ArtsVote Calgary has updated responses from a considerable number of political candidates on arts policy, and the particular needs of their constituents when it comes to the arts. Find out what your local candidates have to say (click here). So far, responses have come in from:
7 Alberta Party candidates
5 Evergreen Party candidates
13 Liberal Party candidates
10 PC Party candidates
2 Wildrose Party candidates
You can also find responses from Senate candidates here.
This from the Professional Arts Coalition of Edmonton:
Have a heart-to-heart chat with Alberta election candidates about their parties’ visions for arts, culture and heritage in our province.
PACE is organizing an Arts Forum for this Friday, April 20 at 7:30 p.m. in the Jefferson Room at the Prince of Wales Armouries, 10440 – 108 Avenue.
Bring your arts, culture and heritage questions with notebooks and pencils to the Prince of Wales Armouries this Friday. Tell all your professional artist and arts supporters friends to come, too. Let’s impress upon all these candidates how important arts, culture and heritage is to all Albertans.
Party representatives confirmed so far:
For more information, check out the PACE website.
PACE (the Professional Arts Coalition of Edmonton) and ArtsVote are active arts advocacy groups in Edmonton and Calgary respectively.
Recently, ArtsVote collected responses from the various provincial party representatives, querying them about their vision for the arts in Alberta. They asked the following questions:
For those of you who couldn’t be there at the ArtsVote forum in Calgary two weeks ago, it’s well worth having a look at the video from this event.
There were some interesting policy proposals that were put forth, and it was also interesting to see which policies or specific commitments candidates chose to be silent on.
The event was well-attended, and there was a strong media presence. A brief report can be found here, but of course it’s much more informative to watch the entire event.
A few things struck me about the conversation that day:
If you’re an artist in Alberta (read, self-employed with no taxable income), who should you vote for? For a lot of us that would be a no-brainer, in the sense that we just go on voting for whoever we supported the last time, no questions asked, or don’t bother voting at all: “I mean,” we say, “what’s the point?”
But in this coming election, there are actually a number of parties in play who weren’t there the last time we went to the polls. Are any of them worth your artist’s vote? Or the vote of any citizen who believes that artistic production contributes to a community’s sense of well-being?
Forget about Alison Redford’s Tories and the Wildrose: hobbled by an ideological commitment to no new taxes – that heinous scheme to snatch wealth out of the cold, dead hands of their benefactors – and barring a sudden gush of new wealth pried out of the hands of men and women at the slot machines, there will be no new money for the arts in Alberta. Given the foregone revenue of some $55 billion lost to “overly generous royalty cuts” in the oil and gas sector (quoting a Parkland Institute Report), the government can only deepen its addiction to those slots.
The Dippers, though, “get it”: they understand the symbiosis of “arts and culture” and “quality of life,” and the importance of funding the one so that the other may also thrive. They’ve noticed that the main organ for funding artists and arts organizations – the Alberta Foundation for the Arts – has never entrusted decision-making to an arm’s-length agency but kept it exclusively with a Board of patronage appointments. And that the ministry that oversees arts and culture policy carries a double-barreled label that includes “community spirit” in its mandate. This is a common dodge of governments everywhere (even during sainted NDP regimes in Saskatchewan), to hitch to the arts miscellaneous other “soft” responsibilities, from sports to provincial parks to human rights commissions, as though only lumped together are they worth a seat at the cabinet table.
So an NDP government would create a separate Ministry of Arts and Culture, introduce $30 million in new funding (from increased royalty revenues?), allocate 1% of all large capital projects for the commission of public art, and increase or reintroduce a fine arts curriculum into elementary schools. All good ideas. You could safely vote for a Dipper.
The Liberals devote pages to describing their commitment to arts and culture policies and initiatives (I detect the creative hand of Liberal MLA Laurie Blakeman here) and it’s all exciting. “Great art,” they announce, “brings joy, hard questions, understanding and new challenges,” and call for an “Alberta Renaissance.” Re-naissance means re-birth, nicely giving the nod to the generations of preceding creative geniuses in our midst who have helped shape the contours of our self-image as Albertans even while starving in garrets from Medicine Hat to Grande Prairie. Liberals would legislate Status of the Artist provisions for collective bargaining rights for arts professionals, create an Alberta Film and Television tax credit, establish an Alberta Publishers’ Fund, and would “immediately double the budget” of the AFA “and triple funding within three years.” And I particularly like their proposal to set up a $500 million endowment fund for the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities, “parallel to existing endowment funds for medicine, engineering and the sciences.” (In the current intellectual environment, which treats the arts and humanities with contempt, this is refreshing thinking.) However, it is not clear where a Liberal government would look for funds to fuel all this. We can always dream along with them.
The Evergreens seem not to have any arts policy whatever; and the Alberta Party buries their boiler plate policy – “the Alberta Party will work to increase the role of the arts in the economic and social fabric of rural communities” – within their “priority #3, rural communities.” Urban centres, I guess, can take care of themselves.
But here’s the thing: in what I read from these parties, I did not read a single reference to the radical restructuring of our arts “industries,” mainly a result of the new technologies applied to the production and distribution of artistic work. Already we experience the shift from books in bookstores to books from on-line retailers, from gallery exhibits to digital and collaborative visual artworks, from cinema screenings to downloads from the internet, heck, even from traditional film shoots to cellphone movies, and from publishing houses to interactive on-line self-publishing sites. Nary a word about the new copyright legislation that is a direct threat to “creators’” income in favour of “users’” rights. Nor a word of protest against this new cultural ecology that requires artists to be self-promoting hucksters and clowns in a discount marketplace, their own agents and producers and editors, and trying to make a living in a society whose citizens now feel entitled to free stuff anywhere, any time and anyhow.
I don’t expect individual candidates for political office to have global solutions. But perhaps a “package” of left-of-Tory candidates could come up with original ideas for at least the current decade, brain-storming with artists (something we will never get with right wing parties). Check them out at ChangeAlberta.ca.
Myrna Kostash is a fulltime writer based in Edmonton, author of award-winning Prodigal Daughter: A Journey to Byzantium. Her website is:www.myrnakostash.com
ArtsVote Calgary is teaming up with the Calgary Public Library to host a discussion forum between provincial candidates and Calgary’s arts community. Now is an excellent time to talk about how we’d like to work with our government to enhance the arts and culture in this province.
The vent takes place THIS FRIDAY, March 30, at noon, at the central branch of the Calgary Public Library (616 Macleod Tr SE).
It’s going to be a full deck, with representatives from each of the parties. Here’s the full list:
CONFIRMED PARTICIPANTS:
Alberta Party – Kevin Woron
EverGreen Party – William Hamilton
Liberal Party – David Swann
New Democratic Party – Marc Power
Progressive Conservative Party – Sandra Jansen
Social Credit Party – Len Skowronski
Wildrose Alliance Party – Mike Blanchard
The event will be hosted by Russell Bowers, host of CBC’s Daybreak Alberta. Russell did a terrific job of hosting the recent Calgary Poet Laureate showcase, and will no doubt lead a fair and spirited discussion. Speaking of Poet Laureates, newly-minted Calgary Poet Laureate Kris Demeanor will perform, setting the mood for the event.
I’ll be in attendance, and will post a summary of the event afterwards. I really encourage as many of you as possible to come out, and help to make sure that arts and culture policy is on the political agenda.
Here’s the link to the event not the ArtsVote website:
http://artsvotecalgary.ca/artsvote-provincial-election-forum
Well, it’s official. We go back to the polls on April 23rd to vote for our new provincial government. With the PCs facing some nontrivial opposition for the first time in a while, Albertans can expect political candidates to be paying more attention than usual to the mood of voters. And for many Albertans, it’s also an opportunity to spend a bit more time than usual becoming educated about political issues, and carefully evaluating the ideas that prospective leaders will advance in the next few weeks.
For many of us, finding ways to bolster the health of the arts eco-system in Alberta is an important part of the political conversation. If you feel this way, there are a couple of organizations in Alberta that exist for the purpose of advocating for the arts and for making it easier for arts-friendly citizens to connect.
In Edmonton, you can connect with PACE (Professional Arts Coalition of Edmonton). Calgary has its own advocacy group called ArtsVote Calgary, an organization that was quite active in the last municipal election. Both PACE and ArtsVote have in the past held town halls and gathered responses from political candidates with a special emphasis on policies pertaining to the arts and culture—in fact, ArtsVote has already begun to gather and make public candidates’ responses to arts-related policy questions. There are plenty of opportunities to become active in both groups as the provincial election heats up.
I’ll be keeping an eye on the websites of these organizations, and will pass on regular updates. If you become aware of any arts-relevant political events, discussions or articles that you think readers of this blog would be interested in, please pass them on, and I’ll do my best to disseminate the information (you can email me at jusedivy@gmail.com).
I’d also appreciate hearing about any other arts advocacy groups that might exist in regions other than Edmonton or Calgary.
Stay tuned…
