Candidate on hot seat over arts funding

Photo by Vince Fedoroff

Cuts by Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s government to federal arts and culture funding, amounting to $40.4 million, have provoked outcry amongst the nation’s artists and prompted last evening’s one-issue all-candidates’ forum in Whitehorse.

More than 120 people filled the Old Fire Hall and heard the Yukon’s four candidates in the Oct. 14 federal election talk about how important arts, culture and heritage are to society at large, and to the territory’s own thriving artistic community.

“People don’t go to Rome to see the bones of old politicians, they don’t go to Greece to find out who were the generals in the Peloponnesian war,” declared the NDP’s Ken Bolton in perhaps the most eloquent description of that importance.

“They go to those places because of the vibrant cultures that those countries have given and shared with the world.”

While Bolton, the Conservatives’ Darrell Pasloski, the Green Party’s John Streicker and Liberal incumbent Larry Bagnell all declared their support for the arts, the devil was in the details.

Those details included what was cut compared with overall federal spending on arts and culture (which has increased to $2.3 billion for 2008/2009 from $2.1 billion in 2005/2006), and whether politicians should be able to withhold funding to film projects if those projects were “contrary to public policy.”

On the former detail, Streicker, Bolton and Bagnell heaped varying degrees of scorn on the cuts before vowing to reinstate the funding.

Pasloski focused attention to the overall increase in federal arts and culture funding since the Conservatives won their minority government in January 2006.

But it was the latter detail that caused the greatest variance of opinion between Pasloski and the other candidates.

When the Harper government attempted to amend the Income Tax Act with Bill C-10 earlier this year, it attached a provision that would give the Culture minister the power to veto film tax credits to projects he or she deemed “contrary to public policy.”

While the bill died on the Senate floor when the election was called, the criticism it unleashed from players in Canada’s film industry, who likened the provision to state-sponsored censorship, was matched at the forum by Streicker, Bagnell and Bolton.

However, Pasloski defended the ministerial veto for the film tax credits.

“This bill is about ensuring that taxpayers’ money is not used to finance material that is pornographic, excessively violent or denigrating to identifiable groups,” said Pasloski.

“This is only used to guarantee that our tax dollars are not used to finance child pornography or movies about serial killers like Paul Bernardo and Karla Holmolka.”

Pasloski went on to suggest that if voters do not agree with how a minister exercised that power, they could express that at the polls.

“People have a right to assess (the minister) ... and would have a chance to re-evaluate that person’s performance,” he said.

Bolton, who several times prefaced his remarks with, “I’m having a hard time being polite,” chastised Pasloski’s position on Bill C-10.

“So what I just heard is that basically we’re only going to fund films as long as they’re made by Disney,” said Bolton, who likened the move to opening a Pandora’s Box of state censorship. “Darrell, once you open that door, it’s opened wide ... don’t even go there.”

Bagnell also decried the provision for a ministerial veto on film credits, suggesting it could sink projects before they got off the ground.

“It not only suppresses artistic freedom but jeopardizes the bank funding for those films,” he said.

Streicker insisted that the funding merits of any artistic endeavour be evaluated by peers, not elected officials.