All governments, whether they be Conservative, Liberal or another stripe, sometimes use the data argument as a defensive strategy because they don't want to move: “If you get better data, then maybe we can do something, but without the data we can't do anything. Our hands are tied.”
My advice to you is to hook your wagon to minority communities. We know that minority communities are overrepresented in the arts community. People of colour, LGBTQ2, indigenous, women, francophones in the west, anglophones in Quebec—find the minority communities that we know are overrepresented among artists and make sure that this is also a way to get their data story told, through the data.
This will give you a very strong argument.
Is that part of your plan?