Saving Ontario’s backbone means more than bailing out cars
By Andrew Cash

The hate-on for artists and cultural workers as whining pigs at the public trough is alive and well across Tory land.

The latest round of this particular blood sport occurred in the last few weeks, when the feds forced a crisis on the CBC by withholding bridge funding, necessitating the cutting of 800 broadcasting jobs.

The provincial Liberals, it’s true, have a more civilized take on the creative class, but they weren’t exactly going all out for culture in last week’s budget either. McGuintyites handed over 20 mil to the Ontario Media Development Corp, $77 mil to film and TV in tax credits and $17 mil per year in tax support for interactive digital media products.

Still, compared to the gnashing of teeth over the decline of manufacturing, forestry and steel and the consequent $26 bil increase in new provincial infrastructure spending, arts and culture seem like bit players. Building cars, making steel, chopping trees – now, that’s where the big boys play; that’s the economic backbone of the country, isn’t it?

A few vertebrae, sure, but it ain’t the whole spine.

With the auto collapse and desperate infrastructure spending grabbing all the ink and most of the cash, it’s easy to forget what the Conference Board of Canada told us last year. The punchline of its report Valuing Culture: Measuring And Understanding Canada’s Creative Economy was that arts and culture and all of their spinoff industries were worth $84 billion of Canada’s gross domestic product (GDP) in 2007, or just over 7 per cent.

The arts and culture sector, it turns out, is bigger in Ontario than agriculture, forestry, fishing, mining, oil and gas and the utilities sectors – combined! More people work in arts and culture than directly in auto. With every dollar of public investment in the arts netting governments $1.84, it sounds like a pretty safe bet, especially compared to the teetering car business.

Bit of a mind bender, isn’t it?

“Like many, I had this ‘starving artist’ view of the arts,” says Conference Board of Canada senior economist Joseph Haimowitz. “But when I drilled into the data it was a different story. The ancillary jobs created in the sector are much higher-paying.”

Take the example of a book. There are, of course, the writer, editor and publisher, but then there are the paper, ink and glue industries, transportation and delivery systems, advertising and bookstores, etc. “This is a very big, broadly based industry, and we need to think about the creative economy more broadly,” says Haimowitz.

While comparisons with the struggling auto sector are tricky – auto accounted for about 3.7 per cent of Ontario’s GDP in 08 but accounts for a large chunk of our exports – you get the picture: whining parasites artists are not. They are at the core of a huge economic sector.

So is it getting the stimulus attention it deserves?

“I scream at some of the money thrown around in the name of stimulus,” says arts policy consultant Garry Neil. “The money in the provincial budget is to be welcomed, but much of it is for cultural industries, not artists directly.”

While the sector is huge, most of the 140,000 artists at its heart live well below the poverty line. “We need to get serious about the artists themselves, many of whom are working poor,” says Pam Frache, education director of the Ontario Federation of Labour.

And while ACTRA honcho Brian Topp thinks the Liberals made some smart cultural investments in this budget, he speaks starkly about what still hasn’t been done. “Artists are under-compensated, they have fewer rights and benefits, no access to EI, no pension and no access to mid-career training and transition.”

Many of the policies that determine things like income security and workplace training were written in the 50s and 60s and did not anticipate an economy of freelancers, he says.

So do the Libs get it?

“We are well aware of the value of this sector,’’ says Sarah Petrevan, a rep for Culture Minister Aileen Carroll. Indeed, well before commissioning Richard Florida and Roger Martin to study the creative economy, the Libs sponsored a 2006 report that made several key proposals: tax measures that would allow artists to spread income over several years, making grants to artists tax-free, creating tax credits on the purchase of art; collective bargaining; career training; access to employment insurance and maternity leave; affordable live/work space and more funding for the Ontario Arts Council.

Bold stuff, but – surprise! – most of the recommendations were ignored in the Libs’ 2007 Status Of The Artist Act. Still, Petrevan promises, “Ontarians are going to see a number of new initiatives for arts and culture rolled out over the next few months.”

We’ll be waiting.

news@nowtoronto.com

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 2nd, 2009 at 2:06 pm and is filed under All Blog Posts, Environment, General, Now Magazine. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.