The Arts Are a National Defence Strategy

About This Episode:

In this solo Stageworthy episode, host Phil Rickaby takes a deep dive into the idea of “nation-building” — and why Canada keeps getting it wrong. Sparked by post-election rhetoric around pipelines, railways, housing, and AI infrastructure, Phil argues that these are construction projects, not nation-building ones. True nation-building, he suggests, happens through culture — and specifically through the arts.

Drawing on Canadian history, from the Massey Commission to the creation of the Canada Council for the Arts, Phil traces how arts funding was once understood as a form of national defence — a way of protecting Canadian identity from cultural erasure. He contrasts that history with today’s fixation on GDP, ROI, and “bankable” outcomes, and asks what happens to a country when its soul is treated as discretionary.

This episode is part rant, part cultural history lesson, and part call to action — urging Canada to remember that theatres, music, film, and storytelling don’t just entertain us. They define us.

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Transcript

There’s something that’s been on my mind since, well, since the last federal election here in Canada. And the thing that’s been on my mind is a phrase that was used by the Prime Minister to describe his goals. And he was talking about nation building, nation building projects.

And that was one of the things that he was going to prioritize, the building of the nation. But the kind of projects that the Prime Minister and his cabinet have been talking about, pipelines, railway, housing, AI infrastructure, these are the things that they’ve been talking about as the important things that will build the nation of Canada. And what I find interesting about that is the fact that these are construction projects, not nation building projects.

Nation building projects should bring the country together or reflect the country to help clarify the identity of the nation. And a pipeline isn’t going to do that. A railway, while perhaps convenient, will do that.

Housing, sorely needed, will not do that. And AI infrastructure, it’s not going to do that. These are bankers’ projects, right? These are things that bankers are interested in.

We’re pouring $116 billion into high-speed rail and mines and pipelines and railways, and we’re calling them nation building. I understand why a banker might be interested in these kinds of things. They make good financial sense because you can see where the money is going.

And governments on all levels love that, right? They love to build a subway extension because you can see that, right? You can see that the subway extension got built. You want to build a hospital. You can see the hospital.

The problem is that once that hospital is built, the non-sexy costs have to come into play. You have to pay for the service of the train, right? You have to make sure that the subway is staffed and has adequate service. You have to make sure that the hospital has nurses and doctors and equipment and equipment that needs to be maintained and things like that.

And none of that is the kind of things governments love to do because you can’t point to that. You can’t point and say, we made, look at that. All those employees, we paid for that.

But governments can say, we built that subway. We built that hospital. We built that pipeline.

We built that rail line. Governments love to do it. And here we are, say, I’m in Toronto, and as I’m recording this, there has been a 16-year project to build a new light rail line in Toronto.

And when it’s done, the government’s going to say, we built that. They’re not going to talk about all of the delays and things like that, but they’re going to point at the physical thing and say, we built that. They’re not going to talk about how much it costs to staff it.

They’re not going to talk about how much money they need to annually put in to make sure that our transit system is funded because the TTC is always begging for more money. Toronto Transit Commission, for those not in Toronto, our transit system is always begging for more money from all levels of government to keep people moving. Governments love those kinds of things, but those are not nation-building projects.

They don’t clarify the identity. They don’t celebrate the identity. They don’t bring the together.

Obviously, you know where I’m going to go with this, because this is a theatre podcast. The arts do that. The arts help to clarify the nation.

The arts help to define the national identity. And we have funding for the arts in Canada, but I thought it might be interesting to look at how we got here. And the way that we got here starts with the Massey Commission.

In 1948, Prime Minister Louis St. Laurent commissioned the Massey Commission, chaired by Vincent Massey, that’s the name. And the reason for it was that the Prime Minister at the time was looking at media and the effect that Canada being so close to America was having. The fear was that without some kind of intervention, Canada would become a cultural vacuum without a culture of our own, as far as any of the things that help to build culture.

Like I said, music, theatre, television, dance, film, all of those things. Without that, we would just be constantly taking in U.S. media. And so the Massey Commission was looking at all things that the country could do, that the nation could do, the government could do, to try to figure out how to respond to the American peril, as they referred to at the time.

And one of the things that came out of that was the belief that arts funding was a national defence strategy. That’s the terminology they used. Arts funding is a national defence strategy.

And this led to the Canada Council for the Arts, the National Library, and that cascaded out to help form provincial arts councils, municipal arts councils, and the rest. A lot of people forget that in 1944, at the end of World War II, a lot of artists marched in Ottawa to demand funding for the arts. And that, of course, led to the Massey Commission.

They were demanding that a civilized nation, they said that a civilized nation must invest in its soul to heal from the war. And that was the goal. If we put money into the arts, the nation could heal from the war.

And so, ultimately, all of that culminated in 1967. As we headed into Canada’s centennial, the arts were used to link the country. And that’s when so many of our core theatre companies started to be formed.

We built theatres in the same way that we used to build the railway to link the country. So we saw the arts in that way. And then in the 1990s, we had a debt crisis.

The arts stopped being seen as a defence strategy, as sovereignty, and they began to be seen as discretionary. In that time, we had three prime ministers. We had Brian Mulroney, Kim Campbell, and then we had Jean Chrétien, who took over in 1993.

Jean Chrétien’s focus was in balancing budgets. And so it’s the idea of the arts as discretionary, as a luxury, started there. And we have decades of stagnation in arts funding, as well as the perception of the arts.

I remember back in the Harper days, he used to talk about people in the arts as the elites who just complained about the grants they weren’t getting, as if all the people who were in the arts were somehow rich and just like drinking their wine and expecting money to be thrown at them. And that’s really changed the way that the arts have been perceived. A grim truth, sad truth, is that no level of Canadian government has significantly increased any kind of arts funding for decades.

In 2016, there was a doubling of the council’s budget. But that wasn’t really a big actual influx of money. That was just a one-time correction in funding because there hadn’t been any kind of increase in Canada council funding for 20 years.

And now, after that, we’re back to the stagnation phase. Funding is not keeping pace with inflation. There’s less money to go into making art, building a nation.

There’s less money coming from all the arts councils. The thing that really gets me is that today, no level of government would create an arts council. If the Canada Council for the Arts didn’t exist, if the Ontario Council for the Arts didn’t exist, if the Toronto Council for the Arts or any of the other councils in the provincial or municipal levels didn’t exist now, no government would create them because they can’t point at it and say, we built a subway because it’s more esoteric.

Although, it is in some ways more important. Sure, I mean, having transit is important. Having all of this stuff is important.

But I know I’m preaching to the choir here. But as we know, music and television and movies and theatre, these are things that feed the soul. These are things that help to define what a nation is.

I’ve been thinking about the difference between the way the arts are perceived in Canada and the UK. I didn’t know this, but the arts funding in the UK is funded by the National Lottery. The money doesn’t come from the budget.

It doesn’t come from the taxes. It comes from the National Lottery. And so, the arts don’t compete for money.

They don’t compete with hospital beds with infrastructure for that sort of thing. So, it’s a little easier for arts funding to keep up with inflation, to go where it needs to go. But it’s also interesting because there’s an entirely different attitude about the arts in the UK.

In the UK, the arts are a public service. In the UK, there’s a public right to the arts. That’s how we do it.

It’s a public right. And also, they’ve had a longer history of unbroken production. From Shakespeare and prior all the way to the modern era, they’ve had theatre there.

In Canada, it hasn’t quite been like that. We’ve had some amateur societies. We’ve had some salon shows, little amateur productions in the home.

We’ve had vaudeville theatres and other theatres that have imported shows. But our true production in theatre didn’t really start until the 60s, until the infusion of money from the Councils for the Arts. In Canada, every time the budget is discussed, every time it’s time to talk about money, spend so much time trying to talk to levels of government about how much GDP they generate, what’s the return on investment.

Now, that’s something that the bean counters want to know. The people who are writing the budget, sure, they want to know that. But the fact that arts organizations have to essentially go in every year to their levels of government and justify their existence based on how much money gets generated for every dollar that’s given to them, instead of looking at what they really do, what the arts actually provide, the way that they build nations.

Because governments love to build the whole. They just don’t want to pay for anything else. It’s that hospital analogy.

They want to build the hospital. They don’t want to have to be on the hook for all those pesky nurses, and doctors, and support staff, and equipment, and its maintenance, and all of that. They don’t want that.

They just want to be able to look at the building. And in theatre, because this is a theatre podcast, so let’s bring it back to theatre, we provide a narrative infrastructure. If we want to bring it down to something, a mine in Sudbury provides nickel, and a play provides collective conscience.

A while ago, the Ontario Arts Council released a paper talking about how much GDP was generated by the theatre companies, the arts organizations that were given money. They wanted to show that for every dollar, and this is from the report, every dollar invested by the Ontario Arts Council generates $25 in revenue. $1, $25.

At the time, I was like, why do we always come down to this? Why is this the thing that we’re always having to talk about to justify our existence, to justify the existence in the theatre? Why does it always come back to the beam counting? Because it’s supposed to be so much more. It is so much more. In the UK, the average Londoner doesn’t go to the theatre because it generates GDP.

They go because of what they get out of it. They go because of the feeling they get, the sense of identity. They don’t think about, they don’t look at a production of Shakespeare and think, that was a good return on my tax investment.

They see the Shakespeare play as part of their culture. It is one of the things that makes them, them. And I hate that this is where we’re at.

That this is the kind of thing that we have to do here in Canada and justify our financial existence as artists. Because we need to be doing more culturally than building a railway, than building a pipeline. Because like I said, those things do not, they don’t have anything to do with culture.

They don’t have anything to do with nationhood. Those are construction projects. They don’t clarify or add to the national identity.

You want to build a museum and fill it with great stuff? That would be culture. A national museum, let’s build another national museum. I would be into that.

But also we have a national theatre. We have the NAC in Ottawa. I would love to see more from there.

I would love to see the NAC become like this incubator that sends all of these shows out across Canada. Because Lord knows we need in this country for the plays that we create to have further lives from their premiers. I would love to see a theatre, a center become that.

Maybe even one in each province. A national theatre in each province, building and presenting the work that we create in this country and sending it out for everyone to see. A way to link our provinces together through the arts, creating a national identity.

We’re a big country. There’s a lot of space, not just between cities, but between provinces. It takes a long time to drive across this country.

So many of our theatres and our theatre communities are so separated. They have their own unique identities, their own voices. And that’s not a bad thing.

But imagine if we could share those things. Imagine if we were willing as a country to invest money, to invest in ourselves as a nation, if we only had a leadership that had the courage to do it. But I fear that with a banker at the helm, he’s only looking at the GDP.

He’s only looking at the return on investment that he can see. And he’s not looking at the soul of the country. We need to get back to the arts as civil defence.

We need to get back to the arts as our national defence strategy. We just have to fund it. We just have to be willing to put our souls behind it, to put money behind it so that it can get done.

That’s nation building, not construction, not railroads, pipelines, all that sort of stuff. I long for leadership that would be brave enough to return to the idea that the arts was a national defence strategy. I think it’d be pretty cool.

Anyway, if you’ve watched or listened this long, thank you so much. This has been Stageworthy. I’m Phil Rickaby, the host and producer of the show.

This was a bit of a rant. And I have a lot of things that I want to talk about. And I think I’m going to start releasing these kinds of things every so often, maybe on a Saturday, because I don’t want to take away from the interviews that I’m doing.

Those are the stars of the show, not me. So I might do this sort of stuff on a Saturday. I want to say that if you’re watching on YouTube, please leave a comment, tell me what you think.

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And that’s it for me with this little rant. And I will see you on Tuesday for a new episode, a new interview on stage.