The Still Before the Storm ~ Fish writer in residence #7

By the time you read this post, Premier Ed Stelmach’s farewell budget may have already impacted the surface; the words “hopeful” and “fearful” replaced in headlines by “angry” and “AAAAAAAAA!” Whether this meant another round of cuts to the arts – five to ten per cent being the common rumour - was still an unknown I wanted to freeze and examine in the last seconds before anything else happened. The still before the storm.

As you know, last year’s 16% “haircut” went deep into the scalp of arts organizations like Film and Video Arts Society Alberta, here at Latitude 53 and over at the Society of Northern Alberta Print-artists, just to name a few local spaces.

“SNAP was hit by the usual 16%,” executive director Anna Szul explained. “We didn’t cut any one particular program but trimmed expenses everywhere. Although in retrospect, for public perception, it would have been more effective to cut all from one area to show what a drastic effect such extreme financial cuts have on the arts.”

Objective note: we are at the point of talking about strategically placing cuts so people notice.

Rather than SNAP’s even approach, this was how Latitude handled the cuts – dropping one major show and a catalogue, both interrupted possibilities in the middle of the gallery’s financial year. Executive director Todd Janes and I sat down for some time talking about last year’s cuts, which he described as useless and mean-spirited, especially as Alberta allocates only .1% of its budget to the arts. Point one per cent. He compared it to your household trying to balance its finances and pretending not going to a movie is going to save the children.

Janes, who should write a book on the subject, thinks there are bigger issues to talk about than how much the Tories fund farming, big oil and horseracing. “There’s been 40 years of Tory rule and, let’s be generous, the past 25 years of Tory rule haven’t managed anything. One of the main reasons they survived is because a bunch of prehistoric life died in one area and for the past four decades they’ve had a large horseshoe made of petrochemicals up their ass.

“It’s not because they have a vision, or a plan.” This last item is increasingly felt in the province, regardless of your political stripe. “What has Lindsay Blackett done?” Janes asked. “Great, we have a Department of Culture and Community Spirit. But the bigger story is Minister Blackett has mismanaged his portfolio beyond belief. Arts and culture are clearly not even on the radar for this government … or they’re just malicious. It’s probably a mix.

“There’s a few points that need to be conveyed here. One, the arts are still not funded in Alberta from taxpayer money, but lotteries money. The allocation is very clear. The second thing is, under the leadership or the vision or the impetus of Lindsay Blackett, I would argue almost everything he’s done has eroded professional artists and arts organizations in this province. And while the AFA budget has been going down almost every year since he’s been minister, his personal departmental expenses have gone up over 22%. His ministerial budget has inflated in a opposite direction. I find that really interesting.”

Janes cited the government’s partial matching of private donations to non-profits as positive, “but at the same time Blackett totally got rid of Wild Rose funding and decimated and consolidated a lot of the non-profits that just as a general citizen I’m curious about. And what does the Premier’s Council on Arts and Culture do again? It’s a panel of people from all over the province that meets and advises the minister, but there’s no accountability - no one really knows what they do. And the AFA went for over a year without a chair. Finally we have Mark Phipps, and we’re eager to see what happens under his governance …”

Alberta, believes Janes, has an odd psychology when it comes to advocacy and funding. “There’s a large ribbon of fear. We don’t want to rock the boat for fear of repercussion. I find that scary. It’s a fallacy, too. In this province a squeaky wheel gets oil.

“I don’t know where (the fear) comes from.”

I brought up a beholden’s attitude of not wanting to snap at the hand that feeds it, but he believes that doesn’t apply. Organizations work for their supper, after all. “If we look at arts and culture relative to social services - with a larger portion of the budget - what’s happened over the last ten years is it’s moved from, ‘We (the Tories) are going to help (social services) do work,’ to where they’ve removed the middleman and most social service agencies and non-profits do a bunch of fee-for-services. So they actually provide the day-to-day operations services the government doesn’t provide any more, at a much reduced cost. So it’s not about biting the hand that feeds you, it’s about a hand helping the government do what it should be doing.

“Now look at arts organizations. Arts organizers have to be really good managers. We can take a loaf of bread and some water and feed the multitudes. I fear we’re our own downfall because we’ve done so well for so long with so little that maybe it looks easy. Arts organizations provide facilities and services and common gathering places … a lot of what arts organizations and to some degree artists do is a fee-for-service in terms of this devolved government. ”

This “service” aspect is especially true when it comes to bragging time at elections, when cultural patriotism flies at its peak as politicians boast about the borders they hope to keep working within. But Janes notes: “Why shouldn’t we be calling governments to task? We elect them. We pay their salaries. If they’re not doing what we want shouldn’t we be able to have a mechanism for saying, hey, what’s with this?

“Everyone is affected by the arts whether they agree it should be funded or not. The statistics show 98% of people think the arts are important and 92% think they should be supported. Those a pretty strong numbers. Harper would love to have those numbers, I’m sure. For every dollar that’s invested by governments into artistic activities in Canada, it generates about $8.

“For governments that are concerned with financially conservative policies, the arts work. They are a success story. And the majority of Albertans do not see art as an add-on frivolity, they engage in it.”

All this, we knew before the budget dropped. So, uh, how did it turn out incidentally?