Conservative Party

Jurij Klufas

Green Party

Neil Spiegel

voteneil@spiegel.ca
Website
416-533-2030

1. What role do the arts play in your life?
My wife Ann is a documentary film maker and I have pitched films with her. For her arts are a fundamental part of her life. Both documentary film and the poetry and writing that she does. For myself I have had a lot of fun developing a film idea with her that we hope to make over the coming year. I also have interests in Guitar and have historically been interested in drawing, mostly life drawing.

2. What role do the arts play in keeping people healthy?
Art is everything that we do that has value to us beyond pure survival or economic life. It is in essence what we do with our lives. I personally define Art quite broadly and think of it as a component of everyone’s lives. A better question would be: Can we be healthy or happy without art?

3. Why is it important that Toronto have a healthy arts sector?
People are attracted to places with good arts scenes. It fills their lives up. If we want to attract creative people in the business sector, good city planners, great chefs, doctors, lawyers, tailors, candlestick makers, we need to have a thriving arts scene. Why do you think San Francisco was the home of the dot com explosion? It was because the city had a vibrancy that attracted artists and creative business people.

4. Does your party believe that Canadian content and ownership should be protected in our broadcasting industry?
Yes, but, the Green Party has no illusions about the modern media world and corporate globalization. What good are "Canadian ownership" rules that empower crooks living in London, England, who just happen to hold Canadian citizenship? What good are "Canadian content" rules that don't apply to the Internet? These rules are in need of some serious reform.

We'd like to expand the diversity of Canadian content, not just force people to watch it: more creative independent TV and radio broadcasts, more cooperation between the public broadcaster (CBC/RadioCanada) and community groups, and above all, availability in many more languages: in Toronto, even just in Scarborough, we Canadians have a hundred languages, forty religions, and very little of that diversity is reflected in what actually gets to the air.

The best way to protect Canadian ownership and content is to open up broadcasting to many small players, who might broadcast to no more than a few neighbourhoods, to treat television a bit more like the Internet. There are dozens of unused UHF channels and millions of TVs ready to receive them. Why are they unused? 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.

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?
Remove all income tax from artists or anyone else living below the poverty line. 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.
Move arts funding down from large scale projects to community based projects.
Consider revamping charges for for-profit broadcast rights as a use of stable funding for the arts.

6. Do you support federal investment in Canada's arts sector?
Yes. Strengthen support for CBC radio. Expand CBC televisions role as a news and information network and direct it away from commercial programming.

a. Does investment in the arts produce a health dividend? An educational dividend? A public safety dividend?
Health costs are reduced when people seek artistic collaboration or involvement to feel involved and connected, rather than going to their doctors for company or sympathy (which is a surprisingly common phenomenon).

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?

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).

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.

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.

Liberal Party

Sarmite Bulte, M.P.

NDP Party

Peggy Nash

peggy@peggynash.ca
www.peggynash.ca
416-769-2200

1. What role do the arts play in your life?
I have a degree in French literature, have worked in independent filmmaking and have organized literary initiatives at the CAW. I believe strongly in an independent Canadian culture, given the fact that we live next door to the most powerful country in the world. It is important that our federal government invest in the arts to ensure that a diversity of Canadian voices is heard, at home and internationally.

2. What role do the arts play in keeping people healthy?
The identity that we build with our literature, filmmaking, performing arts, painting and visual arts allows us to develop a common outlook on the world and ourselves. In telling our stories, the arts provide a shared experience and allow us to dream. Along with helping to reaffirm our place and experience in the world, specific use of the arts in health treatments such as art therapy, reduction of risk behaviors among youth and the healing process achieved through words, books, dramatic improvisation and music, are well-recognized.

3. Why is it important that Toronto have a healthy arts sector?
Arts and culture are a vital economic engine for our communities, city and country. Our city’s cultural wealth is a key factor in attracting tourism and giving Toronto a high-profile, international status. Just as important, our arts sector is a major source of employment for over 190,000 people in Toronto who work as individual artists, in small businesses and in larger cultural institutions and industries

4. Does your party believe that Canadian content and ownership should be protected in our broadcasting industry?
Yes. Public broadcasting is a key part of that protection. While the Liberals have slashed the CBC’s budget by 20 percent over the last decade, the NDP will increase and stabilize funding for the CBC and Radio-Canada, recognizing the importance of public broadcasting in our large country. Under the Liberals, media concentration has continued to increase. The NDP would protect domestic ownership of cable and communications companies, and ensure more diversity of voices in media by preventing further mergers and acquisitions that provide media owners with more than 20 percent market share in a national, regional or local market. The NDP would also order the CRTC to enforce responsibility in the cable TV industry, get a handle on fee hikes, deal with the reduction of community access programming and rebalance regulations to put viewers’ interests first.

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?
First, the NDP will ensure stable, long-term funding for all current programs receiving funds from the federal government—the only political party to make this commitment. Programs like FACTOR, that administer funds to launch new Canadian music artists, provide the additional resources that artists need to plan and build their careers. The NDP will support Canadians visual and performing artists through project-based grants and tax credits. We will ensure that all Canadians who make less than $15,000 a year pay no federal income tax. Affordable housing is another key area where we will provide support. The NDP will start a 10 year national housing program to build 200,000 housing units and co-ops, renovate 100,000 existing units and provide rent supplements to 40,000 low-income tenants. We will also remove the GST from family essentials including medications, books and magazines, children’s clothing and school supplies to make life more affordable for working people.

6. Do you support federal investment in Canada’s arts sector? Does investment in the arts produce a health dividend? An educational dividend? A public safety dividend? If elected, would you vote to increase funding to the arts sector through The Canada Council? Through Department of Canadian Heritage? Do you support provision of stable, adequate, multi-year arts funding?
Yes. The NDP will lock in all federal arts and culture funding and guarantee a 3 percent increase per year on all currently allocated funds to cover inflation. As well, we will infuse an additional $240 million per year over the next two years for Canadian culture, and increase that to $340 million additional funds by 2007.

Our arts, culture and media are vital to preserving our cultural sovereignty and independence as a nation. Investment in this sector continues to show dividends. For example, FACTOR has proved that a modest $8 million annual investment can have a huge payback in terms of building Canadian independent music talent, launching Canadian artists and generating significant revenues for the industry and our economy, measured in the hundreds of millions of dollars.

Dividends go beyond measured economic returns. What goes unmeasured are the benefits of art therapy and the healing provided by words, books, music, visual and performing arts. These disciplines continue to provide innovative ways of educating our youth, both academically and in relation to social issues like drug and alcohol abuse and other risk behaviors.

Just as we’ve seen with health care, it has been a practice of the current Liberal government to provide ad hock funding for the arts. This kind of practice leads to instability. The NDP believes in stabilizing funding over the long term as a more respectful way to build strong relationships and allow artists to plan their careers.