Christine Tell wants to hear from you-and soon. The Minister of Tourism, Parks, Culture, and Sport released a report called "Reflections: A Summary of 30 Years of Cultural Discussions in Saskatchewan." Her ministry has posted the report online and invites citizens to fill out a response survey by August 22. Let's hope concerned taxpayers step up to the plate to bat away the sales pitches of arts advocates. Otherwise, the province could pump plenty more tax dollars to a dubious cause.
Tell says she wants "a strategy which begins to move arts, culture and heritage sectors from the margins of government to the centre." But is this good?
People don't need government to give them a culture. Citizens buy art, watch films and television, dance, and celebrate traditions all on their own, with or without the government's help. When the state steps in to throw dollars at cultural goals or artistic industries, a Pandora's box is opened for taxpayers.
Why? Because the artistic community wants public dollars, yet insists it's really not about the money. They say the value of art can't be defined in monetary terms, but instead by the intrinsic richness it brings to a community, and other such intangibles. Stripped of any way to quantify the value of their "investment," governments dish out increasingly more to an artistic lobby that is never satisfied.
Our province goes even further by actually funding organizations that don't produce art, but lobby for money instead. The Saskatchewan Arts Alliance gets public dollars via the Saskatchewan Arts Board and SaskCulture. One role of this non-profit coalition of arts organizations is "advocating healthy levels of public and private support."
The alliance has succeeded. Saskatchewan's municipal and provincial funding for the arts is respectively second and third highest in Canada. In 2003-04, all levels of government combined spent $206 million on arts and culture in Saskatchewan. (The highways budget was $293 million that year). Just last fall, the province doubled its contribution to the arts board to $11 million.
For what cause, exactly, no one can say. Comments in the Ministry's "Reflections" document prove just how contradictory cultural goals can be. In one place it's to "offer some protection against the overwhelming impact of imported culture." Elsewhere, it's to emphasize "the importance of multiculturalism in our society." Yet, in the next breath, the goal is to create "active communities that are inclusive of all races, sexualities, backgrounds, and lifestyles."
Is it the role of government to subsidize the entrenchment of cultural differences and eliminate disdain for any kind of sexuality or lifestyle? That sounds more like government imposing culture than promoting it.
Strip away this list of irreconcilable and contradictory goals of cultural policy, and something different appears. It's subsidized political correctness in the name of "the public good." It's governments giving in to lobbyists, who, if they were more honest, would say, "Give us money to produce things that people wouldn't buy, and advance agendas they wouldn't support, to give you votes you otherwise wouldn't get."
Yes, the provincial government could make progress by streamlining the overlapping, unpredictable and inefficient means by which public dollars get to artists. But it would be even better to see lotteries, and not tax dollars, become the sole means for artistic funding. After all, people play lotteries for the money, but tell themselves it's for the public good. It's the perfect match for arts subsidy beggars who do the same.
