Mr. Speaker, I am generally not considered an expert on culture and the heritage department. I am a farmer from Saskatchewan. However I do read. I do write. I do look at art. I do watch plays. I do watch television and all the things that all Canadians do.
In this discussion we should remind ourselves that cultural pursuits are an expression of all of society and they have always had difficulty being recognized for what they are trying to do.
We have heard a number of speeches this morning stating that if the market will not support it then it should not be produced. Yet when I look back at my very modest understanding of the history of artistic endeavour, I see a great many works that are now considered to be the epitome of that genre of art. It would not have been accepted by the market in the day it was produced. It was very controversial and yet because the state or the church was determined to pay the artist to do the work and support the artist in his or her endeavour it was produced.
People asked why waste money painting the Sistine Chapel ceiling, paying an artist for the years and years it takes to produce that stuff. When it was finished the population was agog because Michelangelo had painted some of the people without as many clothes on as they thought there should be. While the church and the Pope had financed the project, they did succumb to popular pressure and have him come back and paint over some parts of it.
However without the backing of the state or the church-in that case the church was collecting money from all of the population-without a firm commitment to that artist, we would not know Michelangelo ever existed. He is still considered to be one of the greatest painters and sculptors of all time.
That is just one example. We have many in Canada to which I am sure people in the artistic community could point. Because most of my friends of the Reform Party are from western Canada I would just mention the name William Kurelek .Without some assistance from Canadian governments we probably would not realize that William Kurelek was a great talent in his own right. He was considered kind of a nut case by his colleagues and the people who knew him, but some people in the artistic community convinced others he should receive financial support, so we got the paintings that he produced in his lifetime.
We tend to think that Heritage Canada is only supporting experimental art and playing with new ideas, that they support exotica or things that are quite foolish. We have heard quite a lot of some of those perceived to be foolish things. Not being terribly modern and culturally aware, some of those seem a little foolish to me as well, but we have to be prepared to make those kinds of experiments if we are going to move forward as a society.
As we have only eight to ten minutes each to speak I do not want to spend too much time on this, but we should remind ourselves that some of what Heritage Canada does with its grants and its money is quite mundane. If we pulled back all the support the department gives, even my friends in the Reform Party would up on their feet crying about the interference that had been precipitated by the pulling back of those funds.
As an example, I have in my community a second newspaper that started up in the last few years which portrays a very right wing point of view. My friends in the Reform Party would love the editorials. Basically the reason for the newspaper is to put those editorials and those opinions in front of the general public in that community. Because this lady has these extreme views she has trouble getting advertisers to support the paper.
She wanted to set up a second paper and keep it going. She had started one up in a neighbouring community which was in danger of folding so she took over the management of it again. I got a call from her to say she was having trouble getting the postal subsidy needed to keep both newspapers going. This comes from, guess where? Heritage Canada. As I recall it is about 88 cents per paper per week. The paper cannot operate and cannot circulate this other opinion in those communities without the support of Heritage Canada.
While she is an avowed believer in letting the market be determined, she was very concerned as well about the duality of these arguments we get into and the fact that she might not be able to get a grant from Heritage Canada because she was starting up a second paper and policies were changing. This in effect would be a restriction of freedom of speech. Freedom of speech is only one forum of the freedom of expression our societies and the tribes we have come from feel is the root of our existence.
If we are going to have freedom of expression it has to go beyond just producing newspapers with a point of view. It ultimately has to include putting paintings on ceilings, even though it was thought to be a stupid place to put a painting, and living with the kind of criticism that even that glorious work in the Sistine Chapel got when it was performed. Sometimes backing off from criticism has happened, with a little paint here and there to cover up what the general public is opposed to and making adjustments but not by withdrawing all support from society in general.
I hope in opposing the restructuring of Heritage Canada that some of my friends in the House do not mean that all forms of support would stop. Even as a group, we are not wise enough to recognize a potential talent or a product of the artistic mind that will fly and be famous for centuries.
One time as a farm boy I was able to get to Paris for a day or two and go through the Louvre. There are many works I remember of course. Everyone sees the "Mona Lisa" and wonders at the Dutch masters and the works of the French, the Spanish and the Italians. However, the one thing I personally admired was some of the sculpture in stone from the early Greek period. Some of this stuff weighs thousands of pounds. The art is so great it appears as if these winged creatures will take off momentarily. They look as light as a feather, they are ethereal. They almost look like lace, but they are stone and weigh thousands of pounds. Nobody knows who did that work. But we still have it and we still admire it.
Some time thousands of years ago, some king or priest or bishop or whoever helped to finance this work of art. It was probably criticized by a few people in the street or maybe all the people in the street as a waste of public funds for keeping this poor sculptor in food and drink for the time it took him or her to produce it. Nobody knows who produced it and yet millions have appreciated the thought and the expertise and the feeling that went with it.
To be so careful with our dollars and cents that we lose all common sense has to be something we avoid. I hope for just a few political moments, we will let common sense prevail and not just follow public demand. The public demand to stop spending is always there from the taxpayers' side of our psyche. We also must remember we have more than that in our individuality and in our group consciousness and in our group needs. We
must recognize that this also includes recognizing freedom of expression and supporting it.