhaps at that moment it had to. But the shameful, half-joking, whispered justification making the rounds was "nobody ever died of too little opera."

Fortunately, the Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts is now a gorgeous reality.

And Mr. Rae is now with the federal Liberals, who are promising to do more than the Conservatives to protect the arts.

Very few Canadians in generations to come will remember the words of a Stephen Harper or a Stéphane Dion, no matter how hard their various speechwriters toil. But they will carry with them whole passages from a novel by Michael Ondaatje.

At university, I studied Snow, a work by Canadian poet Margaret Avison, which contains these words: "Nobody stuffs the world in at your eyes. The optic heart must venture: a jail-break and recreation."

To me, these words, which still thrill me, mean we need to see the world anew to recreate ourselves. Haven't our artists always done this? They've stuffed the world in at my eyes, as recently as a few weekends ago, when I went to see Scorched, a brutal and funny play about war by Quebec writer Wajdi Mouawad, brilliantly acted at Toronto's Tarragon Theatre. In the middle of the Toronto International Film Festival, when there were many other entertainment options, there was a pretty full house.

I was impressed. It made me feel better about an embarrassing encounter I once had with a visitor from Poland who asked, "In our country we revere writers and artists, so why is it in Canada we hear so much about accountants?" Beats me. Don't get me wrong. I love accountants - every major ballet company or small theatre troupe needs one (or a team of them). And yes, arts groups should be entirely accountable for the money we give them.

But our homegrown culture - and the way we present it abroad - gives us so much more than a place to go on a Saturday night. It gives us, as Ms. Kain also noted, "our place in the world."

If voters don't demand in this election to know how the party they intend to vote for will protect and encourage our cultural richness and identity, what it will do to fund the arts, and what it won't dismantle no matter what - they will have missed one of Canada's most important bottom lines.

PS: They should get it in writing.