Madam Speaker, I am very proud to rise in the House today on behalf of the New Democratic Party to support my colleague's Motion No. 297, to increase the annual budget of the Canada Council to $300 million and to call on the government to roll back the cuts that were announced this past summer to the arts promotion program, trade routes, the national training program for film and video sector, the new media research network fund, the Canadian independent film and video fund, the Canadian feature film fund and the Canadian music memories program.
I have had the great privilege in my life to tour from one end of this country to the other as an artist and to be involved in many wonderful festivals. I learned two really important lessons doing that. One is that Canada may seem like an immense country, but it is actually very small. Wherever one travels across this country, the audiences are surprisingly like one town spread across vast distances. The other element is how difficult it is to mount tours. In western Canada, one is travelling 12 hours between stops. That presents enormous challenges to a country like Canada and it is unmatched by almost any other country in the world.
I spent many years working with the Ontario Arts Council studying touring grants and working on them to get programs out there. I can say that for the very few seed dollars that come from the federal or provincial government to arts organizations, theatre, music and dance, those dollars create so much more in terms of in-kind and matching contributions and developing a creative economy. I say that because I think many in the arts community across this country were stunned last summer when about the only move the government made during a very quiet summer was to cut some key programs. The two that often come to mind are the cuts to the PromArt program and trade routes, which were programs specifically designed to build international audiences and an arts industry internationally.
When the government was asked about why these programs were cut, the response from the Prime Minister was absolutely staggering. With a level of personal vitriol against the arts which I think shocked even people who have known the government's opposition to culture, he accused the arts organizations in this country of being some kind of schmooze fest for rich people at the taxpayers' expense. That showed the deep anger his government has toward arts organizations. It also showed an incredible misunderstanding of how the creative economy actually works in this country. I would like to provide an example.
La La La Human Steps in Montreal began back in 1980 with a first show that had maybe 75 people in attendance. It was a very small seed organization. Twenty-nine years later it is a touring company that is travelling around the world. On its initial tour, the group went to New York City and returned to Montreal. Now it is touring up to two years at a time. On its tour the group plays before audiences of 140,000. It shows how much the small investment made in that theatre at that time has grown. This is a group that is dependent on international markets because the market in Canada is not enough.
If one is going to have successful arts organizations in this country, one builds a show that can tour for a while in Canada. However, that international organization is needed in order to develop. It is about building relationships and making investments and long-term planning. For one of its tours, La La La Human Steps will plan two or three years in advance. This is the kind of commitment that is made.
At the international level, Canada has developed this reputation because of the reciprocal nature of building these relations. However, it is also building an industry. It is taking what would have been a small theatre production and turning it into something that can actually create a sustainable industry. For example, one of the dancers in that company now earns 10 times the budget for that company back in 1980. That shows the results of the investment.
When the government arbitrarily cut the programs, we were faced with a disastrous situation where suddenly, years of tour planning were put in jeopardy. Mr. Martin Faucher, the president of the Conseil québécois du théâtre, said that these cuts will be “a disaster for the international development of Quebec theatre”.
Alain Paré of the International Exchange for the Performing Arts said that the results were, and he used the word “disastrous”. In particular, for 61 professional companies 327 tours have been compromised, 3,395 shows affected, and over $25 million lost.
That is the immense, long-tail loss from shortsighted, short-term ideological positions taken by the government. Contrary to the Prime Minister's claim that this was some kind of massive tax subsidy for galas, what these programs would do is pay the air fare. That is it. It would pay the air fare for the artist to get to Europe, pay for the equipment to get over there. From there on in everything that happens internationally in Europe or anywhere else in the world is carried out by the theatre through its relations. So for a little bit of investment at the federal level, we have an amazing response economically and we also have a development.
Now we are in a strange position where Canada is being looked at as some kind of cultural backwater because we are the only country in the western world that has pulled out the support for these tours. There is nothing to replace it.
The government, because it has taken hits recently and it knows that its colour is starting to show, is starting to say there is money in Canada Council, here, there, but if we look at the numbers carefully it does not add up. The numbers that are in the Canada Council do not come close to dealing with what was lost in terms of the government's attack on the export markets that they had through Promart and Trade Routes.
The government had an opportunity to explain to Canadians why these cuts were made if they were not just done for ideological reasons. There could have been a reason. Maybe these programs were inefficient, maybe they were wasteful.
We held hearings at the heritage committee and we gave the government full opportunity to come forward and explain why it was necessary to cut these programs. It was quite shocking and I think very disrespectful to the committee that the minister's staff refused to show us any documents that were anything less than six years old.
They had to dust off these old reviews of these programs, and when we looked at these old reviews they were all very positive, but surely to God there had to be some reviews in the last six years that might show some warning signs that maybe there was a problem with these programs. They refused.
When we asked them why they would not show us any documentation or any proof that these programs were inefficient, for a six year period, the minister's staff said that telling us anything about this would be a violation of cabinet secrecy, that these secrets were somehow, she used the word, “sacrosanct”.
I was actually astounded by that word because some of those reports were already available online. We could look at the 2007 review. They refused to show it to our committee but it could be seen online. The 2007 review of the Trade Routes program showed that it was an excellent program and it had very strong results. In fact, the various reports and studies that were done by the International Exchange for the Performing Arts found excellent responses for these programs.
At the end of the day we are left with a very clear picture of a government that attacked some key arts funding that was more based on developing arts as an industry and arts as an international export. These cuts came because of ideological reasons. That is the only reason we can seem to find.
The government always seems to find it very touchy when we use the word “ideological”, but these were two cuts happening in two different departments at the same time, both of them focused on international arts development.
I have to ask, can we imagine any government anywhere in the world that is not interested in actually creating a sustainable export business for its arts? How could a government think that is a waste of money? How could a government see that having a strong international development for arts organizations, for books, for movies, for music, for theatre would somehow be against a ruling party ideology? It is absolutely staggering.
If we look to our neighbours in the United States, their trade missions and trade departments promote Hollywood, promote their industries, almost with a brass knuckles furor. We see that Europe is more than willing to invest in arts to ensure that arts are funded. The development of any creative economy in any city in the western world is focused on the viability of its arts sector.
In Canada, for years, we have struggled with some of the most anemic funding imaginable and even with that, we have had such great success with our arts. However, the government made the decision to attack these programs without being able to provide any viable explanation for their loss, any possible replacement value for having taken this money out.
As I said earlier, we are seeing the loss of millions of dollars in investments, the damaging of thousands of shows and tours all across North America and the world that have been carefully planned out for the last number of years. They have had the rug pulled out from under them.
In conclusion, the New Democratic Party will be supporting this motion. We are calling the government to task for its failure to support the arts and for its attack on our international reputation in terms of artistic development.