The culture card: How the arts could cost the Conservatives

By Janice Tibbetts
Canwest News Service

Stephen Harper may have dashed his hopes of winning a majority with cuts to arts programs. (Chris Wattie/Reuters)

OTTAWA - In the end, Stephen Harper may have dashed his hopes of winning a majority for a paltry $15 million.

That's Quebec's share of $45 million in Conservative cuts to arts programs, which exploded into a major election issue for a party that had banked on significantly increasing its seat count with a breakthrough in Quebec.

"I would hazard to say that culture stopped the Conservative majority in its tracks," declared Ottawa pollster Nik Nanos.

How did it happen that targeted cuts to certain arts programs captured centre stage, effectively erasing almost three years of Conservative courtship of Quebecers, including an official declaration recognizing the province as a nation within Canada?

In the lazy days of August, when Harper was publicly warming up to a fall election, the cultural chill was quietly beginning to bubble in the arts community nationwide, which had just learned the Conservatives had killed certain arts-and-culture programs.

The cuts amounted to only a fraction of the $3.8 billion the government spends on arts and culture. One was a $4.7-million program to promote Canadian culture abroad, which a Conservative government official said at the time was killed because most of the grants "went to groups that would raise the eyebrow of any typical Canadian."

The recipients list was broad, including the Toronto rock band Holy F---, several Quebec dance troupes and the Royal Winnipeg Ballet.

"These cuts are small compared to what we are afraid of, which is an overall indifference toward the cultural industry," said Richard Hardacre, president of ACTRA, the union representing performing artists.

The cuts came on top of another irritant to the arts community - a piece of legislation that denied tax credits to films deemed to be offensive.

The initiative, which the Conservatives shelved in their election platform last week, was widely decried as censorship and cast suspicion on the Conservative motives in supporting arts and culture.

By the time Harper hit the campaign trail on Sept. 7, riding high in public opinion polls, his cuts were being vocally condemned at the high-profile Toronto International Film Festival.

There was also a handful of demonstrations across Canada, but the outcry was escalating rapidly in Quebec, where the Conservatives were hoping to at least double or even triple the 10 seats they won in 2006.

Perhaps one of the most damaging setbacks for the Tories was a widely viewed YouTube video by Quebec singer Michel Rivard that comically spoofed out-of-touch anglophones in Ottawa making decisions about arts programs they neither understood nor appreciated.

Enter Gilles Duceppe, who was able to capitalize on a growing sentiment that the cuts were an affront to francophone culture. The Bloc Quebecois leader also bundled the program cancellations with Harper's crackdown on youth crime - a perennial hard sell in the province - to portray the prime minister as being out of step with Quebec values.

The anger morphed into an anybody-but-Harper movement after the prime minister, as he was promoting his crime agenda in Western Canada in mid-campaign, told reporters that ordinary Canadians can't relate to gala-going artists, an assertion that galvanized the communities in Toronto, Vancouver and other urban centres.

"I don't know what he was thinking," said Nanos, who believes that day, Sept. 23, was a tipping point in the campaign.

Canada's three largest cities - Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver - are home to 64 per cent of the 1.1 million Canadians employed in the arts and culture sector. The Harper Conservatives, with their strong rural base, did not win a single seat in the three cities in 2006.

Nor were they even competitive in any of the Top 20 constituencies across Canada where the cultural industry is employed, according to an analysis by punditsguide.ca - an independent website that tracks federal election data.

"When the election was launched, they probably had written off those seats anyway," speculated Alain Pineau, national director of the Canadian Conference for the Arts.

The Conservatives have acknowledged publicly that the cuts to some arts programs were politically motivated, but they say that the overall budget for culture has increased under the Tory watch.

Federal budget figures show that spending climbed from $3.3 billion in the last year of Liberal power to $3.8 billion in 2007-2008.

But critics contend that the money has been shifted from culture to things such as the 2010 Vancouver Olympics, which also falls under the auspices of the federal Heritage Department.

A former Conservative political analyst blames the Tories' lack of an "early warning system" for failing to grasp the impact of their cuts before it was too late, just as they failed to react early to fear over the economy.

"It was the first crack in the wall and the pressure of the economic story caused the wall to break open," he said, referring to criticism the Conservatives were also slow to gauge public angst about the economy, which has been cited as the reason behind their Ontario slide.