They all have a story -- a grant here, travel help there -- but only one can say the Canada Council changed the course of her life at the age of eight.
Karen Kain was in Grade 3 in 1959 when Celia Franca and the National Ballet of Canada came to Hamilton. She sat watching, mesmerized, and knew instantly that was what she wanted to be.
But it was only this Monday that Kain realized the full connection. She had always credited the Canada Council with helping her become this country's premier ballerina -- the council funded the 1973 trip to Moscow that saw her return with a silver medal and national recognition -- but it was only in researching the history of the council for its 50th birthday party that she realized where it all began for her.
The council had funded the tour that brought the ballet to Hamilton. And now, 48 years later, with a legendary dancing career behind her, the little girl in the seats was now chair of the Canada Council.
"It changed the course of my life," she says.
Yesterday evening, the council brought 50 of the country's most accomplished artists to Parliament Hill where Kain spoke words the likes of which are rarely, if ever, heard in this country: "I thank the Government of Canada."
She was hardly alone.
Rudy Wiebe was there from the West remembering the $2,000 grant he got in 1964 to begin work on a second novel. "To me," he says, "it was sort of an affirmation." He also received a travel grant in the early 1990s to retrace, by canoe, the tracks of the ill-fated Franklin Expedition. Had he not been able to experience that, he says, he could never have written A Discovery of Strangers, which won the Governor-General's Award for literature in 1994.
Zacharias Kunuk was there from the North, talking about his first production grant back in 1985, enough money to begin the filming that became, eventually, The Fast Runner, the Inuit movie that won the best first film award at Cannes in 2001.
Mark Djokic was there from down East, the 24-year-old concert violinist just beginning to find out what it is to live in a country willing to pay for the education he received elsewhere.
"When I go to other countries and I tell people about this," he says, "they don't believe it."
And Roch Carrier, the former National Librarian, was there to say if he had not been funded to begin his writing career, there would never have been The Hockey Sweater -- and the back of the Canadian five-dollar bill would have to go wordless.
"If the council were not invented 50 years ago," he says, "we would have to invent it today."
The Canada Council was born in 1957, six years after the Massey Commission basically said it was impossible to "make even a modestly comfortable living" here as an artist or painter.
There was no real Canadian literature -- only 14 books of fiction were published in 1948 -- and only four centres had fairly active theatre companies.
There was an elitist edge to the original concept. Robertson Davies, in fact, sat on the commission and fought against the creation of the council, fearing it would only lower the brow of arts.
Today the Canada Council pours $181-million a year into the arts in Canada, and the half-century of funding has had an impressive effect. From nine art galleries in 1957, the council now funds 147 art museums, artist-run centres and public galleries. There are now more books published than even a Governor-General's Award jury can read.
It has not always been a smooth ride. Some grants are downright ridiculous -- dancing naked down the Trans-Canada Highway, for example -- and the council gets its fair share of abuse.
Canadians, after all, may not know much about art, but we know what we don't like.
"When you have a group that funds the arts," says Wiebe, "it has to fund imaginative things that no one has ever thought of before. "Some things bomb. Some things need to bomb.
"There would have to be something wrong if they didn't get criticized."
It is for this very reason, says director Robert Sirman, that the council guards its treasured "arm's length" relationship with the government that provides the funding.
"In a sense," he says, "we protect the politician from ownership of the decision. It saves the politician from embarrassment."
And what saves the council from embarrassment, he says, is that all grants are decided by peers. If they think it's art, it must be art.
Besides, he would argue, the successes far outweigh the failures.
Two years ago, Sirman says, the council helped fund 900 organizations. And they, in turn, produced revenues exceeding $1-billion.
And as for the cultural industry, which the Massey Commission found barely existed apart from American movies, it's now a $40-billion-a-year industry in this country.
"Simply put," says Liberal member of Parliament Jim Peterson, "we wouldn't have the arts in this country is we didn't have the Canada Council."
Roy MacGregor