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1. What role do the arts play in your life?
The Arts play an active role in my life. I work as the Assistant
Museum Administrator for the Textile Museum of Canada which
allows me to view and participate in many artistic and cultural
programs. It expands my worldview, tests my sensibilities,
and allows me to better understand others.
2. What role do the arts play in keeping people healthy?
It exercises the mind; allows for people the express their
emotions, and address their concerns in a constructive medium.
Medical thinking today is mostly about finding the links between
the immune system, the nervous system and senses, and brain.
The ancient Greeks believed in this correlation, so did the
Arabs. The island of Damascus during the early Middle Arts
had theatres devoted to healing minds troubled by the stresses
that society had placed upon them. The real question here
is “can we actually be healthy without art?”
3. Why is it important that Toronto have a healthy arts
sector?
As stated in my answers to your previous questions, art is
a key factor to an individual’s health. Economist Richard
Florida has three well-regarded measures of the health of
cities: the "Bohemian Index" tries to directly measure
arts activity; the "Gay Index", is highly correlated
to a lively arts sector. What Dr. Florida calls the "creative
class" includes all of the obvious arts activity, but
also those doing art as a secondary or subtle activity as
part of other work (like architecture or gardening) and technical
work that involves high creativity like all forms of scientific
research or software development. [** For more information
regarding the Florida study, please check out: http://www.americancity.org/Archives/Issue5/florida.html
**] Study after study shows that these industries simply do
not thrive without high quality of life that is impossible
to achieve in a city without healthy arts, and, more importantly,
the work itself benefits from exposure to many creative people.
World-class arts cities like Toronto, New York, Paris support
their artists in various obvious ways, but also various subtle
ways.
Artists create social networks in places like coffee houses,
in public parks that are music-tolerant, dives full of musicians
ready to jam, and on the sidewalks and rooftops. If people
visit the city and they feel welcome and engaged, then, we
attract more expressive talent, more individual human capital,
and Toronto remains a great place to live – and invest.
Do you want to live near strip malls, or lively downtowns
with more ideas, more venues, more ways to form links and
connections with others? Cities need art. Without art, cities
choke and literally die.
4. Does your party believe that Canadian content and
ownership should be protected in our broadcasting industry?
We'd like to expand the diversity of art that is publicly
supported with more creative independent TV and radio broadcasts,
more cooperation between the public broadcaster (CBC/RadioCanada)
and community groups, the opening of UHF channels, and above
all, availability in many more languages: in Toronto there
are a hundred languages, forty religions, and very little
of that diversity is reflected in what actually gets to the
air. Flipping through channels in Toronto should look a lot
more what's on its streets.
Broadcasting to many small players, who might broadcast to
no more than a few neighbourhoods, who treat television a
bit more like the Internet and exploit online content distribution
(rather like http://zed.cbc.ca
) is the model for the future.
There are dozens of unused UHF channels and millions of TVs
ready to receive them. Why are they unused, is it because
of obsolete regulations and vested interests? The Greens view
cultural diversity as the best way to protect biological diversity,
and would like more chaos in the game. If we don't plan for
it, we'll just get it anyway, via technology. And if we plan
for it, then, the artists who do the work will benefit much
more clearly than if we let analog media fade in favour of
the net.
5. Our artists help make our society prosperous, yet
many of them work and live in relative poverty. How can the
Federal Government assist in returning some of that prosperity
to our artists?
We recognize that artists give up a lot to pursue their work.
Greens will remove all income tax from artists or anyone else
living below the poverty line. Greens guarantee basic housing
and plain healthy food as social and economic rights, which
Canada signed a treaty to protect in 1976 but has never implemented.
What is our word worth or our intervention diplomatically,
if we don't treat our word on such matters as sacred?
True social and economic rights protection frees many people
to do art without fear, but, we'd go further: The Green Party
would propose to the House of Commons that we adopt a tax
policy like Ireland's for artists: no income tax. Tax should
be on consumptions, not on creative incomes.
We'd start though by covering basic dental and drug expenses
for artists - many promising people are forced out of these
professions for fear of not being able to keep their teeth
in shape, or deal with an illness that requires expensive
treatments. And no one wants to look at a dancer with bad
teeth. Also, gym membership, exercise-specific gear, and healthy
organic food supplements would all be untaxed by Green government.
Perhaps the biggest issue is the waste of time involved in
dealing with government - we'd reduce the paperwork load on
artists to basically zero, and put at least a thousand more
dollars per year in the average pocket of the fulltime professional,
while covering their most basic expenses.
6. Do you support federal investment in Canada’s
arts sector?
a. Does investment in the arts produce a health dividend?
An educational dividend? A public safety dividend?
Investment in the arts produces a health dividend, an educational
dividend, and a public safety dividend. Consider the payoff
we get when we invest in the arts:
Health costs are reduced when people seek artistic collaboration
or just to be part of an audience to feel involved and connected,
rather than going to their doctors to get sympathy (which
is surprisingly common). Rather than committing crimes. Rather
than turning to drugs or sexual habits that kill or spread
disease. Art is a critical form of therapy.
Education costs are reduced when people learn and more quickly
find what interests them via entertainment. How many people
learn most or all of their history from movies? And what works
of art, like Uncle Tom's Cabin, have changed society and raised
consciousness?
And think about the vocabulary you can develop watching Shakespeare
or Marlowe- let alone acting in it. Culture knits education
into every gesture and conversation, when it's done right.
Classroom education is also very often a bad play - what it
if could be a more exciting play and if it could involve students
more directly in acting out the history? Civic life would
benefit - and that's why we FUND public education, to make
better citizens. Actors and choreographers have a place in
our schools - let children see that an artistic life *is*
an option.
Public safety is obviously improved with more eyes on the
street later at night. Would you rather be on a well-lit main
drag at midnight with hundreds of people around, dozens of
whom are employed on that street and lose their livelihood
if the street becomes unsafe? Or on some deserted suburban
wasteland street? It's obvious. When people have a unique
advantage from living in a community, and art is about just
that uniqueness, they defend that community, and they defend
it ferociously.
b. If elected, would you vote to increase funding to
the arts sector through The Canada Council? Through Department
of Canadian Heritage?
The Canada Council is a good program, but it would be easier
to fund if it had clear objectives in terms of social capital,
individual talent (or "individual capital"), instructional
capital like techniques and courses, that were expected to
emerge from its investments in the arts. These would provide
at least a way to answer "what value is created",
without trying to reduce it to financial terms (which would
be futile).
A third Council should be set up strictly for projects that
exploit the linkage between cultural and biological diversity.
In this category we can include arts-focused funding for First
Nations language preservation and arts that are "close
to the land", like landscape gardening and the preservation
of unique species or heritage genomes. The long slow arts
that lead to "Slow Food" and unique food cultures
are critical to us all.
c. Do you support provision of stable, adequate, multi-year
arts funding?
Secure funding of these programs across many administrations
is required to ensure the arts they support survive; that
will not be achieved if a single Auditor-General's report
can bring the whole thing crashing down:
So accounting and accountability is actually key to keeping
federal funds flowing into the arts - once implemented, value
reporting standards are hard to change, and a hostile administration
in Ottawa would find it too much bother to challenge and change
a good system of identifying capital assets and intangibles
in the arts.
Consider Walkerton: the NDP hired a thousand water inspectors,
and the Conservatives laid them off. Neither put clear standards
for testing and quality in place, they simply changed the
number of eyes on water without considering the protocol or
chain of custody of the results. Had the NDP put some clear
standards like ISO 14000 in place, it would have been much
more difficult, maybe impossible, for the Conservatives to
rescind. Likewise, clear standards for reporting on "what
we get out of the arts," are the key to keeping public
support for funding.
It may even be valid to have the Auditor-General report on
these matters, so that s/he can say clearly "Canada got
value for money out of its arts investments: health and well-being
increased, and street crime was reduced, and many youth were
distracted and load on the health care system and police were
reduced. Dollar for dollar, it's hard to find a better way
to spend money." How difficult would it be to cut arts
funding after several years of such reports?
Greens will make such funding invincible, by making it defensible
to a point that is rational. We can talk about numbers of
copyrighted original creative works, for instance, or number
of live events (paid or not) or even number of audience-hours
which were watching or number of participant-hours. We will
not try to reduce the art itself to just numbers, but, there
are things we can do to account for its human impact.
Additional Comments
In closing, how do you know Green Party of Canada will keep
these promises? The answer - Greens are the only party that
view creativity, not imitation, as the most basic aspect of
life. It is nature's creativity that makes this planet such
a wonder to live on. It is human creativity that makes it
possible to live well with less. While the NDP focus on "workers"
and "families" is admirable, it is not essential
to their program that everyone live a creative life. While
the Conservatives are right that entrepreneurship is essential
to a healthy arts sector, not to mention sane copyright laws
and licensing enforcement, it is of no concern to them if
artists starve and die in a garret. While the Liberals have
done much to create the vision of some common multicultural
"mosaic", that's done now, we all accept that our
diversity is our strength. But what next? We're all watching
people of diverse skills and strengths in arts, sport, even
politics. But we're still *spectators*, too often - we are
not yet *creating* our world:
Greens say what comes next is what Glenn Gould said would
come next: "In a perfect world, art would be unnecessary.
The audience would be the artist, and their life would be
art." The citizen, too, is an artist, and we welcome
you to join our play: the Green Party. I urge you to visit
our website: www.greenparty.ca and read the party’s
platform. Participate in the electoral process, in community
development, and in your nation. Create with us a new work:
Canada. |
