To Have and Have Not

Fallowing the Arts To Have and Have Not In the fall of 1995, Ontario's provincial government pulled significant funding from the Ontario Arts Council's budget for supporting all the province's performing arts groups. In December of 1996, Ontario's Lieutenant Governor distributed prizes totalling $300,000 to a few of those groups, those which had succeeded in increasing their private sector fundraising support. For those with a biblical cast of mind, it was a modern enactment of the lesson of one of the New Testament's most cryptic parables: "For unto every one that hath shall be given, and he shall have abundance: but from him that bath not shall be taken away even that which he bath."' Well, better that some should thrive th.an that all should perish. And there is no use pretending, particularly in the field of arts funding, that a return to the days of more generous and wide-spread government support is imminent. There can be no turning back; with paradise lost, the only direction is forward, into the millennium. Indeed, the governmental goal ofdeficit reduction, coinciding as it does with our superstitious awe at the approach of the year 2000, has gripped Canadian governments, and the Canadian people, with a millennial sense of urgency; accordingly, the time to wrestle the deficit to its knees is now. To make possible the dawning of the new age, all secondary goals must be sacrificed to this one, overriding purpose. The problem with such rhetoric is not that it is employed for false purposes (it is not), but that it focuses our attention too much on the present struggle, to the neglect of the struggle's overall end. Instead of urging us forward with a vision of the ideal society, it frightens us with the possibility ofthe end of the world. Millennial fervour thus melts into apocalyptic terror, which in turn cripples our ability to plan our collective future. The rhetoric ofeither/or displaces the vocabulary of both/and. Priorities are established by a brutal process of elimination: in order to keep this, you must do away with that. In Ontario, we have been living with the ensuing howls of rage for over a year. But the useful debate at times of funding crisis is not about the short-term effects of cuts (there is no debate - they do great Journal ofCanadian Studies Vol. 31, No. 4 (Hiver 1996-97 Winter) damage to essential social institutions) but about society's priorities. Impossible as it seems, we need to look beyond the carnage of the apocalyptic battle to contemplate the kind of millennium we want to enjoy once the battle is won and the deficit is, indeed, controlled. In Canada, in 1997, the arts run the real risk of disappearing from that discussion completely. At times offinancial crisis like the current one, the arts easily become the first casualty. Anything that cannot justify itself on the grounds of universality, its practical usefulness to every citizen, gets discounted in the first round. The fight immediately becomes that much more dire, because the contest is now seen to be among competing universals, with non-essential luxuries eliminated from consideration. Certain facts - that arts funding constitutes a pathetically small proportion of any government's budget, and that complete elimination of arts funding would barely scratch the surface of the overall deficit problem - get lost in the rhetorical shuffle. The debate seems somehow purified , less frivolous, when theatre, music or dance have been set aside so that we can concentrate on issues of immediate practical concern, like health care. And how al1engrossing the health care issue is - both because of the size of our investment in it, and because of our unquestioned need for it. Touch our health care system and rational debate gives way to desperate bargaining. "Give us back our health care," pleads the electorate, "and you can keep the rest." To see how this scenario plays itself out, we need only look to the province of Alberta, where an early and aggressive attack on the deficit has already produced a significant annual surplus in the provincial budget. Given such a happy situation, one might have expected...