Podcast

Solo: Funding cuts and the future of theatre in Canada

About This Episode:
In a solo episode of Stageworthy, host and producer Phil Rickaby discusses the looming threat to Canadian theatre and arts due to government funding cuts. He reflects on the recent mandate that all government departments, including the Canada Council for the Arts, must find 15% in savings, which will result in significant cuts to arts programs. Phil explores why the arts in Canada are so vulnerable to these cuts, citing a long-standing public perception that they are not essential or relevant to the average Canadian. He poses critical questions about the future of theatre in Canada, including what companies will do to survive and how the arts community can better articulate its value to the public and to the government.

This episode explores:

  • The significant impact of a mandated 15% cut to the Canada Council for the Arts.
  • The challenge of public perception that the arts are for “elites” and are not relevant to most Canadians.
  • The historical context of Canadian-made content being seen as inferior to that of the US or UK.
  • The importance of the arts in defining Canadian identity and what it means to be a nation.

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Transcript

Hello, welcome to Stageworthy. I’m Phil Rickaby, the host and producer of this podcast. If you’re watching on YouTube, I would really love it if you would like this episode, leave a comment if you have thoughts about what I’m going to talk about today.

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And that’ll all be available to you for just $2 Canadian a month. Just go to patreon.com /stageworthy and become a patron of this podcast. Today it’s just me.

So I’m going to have a bit of a solo episode. So there’s something that’s coming and I think we’re aware of it. I don’t know how much we’re prepared for it.

As was announced in the spring or early in the summer, the prime minister decreed that every department would have to find savings of 15%. That means cuts to programs of 15%. And that’s going to hurt a lot of programs, but some of the ones that it’s going to hurt the most are the arts funding, because the Canada Council for the Arts is also going to have to find 15% cuts at a time when we’re already seeing lower levels of support from the from the councils, whether it’s Canada Council.

I’m hearing all the time how there’s less funding available. So 15% cut is going to be a pretty big deal. And I wonder what the plan is for that.

Because the other levels of government are not just going to suddenly step up, they’re not going to increase their funding. Sadly, in this country, nobody ever increases funding for the arts, or if they do, it’s only once in a while. And then we never go back to the funding that we used to have.

So the question becomes, what are the theatre companies that rely on government funding going to do? And that is almost every theatre company in this country that is not a commercial theatre company and of commercial theatre companies. That’s basically in Toronto, Mervis Productions. And there might be a couple of other ones across Canada that I don’t know about.

But every other theatre company is relying on government funding, operational funding, project funding, whatever it might be. And so the cuts that we are going to see this fall are going to have a massive impact on all of that. So the fact that we’re going to see funding impact us is a big deal.

And I think it’s going to fundamentally it’s either going to change a lot about the way that that we look at funding in this country and how we fund the theatre and the arts that we present, or theatre companies are going to close. And I don’t want I don’t want that. I know you don’t want that.

I’ve seen a bunch of calls for people to contact their MPs and make their voices heard. And that is absolutely important. It is important to show that we are engaged that we have something to say about this.

But the real problem is that that decision has already been made. It’s been mandated. And I don’t think we’re going to stop it.

So what does that mean? Why is this happening? And I think one of the reasons why this is happening is because the arts in Canada have never really been particularly successful at explaining our worth. I remember back during the Stephen Harper years, him complaining about the elite artists complaining about their funding and things like that. And that is not an uncommon way of seeing the arts in Canada, that it is something for the elites and something that is not particularly relevant to the average Canadian.

And that is a massive problem for us. And I wonder about how we let it get to this point. Like, how did we get to the point where for most of the country, I would say maybe Quebec is a little bit exempt from this, but the rest of English Canada certainly falls victim to this.

This idea that the arts are not necessary, they don’t really give us anything that we need, they’re just, they’re frivolous expenses, or something that the just the elites need or are interested in. And I look at how we talk about the arts. And I think that sometimes we talk about the arts to the public in the same way that we talk about the arts to the funding bodies.

And sometimes we will do that. And we’ll talk about we’ll use words and phrases that aren’t particularly meaningful to the average person. They might be meaningful to the granting body, the granting body might be interested in the meaning behind what you’re doing, what is the raison d’etre, things like that.

The audience just wants to know if it’s cool. They want to know are they going to have a good time? Are they going to come away thinking about it? Is it something they’re going to basically enjoy? But we also have a serious problem just in the way that we talk about the worth of the arts. Recently, the Ontario Arts Council put out a document talking about the importance of the arts, and it was entirely about how much revenue the arts can bring in.

And while that can be an important thing to look at, it is certainly not really where the value of the arts are. Because we can talk about revenue, but revenue isn’t everything. We are a country that defines itself by not being something.

If you ask the average Canadian what it means to be Canadian, they’re probably going to tell you we’re not American, and that is the definition. And that is supposed to be the role that the arts takes. The arts help to define who we are as a nation, as a country, as a people.

And by not taking that on and not creating arts that I guess that the general public can relate to, we’ve made it seem like we’re not relevant. And that couldn’t be further from the truth. I mean, here we are.

We have a prime minister who’s talking about nation-building projects. But when he’s talking about nation-building projects, he’s talking about pipelines and trade and not about things that are actually going to build the nation, like stories that define what it means to be Canadian, like stories about Canadians. These are the things that we should be doing.

These are the things that the government should be supporting. But that’s not what’s happening. And that isn’t what has been happening for a very long time.

We also have that thing that we have to combat as Canadians, which is the idea that whatever it is that we are making is inferior to whatever is being produced in the US or the UK or elsewhere in the world, that we don’t see things as successful until they are successful in those places. Again, that’s a problem. But that comes out of the fact that for a long time, a lot of the work that was produced, say, for example, on television.

I mean, I can remember growing up and TV shows that were made in Canada, you just understood that they were on because they were on. If we weren’t going to watch the American channels, we were going to watch the Canadian channels. And that was like the CBC or CTV.

And they were producing game shows where the prize was the Encyclopedia Britannica. Not particularly exciting. They were producing TV shows like The Beachcombers.

And believe me, The Beachcombers is a legendary show, but it’s all that was on. It wasn’t interesting. I remember watching it, but I was bored.

You had shows like The King of Kensington or The Trouble with Tracy that were purportedly sitcoms, but they were not funny. And when we look at that kind of work and we’re comparing that with what was on the US television was broadcast to us at the time, we can’t help but see that as inferior because it was not a great product. It wasn’t something that the organizations that were producing it were putting a lot of effort into.

They were doing it because they had to, not because they wanted to. So here we are now, years later, and the perception still is that the work that is produced here is not as good as the work that comes from the US or from the UK. And that’s probably another topic, but it does contribute to the idea that the work that we do is not important, is not relevant to the average Canadian.

And so here we are, staring down the barrel of cuts that are going to have a massive impact on the theatres and the art galleries and all of the things that are funded by the Canada Council for the Arts. And I don’t know what the plan is. I don’t know what the theatre companies are going to do.

I’m sure that we’re going to be seeing more calls for more funding from donors, but there’s only so much that that can replace. The Canadian government has been the biggest funder of the arts since the 1960s and 70s. And so this means that by taking away that funding, I don’t know that we will find a replacement for that funding.

And so I become a little bit frightened about what that means for some of the companies that are working in Canada. What does that mean that we are going to lose theatre companies? Does that mean we’re going to lose artists? What does it mean? I don’t know what the answer is yet, because we haven’t seen those cuts, but they are coming. And so I wonder what the plan is.

I wonder what’s going to be done. How are we going to find a way to replace the funds that are going to disappear? Are we going to rely more on the audiences? Is the audience’s participation in the work going to become more important than it ever has been before? Are we going to work to find new audiences to bring them into the theatres? Or are we just going to wait for the winds to change and the funding to go back up? Are we going to be passive or are we going to be active? These are questions that time will tell, but I really worry about what this all means. And I would encourage everybody, if you’re wondering what you could do, to absolutely write to your MP, to absolutely write to the Prime Minister and just understand that this is going to happen.

They’re already working on this, haven’t announced it. So we’re going to lose these sources of funding. But you should absolutely voice your dissent at that.

And in the meantime, we need to be looking for other ways to pick up the slack, to find other ways to create the work and to find ways to make sure that that work has meaning and that work does build the nation. Because that is something that we’ve allowed corporations to define Canada. We’ve allowed America to define what we are by, we don’t want to be that.

But we have not come to a state of this is what it means to be Canadian. And so this is a bit of a ramble, but I think we have important things to think about. It is important that we look at what the future of arts funding in Canada is going to look like, what the future of the arts is going to look like, what theatres are going to look like and what they’re going to do to fight against the loss of funding that we’re staring at.

And I guess the question that I have, and the question that I have for you is, what do you think is going to happen? What do you think we should do? I’m really curious. So if you’re watching on YouTube, tell me in the comments. If you’re listening to the audio version, there’s a link to this episode in the show notes in your favourite podcast app, or just go to the website and leave me a comment on the website.

Because I’m curious about your thoughts, because I don’t know the answer. I wish I did know the answer. But we’re going to have to find out where it’s going to happen, probably faster than we wanted to.

I didn’t want that to be a downer of an episode. So make sure you turn in next time, when my guest will be Chelsea Woolley, who is the playwright of Enormity, Girl and the Earthquake in Her Lungs at Nightwood Theatre. I’m sure it’ll be a lot more, a lot lighter this particular episode.

We’ll see on the next episode of Stageworthy.