If you haven’t heard the buzz, the BC Liberals have sucked all the money out of arts and culture, cut education and social services, while making taxpayers pay for leaky Olympics athlete’s condos (where we can never afford to live even with the mould that will grow because of deficient construction) among other Olympic expenditures (900 million worth!).
Below is a circulating letter by Donato Mancini to the Liberals. Feel free to pass on.
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Honourable Gordon Campbell
Honourable Kevin Krueger
The Liberal government’s recent announcement of extreme cuts to the provincial arts and culture budget is a test of BC public sentiment. That test, if designed show that arts are considered an expendable luxury, has failed. As each day passes, it becomes clearer that BC voters consider public arts funding a vital part of our social infrastructure.
It is not necessary for me to rehearse the sound economic logic of public arts funding, since your government repeatedly justifies its policies on fiscal grounds. We know, from your own studies, every dollar invested in arts produces at least $1.36; a solid return from any perspective, even before we factor in lucrative spin-offs in stimulating commercial activity. If your policies were honestly grounded in financial logic, as you repeatedly claim, we should expect your decisions to be based on that logic. Instead, we find evidence to the contrary both in the announcement of cuts and in the opportunistic shift of fiscal rationale to a more vulnerable site.
To say it bluntly: your transparently false claims of budgetary competition between essential social services and the arts are morally appalling. Your rhetorical aim is apparently to aggravate the very wounds opened by your own government’s cuts to essential services and to use that aggravation to stir animosities that are to your advantage in realising a cultural agenda. It is reassuring that so far the BC public has been unmoved by this blatantly manipulative strategy.
We hope the public will see instead that the real competition is with the dramatically over-budget Winter Olympics. Go no further than quoting grotesquely disproportionate figures: $900 million to be spent on Olympics security versus the $47.8 million budgeted for the arts in 2008. The Winter Olympics will mortgage Vancouver for a generation. Social services and publicly-funded arts and culture create no such debts, but rather help alleviate entrenched social problems, beautify the province and distinguish Canada internationally. If your policies were in fact motivated by financial reasoning you would increase public arts spending.
Like all BC cultural workers, I am sincerely grateful for the support the BC government has provided our activities in the past. That gratitude is, however, always symbiotic with a robust confidence in the social importance of arts and culture. Our extreme hard work attests to both. Let it be noted that the workweek of the typical cultural worker averages above 60 hours, time spent creating, promoting, consuming and facilitating culture in BC. We are devoted, productive members of society who take our civic responsibilities seriously. In that capacity, we are justly angry when the government makes policy decisions clearly against the long-term interests of residents of this province.
No cogent argument, fiscal or cultural, can be made for reducing public arts funding. Any policy other than of generous, arms-length arts funding demonstrates disregard of economic facts, contempt for public opinion and hostile indifference to the province’s long-term well-being.
Speaking, I hope, for many cultural workers across BC, I ask you to abandon these destructive plans. Restore public arts funding permanently.
Sincerely,
Donato Mancini
