But despite charges like these from arts groups and allegations from Canadian Heritage Minister Hélène Scherrer that a Conservative government would adopt a scorched-earth policy toward Canadian culture, political commentator Norman Spector says we can all relax.
Scherrer, who is fighting for her political life in her Quebec riding of Louis-Hébert, tried to ignite a cultural bonfire yesterday in a speech at the 25th annual Banff Television Festival. After reciting a list of Liberal achievements for the arts, including the recent shoring up of the Canada Television Fund to $100-million for two years, she directed a series of inflammatory accusations at Stephen Harper and the Conservative Party. She said a Conservative government would destroy the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission, open the skies to American satellites, give away our cultural sovereignty and signal the end of the CBC and the Canada Council. All of this will be necessary, she charged, to find the $50-billion the Conservatives will need to pay for their new aircraft carriers and tax cuts. "We will end up being a nation for sale," she concluded.
Jim Abbott, the Conservative Heritage critic declined to comment for this article. Through a spokesman in his riding in Kootenay-Columbia, he said he was concentrating on the local campaign and was not going to make comments to the national press.
"I don't think they [the Conservatives]would have a mandate to do that," Spector said in an interview from his office in Victoria. "A government that proposed major changes in any sphere should put that before the people in an election." Because the Conservative Party platform does not specifically propose any radical changes to either the CRTC or the Broadcast Act, Spector dismisses Scherrer's charges as "fear-mongering" in the midst of an election campaign. "That's fair ball."
Scherrer's comments capped an extensive lobbying campaign in which arts groups have been arguing vociferously that the Liberals and the Conservatives should clarify their cultural agendas in the televised French and English debates this week.
Referring to the political firestorms during the free-trade debates a decade ago, Waddell said, "at least then we got culture off the table and -- I have to find some wood to knock on -- it hasn't become an issue under NAFTA," in an interview late last week before heading to Banff for a press conference yesterday in which actor Gordon Pinsent and director Daryl Duke implored Canadians to press candidates on cultural issues in the final sprint for the tightly contest election on June 28.
"We will all be working for the Americans -- including you" Waddell said, warming to his subject.
Three things have Waddell and many other arts types riled: the strength of the newly hatched Conservative Party in election polls; the lack of specifics regarding cultural sovereignty in the official Conservative platform; alarming tidbits dropped by Conservative candidates, including Leader Stephen Harper, in speeches and interviews on the hustings and finally, disturbing comments buried in a "Policy Briefing Note for Candidates," a document issued by the Conservatives last April.
The election call did not allow time for the newly merged Progressive Conservative and Alliance parties to hold a policy convention to hammer out an official party policy. In the interim, the 30-page briefing note has taken on huge importance. Embedded in its many subject areas, the policy document says the Conservative Party supports "relaxing foreign-ownership rules" in the telecommunications, broadcast distribution and airline industry, "restructuring" the CRTC, thereby reducing its mandate as Canadian-content watchdog, and finally negotiating an open-market agreement that would "make Canadian programming available in the United States and allow foreign programming to be available here in Canada for the free choice and benefit of all Canadians."
Those statements, says Waddell, make an already dire situation much worse. "We are in a crisis now," he said, "because the amount of dramatic production has declined so dramatically since 1999, when the private broadcasters were let off the hook with respect to content and expenditure requirements. Canadians are being so overwhelmed by U.S. culture that there is very little space left on television and cinema screens for anything other than news and Hockey Night in Canada."
He fears that if the ownership rules change, Canada will be open not only for business but up for sale to the highest bidder. "Imagine if the Americans owned our telecommunications sector and all of our telephone lines were routed through the U.S. in terms of national security. Where would that place us?" he asked rhetorically.
An election campaign is a stellar opportunity for advocacy groups to get their message out before the public and debated among the rival candidates. Although the NDP, the Bloc Québécois and the Green Party all have commitments to protect Canadian content and ownership in their party platforms, neither the Liberals nor the newly hatched Conservatives have made any specific election promises.
That's not a big surprise says Michael Adams, president of Environics. "Arts and culture doesn't come up on public-opinion surveys." He estimates that fewer than 1 per cent of Canadians rank it as an election issue. That's not necessarily worrying. "It could be like Canada and the U.S.," he explained. "The fact that we aren't on anybody's hit list may be a good thing. The half-empty glass could really be half full," he says advising arts groups to "forget it."
That's like asking singers not to sing or actors not to perform. Lobbying for more recognition and support for the arts is the raison d'être of such organizations. A coalition representing ACTRA and its French-language counterparts sent a letter to the five party leaders on Friday demanding positions on Canadian ownership of telecommunications and broadcasting; maintaining Canadian-content regulations in broadcasting and on the air waves and providing stable long-term financial support for domestic cultural industries.
Simultaneously, the ubiquitous Paul Gross issued a challenge to Liberal Leader Paul Martin and Conservative leader Stephen Harper to "step up and tell us: What are your plans for Canada's cultural industries?" Gross, who has been leading ACTRA"s Campaign for Canadian Programming for the past two years, is not the only prominent Canadian performer to step to centre stage to promote the arts in this election campaign. Tomorrow, a clutch of media stars, including Sonja Smits, Sarah Polley, Shirley Douglas, Ken Finkleman and Susan Swan are holding a press conference in Toronto.
Although the timing is partly coincidence, the press conferences in Banff and Toronto will bracket the leaders' debates in French and English, the first being a prod to push culture onto the agenda, and the second, a reaction to its presence or lack thereof in the debate.
Cultural nationalist Margaret Atwood helped stoke the fires in an op-ed article in The Globe and Mail last week when she referred to the new Conservatives as "the Body Snatchers."
"I don't know how real the threat is," said John Brotman, executive director of the Ontario Arts Council, in response to Scherrer's speech. Emphasizing how important the public-support network is to the arts in Canada, he said people committed to Canadian culture would all want to resist a major overhaul of the regulatory and support systems. "They were developed over a long history and with a great deal of care."
Conceding that governments in the past have deliberately or accidentally misinterpreted their mandates, Spector says it is highly improbable that the Conservatives will win enough seats to push such radical changes through Parliament. Besides, "It would take up an entire session to dismantle the Broadcast Act and the CRTC, says Spector, who wrote his doctoral thesis, "Communications and Sovereignty" on the CRTC 30 years ago. "Why would a government use its political capital on something like that? It's not as though there is a great problem out there that needs to be resolved."