“Ordinary people” don’t care about the arts, and artists are elitist snobs who whine at extravagant taxpayer-funded galas about government subsidies not rising quickly enough. And with that denigrating assessment, Prime Minister Stephen Harper defended his government’s forty-five million dollar pre-election gutting of arts funding in Canada.

I think when ordinary working people come home, turn on the TV and see a gala of a bunch of people at, you know, a rich gala all subsidized by taxpayers claiming their subsidies aren’t high enough, when they know those subsidies have actually gone up — I’m not sure that’s something that resonates with ordinary people.

– Stephen Harper, September 23, 2008

When the head of a government starts invoking “ordinary people” just before an election in an attempt to appeal to the broadest base of voters possible, particularly in relation to an issue they collectively know very little about, there is no doubt that the ideological engine is shifting into high gear. Harper strenuously denied the funding cuts were ideologically motivated¹ even as his Finance Minister acknowledged that politics certainly played a role.

We are a Conservative government, and the ministers who sit on the Treasury Board have that hat on as well. This is not a bureaucratic process; the decision is made by the ministers who sit on the Treasury Board, and they have views on certain programs.²

– Jim Flaherty, September 24, 2008

Coupled with the strongly ideological Bill C-10 introduced in February 2008 apparently at the behest of ultra right-wing creationist and Evangelical Christian Charles McVety, deemed “censorship” legislation by the arts community and which would have denied federal funding to film and television productions the government deemed offensive, it’s difficult to imagine how any move the Conservatives might make against the arts could not be seen as materializing out of the right-wing canon. And indeed, an analysis conducted by The Globe and Mail of the Conservative budget in relation to arts funding found that cuts made to arts and culture programs appeared to be almost certainly ideologically motivated.

The Department of Canadian Heritage is the body that receives federal funding for arts and culture. Divided into two “Strategic Outcome” arms, the first, known as SO1, is the mainstay for directly funding Canadian arts and culture, such as film, television, visual, and other arts. The second, SO2, funds initiatives related to sports, official languages, “citizen participation”, even ESL studies. Both are called beneficiaries of “arts funding” by the Conservatives.³

The Globe found that SO1 funding was falling, while SO2 funding was increasing. In fact, all the relevant funding cuts only affected SO1. The government could thereby claim that, although some arts funding was being cut, money was actually being invested back into other “arts” programs, failing to mention the strongly polarized programs making up SO1 and SO2. Moreover, the Conservatives were claiming that arts funding introduced by the previous Liberal government was their own, due to an anomaly in finance reporting after Parliament was dissolved ahead of the 2006 election.⁴

Perhaps sensing the public would not be ignorant of these facts forever, and surprised at the strong and well-organized backlash from the arts community and local governments alike, Harper next announced tax credits for families with children in arts programs. In a breathtaking example of political cynicism combined with naked hypocrisy, Harper introduced the new funding in words barely believable after his tirade less than a week earlier against “whining elitist artists” and their “expensive galas”.

For some children, participating in art, dance and drama classes will be a fun and enjoyable activity. For others, it could be the beginning of much more — a lifelong interest or career.

– Stephen Harper, September 29, 2008

The cynicism of this move did not satisfy those affected by the cuts and the potential censorship legislation, especially in Quebec, where arts and culture strongly identify the distinct society that Quebecers enjoy. It’s interesting to wonder if there would be any way that Jean-Claude Lauzon’s 1992 film Léolo — featuring pre-teen masturbation, food eroticism, scatology, incest, and other wonders — would have ever seen the light of day, had the censorship legislation been in place. Internationally acclaimed, the film made Time magazine’s list of the one hundred best films of all time, but in the world of the Conservatives, this surely would have been deemed objectionable and pornographic stuff during one of the closed-door meetings that would have determined funding for such projects.

But panic ensued, and, in a further example of cynical electioneering, the Conservatives reversed themselves and vowed to scrap Bill C-10. However, the damage had been done. The Conservatives are seen to be ideologically opposed to arts funding, unless they are allowed to call sports, ESL classes, and other unrelated activities “art”. They have ignored the fact that actual arts and culture contribute 7% to this country’s GDP, translating to more than $84 billion of economic gain annually.⁵ They are avowed ideologues, where funding policy is determined not by economic considerations, but by how well-aligned the beneficiaries of those policies are with the Conservative agenda.

Artists, filmmakers, musicians, poets and writers, beware.

1. James Bradshaw, Harper plays populist tune on arts cuts, The Globe And Mail, September 11, 2008. [↩]
2. James Cowan and Marianne White, Finance minister defends Tory cuts to arts funding, September 25, 2008. [↩]
3. James Bradshaw, Study reveals erosion in arts funding, The Globe And Mail, September 19, 2008. [↩]
4. Ibid. [↩]
5. Culture sector helps drive economy, CBC.ca, August 26, 2008. [↩]

Louis Politics, Shameful Acts Arts funding, Conservatism, Election 2008, Ideology, Politics, Stephen Harper

In its rush toward populism and away from discourse, the federal Conservative government in Canada has revealed its vision. Some of that vision was contained in its election platforms of 2006 and 2008, but much of it has been spooled out over the course of the life of the minority government led by Stephen Harper since January 2006.

Canada’s current government is focused mostly on raising the spectre of criminal activity, despite the fact that the government’s own statistics show the national crime rate to have been falling steadily in virtually every area since 2004.¹ Of all the pages detailing policy in its 2008 platform, a full 29% mention crime, violence, punishment, penalties, prison, criminal conduct, or tough laws. The government is also fixated on military engagement and the open encouragement of nationalism.

[Addendum, April 21, 2009: Statistics Canada reports that serious crime was at a thirty-year low before the Conservative anti-crime campaign began.²]

Its actions in these and other areas before the 2006 election and subsequently have demonstrated the Party, and Mr. Harper in particular, to be concerned with populism. As a result, they have shown a remarkable disdain for parliamentary democracy, the traditions of a free media, intellectualism, and for anything that does not on its surface appeal to the basest political appetites of Canadians.

It’s simple to examine this government’s three short years of life to peel away the populist policy promulgations, and begin to reveal that long sought-after hidden Conservative agenda. In a morass of breaches lesser and greater, a few particularly egregious offences stand out. And so, in a series of articles, in neither chronological order nor in any sequence of terribleness, I present the Conservative government’s Shameful Acts.

But let’s begin before it even all got started.

1. Breaking Canada’s election laws

Apparently in order to circumvent national campaign spending limits during the 2006 federal election, the Conservative party engaged in an “in and out” scheme. The Party’s national headquarters transferred money to local ridings, which immediately sent the money back using pre-signed bank transfers, claiming it had been spent on campaign advertising. However, the “local” ads were identical to national campaign ads, with only the addition of local candidate information at the end. The result was not only spending beyond the legislated limits by more than a million dollars, but a loss of almost one million dollars to taxpayers, since sixty percent of the costs of the ads were claimed as refundable expenses by local candidates.³

During routine audits, Elections Canada, the independent body overseeing the election process, uncovered the discrepancies, and in April 2008, the RCMP raided the Party’s national headquarters to seize documents related to the scheme. During its investigation, Elections Canada discovered that local Conservative candidates did not know which ads the payments were for,⁴ presumably because the bank transfers were pre-signed by the national Party.

In other words, local candidates were sent money by the Party to fund their campaigns. The candidates immediately returned the money to pay for their campaign advertising, which they had no part in creating, and which they apparently never saw or approved. The local campaigns then collectively claimed that Canadian taxpayers owed them a million dollars in refunds to be processed by Elections Canada. In other strata of society, this kind of willful flouting of financing rules is known as “money laundering”. The euphemistic “violations of the Elections Act” of which they were accused would, if it were any other piece of legislation and any other component of society, be called “breaking the law”.

There is much more shameful behaviour in this story after the Conservatives came to power, including: the Conservatives’ refusal to cooperate with a House investigation into the matter; representatives being told by the Party not to show up after being summoned by the investigative Committee; the Party’s refusal to express confidence in Elections Canada by voting against a symbolic motion put forward by the Bloc Québécois to do so; and Conservative campaign chair Doug Finley’s bizarre crashing of the Committee, apparently in some Orwellian attempt to intimidate Conservative witnesses.⁵ After refusing to leave, he was forced out by security personnel.

The entire “in and out” episode has been described by critics as “disdain for democracy”, and by some Conservatives as a betrayal of the Party’s vision.

1. CBCNews.ca, Snapshot: Crime in Canada 2007, July 17, 2008. [↩]
2. The Canadian Press, Crime rate hit 30-year low in 2007, The Toronto Star, April 21, 2009. [↩]
3. Richard Brennan, Furor over campaign funds heats up, The Toronto Star, October 27, 2007. [↩]
4. Scandalpedia.ca, The In and Out Scam. [↩]
5. Peter Zimonjic, Conservative candidates felt betrayed, Northern News, August 2008. [↩]

Louis Politics, Shameful Acts Canada, Conservatism, Government, Parliament, Stephen Harper