Orchestras Canada

On Tuesday, October 25, the Canadian Arts Coalition is presenting its 3rd Arts Day on Parliament Hill. On that day, over 90 arts leaders from across Canada – including artists, board members and administrators – will be formed into teams, get briefed on the Coalition’s key messages, and then head up to Parliament Hill to take part in meetings with over 120 MPs, senators and senior bureaucrats.

Orchestras Canada is an active member of the Coalition, Executive Director Katherine Carleton is co-chair of the Coalition steering committee, and OC is serving as the secretariat for Arts Day. As well, members of the OC board will represent Canada’s orchestras in the meetings, where we will talk about the economic, social and artistic contributions that the arts make to Canadian communities, and the key role that federal support plays in sustaining employment in the sector. We will make the case for:

Sustained levels of support for the Canada Council for the Arts;
Sustained levels of support for key programs at the Department of Canadian Heritage;
A renewed commitment by the Government of Canada to the role that arts and culture play in cultural diplomacy, and the importance of opening up international markets for Canadian arts and culture.

To learn more about the Canadian Arts Coalition, please visit the CAC website at canadianartscoalition.com.

And if you’d like to follow the progress of Arts Day on Twitter, search for the hashtags #artsday and #jourdarts!

Following the submission of its brief to the Standing Committee on Finance, the Canadian Arts Coalition (of which Orchestras Canada is a founding member) is now hard at work on preparations for its third Arts Day on Parliament Hill, scheduled for Tuesday, October 25, 2011. The event will see 75 Coalition members from the arts and cultural community from across Canada meeting with over 100 MPs and senior officials, making the case for the value of federal investment in the arts. Members of the board of Orchestras Canada will be part of the action – and we look forward to engaging all of our members in arts advocacy initiatives in the ridings later this fall, too. For more information about the Canadian Arts Coalition, please visit: canadianartscoalition.com

Ontario members of Orchestras Canada are reminded that we’ve developed some useful materials for you to use in discussions with Members of Provincial Parliament and candidates in the upcoming provincial election. You can find these materials on the Orchestras Canada website here: orchestrascanada.org

Arts advocacy groups, be they short-term collaborations, ongoing coalitions or established organizations, are an important, if imperfectly distributed, part of the Canadian arts scene. Some operate on a municipal level, others serve provincial or territorial populations, and others again (such as the Canadian Conference of the Arts and the Canadian Arts Coalition) operate nationally – but the provision is uneven across the country.

On July 27, 2011, a group of arts leaders in Winnipeg took a great leap forward. They held an open town hall meeting at aceartinc, to assess the arts, culture, creative, and heritage sectors’ willingness to explore the idea of creating a Manitoba-wide, broad-based creative sector coalition. This coalition would be called Culture Manitoba, and would provide a strengthened, united voice to represent the arts, culture, creative, and heritage sectors to government, funders, and the community.

Over 80 people were in attendance, and approximately 85% of those in attendance voted, by a show of hands, in favour of creating such an organization. Four working groups were created after the meeting, each led by an interim leader – and meetings will pick up again in September.

Congratulations to all!

Tip O’Neill, the late U.S. speaker of the house, used to say that “all politics is local” – to which we say “huzzah! and never more so than during a federal election campaign!”

To help our members engage in meaningful conversations with candidates in their ridings, Orchestras Canada (in collaboration with our partners at the Canadian Arts Coalition and Imagine Canada) has prepared an on-line, rigorously non-partisan, election toolkit containing

• A downloadable message you can hand to candidates, summarizing key arguments for the arts and arts investment
• A downloadable fact sheet about Canadian orchestras
• Questions for candidates
• A social media primer
• Statistics on arts and culture
• Dos and don’ts for registered charities during an election campaign
• A widget for your website, with links to the Arts Vote toolkit on the Coalition website

Soon to be added: an analysis of the party platforms, from an arts and charities perspective.

We’re also promoting two other social media initiatives:

The Canadian Arts Coalition’s Facebook page at facebook.com/artscoalition
A Twitter hashtag – #artsvotecan – so that arts activists can connect on arts issues, and update one another on the progress of their work in ridings right across the country

To get connected, please visit: facebook.com/artscoalition

Canadians will be voting in a general election on Monday, May 2. As a founding member of the Canadian Arts Coalition, Orchestras Canada will be supporting the Coalition’s efforts to ensure that the arts stay on the election agenda, and we’ll be working through the Coalition and its network to provide access to a range of resources that orchestra-loving Canadians can use to inform themselves and engage with the candidates.

While the development of these resources is ongoing, some things are already in place.

Social media strategies
1. The Coalition hosts a lively page on Facebook, and we invite you and the people you know to publish your updates, links and reports there. You can find the CAC at facebook.com/artscoalition.

2. If you are on Twitter, and you are tweeting about federal election arts issues, we ask that you consider using the hashtag #artsvotecan — and tell everyone you know to do the same!

Election Toolkit
3. A team of volunteers is assembling an election toolkit for the Canadian Arts Coalition website at canadianartscoalition.com. We’ll be able to tell you more about it next week, but it will ultimately include a messaging piece, some door-step questions, compelling arts facts, a Twitter primer, links to relevant local, provincial and national resources, analyses of the party platforms, and guidelines for registered charities during elections.

At point of writing, members of the Canadian Arts Coalition (including members of the board of Orchestras Canada) will be meeting with a remarkable 102 Members of Parliament on November 4 – full one third of our federal elected representatives!

These meetings would not be possible were it not for the volunteers who doggedly made follow-up calls to MPs’ offices, under the direction of OC staff member Jennifer Caines. We salute the following people, who gave generously of their time and powers of persuasion!

Sylvie Raymond
Peter Feldman
Tim Brady
Sandra Chappell
Roberta Ash
Caroline Miller

The Canadian Arts Coalition will be holding its second-ever Arts Day on the Hill, on November 4, 2010 in Ottawa. Meetings with 90 Members of Parliament have been scheduled. Seventy-five arts leaders will have the opportunity to make the same two key recommendations to the federal government that Coalition co-chair Eric Dubeau will be making to the Standing Committee on Finance on October 21 – to wit:

Recommendation 1: That the Government of Canada invest in Canadian creativity and Canadian communities by increasing the base budget of the Canada Council for the Arts by an additional $30 million per year in each of the next four years, bringing the Council’s funding base to $300 million per annum by 2015.

Recommendation 2: That the Government of Canada acknowledge the role that arts and culture plays in enhancing Canada’s reputation internationally and put Canadian artists on the world stage by investing $25 million in strategic international market access and development initiatives.
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The Canadian Arts Coalition is also organizing an arts community meet-up and celebration (with cash bar), at Parliament Pub (on Wellington across from Parliament, next to the Info Centre) from 2:00 – 5:00 pm.

On Thursday, November 4, the Canadian Arts Coalition is leading Arts Day on Parliament Hill – a day when artists, lead volunteers and arts managers from across Canada will meet with MPs and senior officials in Ottawa to advocate for

• sustained and increased funding to the arts through the Canada Council, and
• a refreshed federal commitment to international market and audience development for Canadian arts and artists.

The Board of Directors of Orchestras Canada will take an active role in Arts Day, joining interdisciplinary arts teams to make the case for enhanced arts investment and a renewal of Canada’s long-time role in international cultural diplomacy. Our board will work with up to 80 other arts leaders and meet with at least 100 MPs over the course of the day – and it’s an exciting enterprise!

If this sounds easy and automatic, though, it’s not: an immense amount of work is going on behind the scenes at Orchestras Canada and elsewhere to make this happen. As a voluntary collaboration among a number of leading national arts service organizations, the Coalition has neither operating funding nor a staff team; accordingly, each of the Coalition’s member organizations is contributing money, time and leadership to the effort. It’s exciting and it’s vitally important.

If you’d like to learn more about the Coalition, please visit the website here.

And if you’d like to get involved in Arts Day, let Katherine Carleton at Orchestras Canada know, via email at katherine@oc.ca

The Canadian Arts Coalition has launched a new website, a next step in the Coalition’s efforts to put forward a strong and united voice for the arts in Canada. The new site was masterminded by the same bright people who worked on Orchestras Canada’s website – and we salute Corktown Design for their work! You can check it out for yourself here.

Federal Budget 2010: Arts Sector Key to Canada’s Economic and Social Prosperity

The Canadian Arts Coalition is pleased to see that arts and culture investment has been sustained in Budget 2010 and that the Government will continue to deliver on stimulus measures for the cultural sector identified in the Economic Action Plan. In particular, we commend the Government for wisely protecting investment to the Canada Council for the Arts, and look forward with interest to the unveiling of the Canada Prizes with hopes that this initiative will focus on celebrating the exceptional talent of our Canadian artists.

Budget 2010 makes repeated reference to the need to keep Canadian businesses competitive in the global marketplace. While no measures were introduced to advantage Canadian cultural products, it is hoped that going forward, initiatives such as a new support for international market access and development and increased investment to the Canada Council for the Arts will be introduced – ensuring Canadian cultural content maintains and enhances its presence and competitiveness at home and on the world stage.

As Canada embarks on a path of economic recovery, the arts sector is poised to play a key role in the revitalization of Canadian communities as an efficient engine of job creation across a number of sectors including industry, hospitality and transportation,  that benefit from increased cultural activity. There is a growing consensus among leaders in all economic sectors that arts investment is a cost effective catalyst for high economic returns and we hope to see the Government lever this tremendous opportunity through new and increased investment in the arts going forward. The Conference Board of Canada has noted that cities rich in cultural resources are hotbeds of creativity, economic wealth generators, and magnets for talent across all sectors of the economy.

As part of the creative, knowledge economy, the cultural sector is growing at a rapid rate.  Cultural workers, including artists exceed 600,000. “One in every 30 people in Canada has a cultural occupation. That’s twice as many people as work in the forestry sector and more than twice as many as work in Canadian banks,” said Eric Dubeau, co-chair of the Canadian Arts Coalition. “We need to be part of the plan going forward.”

The Canadian Arts Coalition is Canada’s largest ever group of artists, business leaders and volunteers assembled from across the country. We are united in the knowledge that greater public investment in the arts is essential to Canada’s future. We believe that the high quality of life, for which Canada is known, depends on a rich, vibrant and diverse arts and heritage community.

British Columbia Budget 2010

(We provide this excerpted report courtesy of the Greater Vancouver Alliance for Arts and Culture)

Emerging from [Tuesday’s] budget lockup at the BC Legislature, Alliance for Arts and Culture Executive Director Amir Ali Alibhai, Victoria Symphony Executive Director Mitchell Krieger, and ProArt Alliance of Greater Victoria Coordinator Scott Walker expressed disappointment at the budget’s half-hearted support for the arts in British Columbia.

“Premier Gordon Campbell and Finance Minister Colin Hansen seem to have largely disregarded the recommendations of their own Standing Committee on Finance and Government Services and continue to ignore the importance of the creative sector ” said Mr. Alibhai.

“The Cultural Olympiad was a significant achievement for Canadian artists” Mr. Krieger added. “With this budget, however, it appears that what we have recently experienced was only a moment in time, as support for the arts continues to fall to record levels.”

At first glance, the 2010/11 Budget for arts and culture does appear to fully restore funding to 2008/09 levels, as recommended by the Standing Committee.

On further exploration, however, the arts community spokesmen noted that funding for the Royal BC Museum ($12.1M) is included in the figures presented this year; previously it has not been included. There is also a “mystery” $10M allocation, which is currently not fully defined nor allocated to any existing funding organization, such as the BC Arts Council.

“We would welcome the opportunity to work with the government to make the most effective use of this investment,” said Mr. Krieger.

The following table attempts to compare “apples to apples” and gives a summary of our interpretation of the 2010 Budget. Gaming funds for arts and cultural allocations as well as funding for BC Arts Council grants are significantly lower than in 2008/09.

“Why not just restore BC Arts Council to the $19M level of 2008/09″ asked Mr. Alibhai. “Where has the $7M cut from Gaming funds to the Arts and Culture gone?”

“Artists, arts organizations, community partners, corporate sponsors and our audiences throughout will respond to this budget in a forceful manner” predicted Mr. Alibhai.

“We’ve shown the world what BC artists can do,” concluded Mr. Walker. “What we were hoping for was that the government would learn from the past two weeks and continue to invest in the Arts. When all those visitors return – as the government tells us they will – what they’ll find with this budget is a lot of closed doors and cancelled arts programs.”