Canada and the European Community
Cultural Policy Commonalities & Convergence

 Harry Hillman Chartrand ®
Arts Bulletin, Vol. 15, No. 2, Spring 1991
Canadian Conference of the Arts

A man standing alone and naked in a desert is sovereign.  He cannot be influenced by anyone or any power.  Yet he is impotent.  He is, if you like, in Albania.  Sovereignty means nothing unless it represents the ability to control our destiny.  And in the modern world, that means forming alliances and pooling influence. ¹

Sir Leon Brittain
Competition Commissioner
European Economic Community

Introduction

Since before the Massey-Levesque Report in 1951,² the Canadian arts community has looked longingly across the Atlantic at governments whose commitment to the arts is so great that the box office is not a financial constraint.  Excepting the United Kingdom, European governments typically provide for 80% of the expenses of dance companies, galleries and museums, orchestras and theatres.³  In Canada, by contrast, the performing arts receive on average 30% funding from government at all levels; they earn 50% at the box office; and they rely on private philanthropy for the rest.

Strangely, while governmental largesse has freed European art from 'pandering' to the audience, it has not necessarily resulted in more innovative or varied artistic programming or production.  For example, a study of opera repertoire in Germany showed that despite heavy subsidization the companies receiving funding did not venture beyond the classic operatic canon that is the mainstay of the Metropolitan Opera in New York, which requires 96% seating occupancy to break even on each performance.⁴  This is also supported in other studies.⁵

In the last decade, a new player entered the European cultural policy arena - the European Economic Community (henceforth the European Community, Community, or EC).  Evolution of the European Community's cultural policy exhibits, in my opinion, striking commonalities with that of Canada's, including response to external threat, continuing internal controversy and progressive industrialization of culture.

In this paper, the evolution of Canadian cultural policy is outlined and compared with that of the European Community.  In the process, the paper highlights the pervasiveness of contemporary cultural policy, spanning the arts, broadcasting and communications, education, employment and training, the entertainment industry, fiscal and tax policy, industrial design, intellectual property, language, multiculturalism and regional development.

EVOLUTION OF CANADIAN CULTURAL POLICY

Excepting the Public Archives, National Gallery, National Library and National Museum (all founded in the last century), modern Canadian cultural policy can be said to begin with creation of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation in the 1930s.  Radio started in Canada as a private industry, paralleling similar development in the United States.  While the Canadian National Railway - already in the telegram business - attempted to create a 'Canadian' broadcasting network, by 1925 the Toronto Telegram found that the 17 most popular radio stations were in fact American border stations. Canadians were developing a taste for US programming.⁶

This state of affairs led to passage of the Radio Act in 1927 and creation of the Aird Commission to investigate how radio should be organized and funded.  The Commission reported in 1929 that the Canadian airwaves were a public asset "enabling Canadians to communicate with other Canadians" and "providing a means of articulating and expressing a unique Canadian culture".⁷  The federal government responded by creating a 'mixed' broadcasting system made up of a state-run radio network (the CBC) and private networks subject to public regulation.  While an affirmation of a unique Canadian culture, creation of the CBC was essentially a defensive response to external threat.

Internal controversy accompanied the birth of modern Canadian cultural policy. Federal jurisdiction over broadcasting was challenged by the provinces. Quebec and Ontario even appealed a Supreme Court ruling in favour of federal jurisdiction to the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council of the United Kingdom, which confirmed the Supreme Court's decision.

The next major step in policy evolution was also a defensive response to an external threat.  In this case, the threat was war and the response was creation of the National Film Board in 1939 to promote and maintain Canadian fighting spirit and morale.

The war years witnessed numerous art associations, in all disciplines, in all regions of the country, articulating the Canadian experience in terms politicians and the business community began to understand.  These associations included The Canadian Historical Society, The Canadian Writers Union, The Dominion Drama Festival, The Graphic Arts Society, The Sculptor's Society, and many others. It was this pressure from and lobbying by the artistic community that led to the next major step in the evolution of Canadian cultural policy, the creation of the Canada Council.

In 1951, the Royal Commission on National Development in the Arts, Letters and Sciences, otherwise known as the Massey-Levesque Report, asserted the need for public funding of the arts.  Canadians were being overwhelmed by British and American arts and letters.  There was little domestic production.  The problem was only heightened with the advent of a new medium - television.

The Royal Commission recommended a British arm's length arts council model as that most suitable for Canada.  The Commission rejected direct funding of the arts through a ministry of culture.

Quite apart from the fact that the problems confronting us have little in common with those in other countries, we find that in general they are dealt with abroad by a centralized Ministry of National Education or by a Ministry of Cultural Affairs, arrangements which, of course, in Canada are constitutionally impossible or undesirable .⁸

In the Canadian Confederation many policy fields, including education and health, are the constitutional responsibility of the provinces.  The Commissioners were concerned about federal encroachment on provincial responsibilities, particularly education because of its relation to the arts and culture. The Commission, therefore, drew a distinction between formal and informal education. Formal education was the special domain of the provinces.  The Commissioners, however, saw "no prohibition in Canadian law against any group, governmental or voluntary, contributing to the education of the individual in its broadest sense", including the arts and culture.⁹

In response to the recommendations of the Royal Commission, Parliament, using death duties levied on the estates of two prominent Canadian industrialists - Sir James Dunn and Isaak Walton Killam created the Canada Council for the encouragement of the arts in 1957.  With half of the $100 million endowment, the Canada Council played a role similar to that of the British University Grants Committee, disbursing capital grants to universities.  Where the Canada Council differed from the Arts Council of Great Britain was in the intent to use the remaining endowment for purposes of securing financial independence from government.  In this sense, the Canada Council more closely resembled a United States private foundation.  In fact, the first meeting of the Canada Council, held in the Office of the Prime Minister, included representatives of the Carnegie, Ford and Rockefeller Foundations.¹⁰  Sentiments of the private foundation tradition were echoed by Dorothy Killam who, in 1963, endowed the Canada Council with $8.5 million to create the Killam Program in recognition of her late husband's role in the founding of the Canada Council.¹¹  The Killam Prize has been called 'the Nobel Prize' of Canada. In 1965, through her will, she bequeathed an additional $7 million to the Council. ¹²

For its first eight years, the Canada Council was indeed both politically and financially independent of government.  The activities of the Council were funded from endowment income.  Then in 1965, the Canada Council received an appropriation from Parliament, both in recognition of its success in fostering and promoting the arts and so that it could prepare for the 100th anniversary of the Canadian Confederation in 1967.   For a time, the Canada Council became a 'chosen instrument' of the federal government to encourage artistic activity.  Currently the annual appropriation from Parliament represents some 90% of Canada Council income; the remainder is made up principally of income from the endowment.

Between the early 1960s and the mid 1970s, under the direction of Gerard Pelletier, the federal Department of the Secretary of State became the chief instrument of cultural policy in Canada.  The Department initiated policies based on biculturalism (as a result of the Official Languages Act, making Canada officially bilingual), democratization and decentralization.  Beyond encouraging the National Museums Corporation to expand its activities to include support for museums across the country, federal programs such as Opportunities for Youth, the Company of Young Canadians and Local Initiatives Program dramatically affected artistic and cultural life.  For example, in the early 1970s the Local Initiatives Program provided more funding for theatre companies than did the Canada Council.  With termination of these programs in the mid to late 70s, various literary, media, performing and visual arts organizations then applied for Canada Council support.  A host of new arts organizations had attained professional standards and qualified for Council funding, however, there had been no corresponding increase in the size of disbursements to the Council from Parliament.  This led to a continuing crisis concerning the Council's ability to support small, innovative organizations in emerging disciplines while satisfying the pressing needs of large established organizations.

In the late 70s, the Government transferred responsibility for culture to the Department of Communications.  The policy rationale, while not formally articulated, was industrialization of culture - support for the the so-called cultural industries.  Between 1978 and 1990 the government dramatically increased direct and indirect funding to these industries.  This coincided with a decline in support for the performing arts.  Industrialization of cultural policy was justified as a means of ensuring Canadian cultural content on tv, in motion picture theatres and on the bookshelf.

Through the 50s and 60s, provincial governments created arm's length agencies to support the arts, and in which the governments themselves played a relatively small role.  Both the provinces and their arm's length agencies tended to model their program initiatives after those of the Canada Council.¹³  By the mid 70s,however, the arts support pattern had changed to provincial ministries of culture, funded by lottery revenues, playing a leading role in innovative arts support programs.  The role of arm's length agencies declined, both in dollar terms and in terms of initiating innovative support programs to the arts.¹⁴

By the end of the 1970s, the federal government signed an agreement with the provinces that ended federal involvement in the lottery field in return for an annual payment from the provinces.  These funds were initially used by the federal government to create the Cultural Initiatives Program, which marked the beginning of direct federal grants to the arts in competition with the Canada Council.  Until this time the federal government had restricted its funding to capital grants.  The agreement also marked admission of the federal minister of communications to the conclave of provincial ministers of culture.  This resolved jurisdictional disputes between the two levels of government, at least for a time.

During the 1970s, the government also instituted a number of measures which had the effect of restricting the sale of foreign, i.e. American cultural products.  These included Bill C-58 concerning the deductibility of Canadian advertising in American magazines; special postal subsidies; direct and indirect government investment in Canadian publishers; radio and tv content quotas; tax breaks for certified Canadian tv programs and motion pictures; and a tax (called a garbage tax in Eastern Europe) on U.S. dominated pay tv and cable tv.  This latter tax was used to invest in the production of Canadian tv programming and motion pictures through a Broadcast Development Fund.

In effect, the federal government 'engineered' a. Canadian communications conglomerate consisting of: Telefilm Canada, funded by the special cable television tax and involved in financing tv programming and motion picture production; independent producers, supported by tax expenditures and investments by Telefilm; the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and independent tv networks, both responsible for distribution; and the National Film Board, responsible for process research and development. Unfortunately, the synergy that could reasonably be expected from such a communications conglomerate has yet to be realized.

The trend of the Department of Communications towards industrialization of cultural policy was followed in the late 1980s by changes in copyright protection (including rediffusion rights for broadcasters), proposed legislation concerning the status of the artist and entry of the Federal Business Development Bank into the investment market for cultural products. In 1991 a new Broadcasting Act was passed by Parliament. It eliminated the 'national identity' mandate of the CBC and extended the 'commercialization' of Canadian broadcasting.

The provinces became increasingly involved in supporting the industrialization of culture. Competition among the provinces for film and tv program production included introduction of special tax breaks and programs of grant support.  The result of industrialization of cultural policy was a dramatic increase in Canadian content on tv, at the movie theatre and on the bookshelf. It also led to rising levels of exports to the USA and other foreign markets.  A less desirable result has been declining government support for the live nonprofit arts, which are, in effect, the research and development sector of the commercial arts - they provide new scripts, scores, talent and technique required for the long term international competitiveness of the Canadian entertainment industry.

Two other trends emerged during the 1980s.  The first involved the spread of federal cultural policy beyond the Department of Communications.  In the early 1980s, Employment & Immigration Canada recognized the contribution of the arts to employment and initiated programs of support for training and development.  These programs contribute about $30 million a year to the artistic community.  The Department of Regional Economic Expansion began to include cultural development as part of its Economic and Regional Development Agreements with the provinces.  The Department of External Affairs became more active in supporting the export of Canadian cultural product, particularly after forming the International Cultural Affairs Bureau.  What is now known as the Ministry of Industry, Science and Technology, through Tourism Canada, supported research and promoted the role of culture, including festivals and museums, as tourism resources.  This spreading of cultural policy within the federal government was accompanied by many interdepartmental `turf fights.

The second development was the emergence of multiculturalism as a major element in cultural policy.  While formal responsibility for cultural policy was transferred from the Secretary of State to the Department of Communications in the late 1970s, official languages and multiculturalism remained with the Secretary of State.  The growing importance of multiculturalism, both in political and economic terms, resulted in an investigation by a Parliamentary Committee.  In its 1987 report, the Committee recommended that the commercial arts remain with the Department of Communications, that official languages and higher education remain with the Secretary of State, and that the arts, including the Canada Council, be transferred to a new Ministry of Multiculturalism.¹⁵  The rationale was that Canada had adopted official multiculturalism and, therefore, the minister of culture must be the Minister of Multiculturalism.  The Committee also recommended a dramatic restructuring of agencies, departments, ministries and programs which flowed from this argument. No significant action was taken on these recommendations, other than creation of a Ministry of State for Multiculturalism.

One of the unrealized developments was passage of a new Industrial Design Act. Canada is the largest timber-producing country in the world, but, according to an official of the European Community, Germany is the largest exporter of furniture. Similarly, Sweden's IKEA has successfully combined aesthetic and utilitarian values at affordable prices, and recently opened a 240,000 sq. ft. furniture store in New York City.  European success does not reflect superior wood, but the contribution of design to international competitiveness.