Orchestras Canada

Through Arts Day on Parliament Hill and meetings in the ridings, many of Orchestras Canada’s members communicated with Ministers and Members of Parliament to make the case for the three priorities articulated by the Canadian Arts Coalition in 2011-12, namely:
1. Sustaining support to the Canada Council for the Arts;
2. Sustained support for key programs at the Department of Canadian Heritage; and,
3. A renewed federal commitment to international market development for Canadian arts and culture.

Given the challenging economic environment, the fact that the federal government responded favourably to priorities #1 and #2 is nothing less than extraordinary – and it’s now time to say thank you. We urge you to let your MP, Canadian Heritage Minister James Moore, Finance Minister Jim Flaherty, and Prime Minister Stephen Harper know the impact that sustained federal arts investment has an impact in your community – and thank them for the news contained in Budget 2012.

If you’re looking for inspiration, we’ve got you covered. Please click here to see the template correspondence crafted by Orchestras Canada for your use.

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.