It was about 8 o’clock last Thursday night, when I made my way to the microphone to begin festivities at this year’s Books and Authors Night in Uxbridge. It was the 23rd edition of interviews with, and readings from, Canadian authors. It is, of course, a cornerstone of the annual Celebration of the Arts festival in our community. Like the Studio Tour, the Art Show, the Gala and countless other Celebration events, the Books and Authors Night was nearly at capacity. The lights dimmed slightly in the Music Hall as I prepared to speak.
“Would anybody, who’s been subsidized to be here, please identify himself?” I asked.
It was a nice ice-breaker. But then I asked the more germane question: “Are there any ordinary Canadians here?”
I realize it was a somewhat partisan remark, but I believed it needed to be said. Just two days earlier, at a campaign stop in Saskatoon, the prime minister remarked that arts events tend to consist of “a bunch of people at, you know, a rich gala all subsidized by taxpayers” and that such phenomena do not “resonate with ordinary people.”
In all the years I have lived in Uxbridge, “ordinary people” are the only ones I’ve encountered in the arts. Those who’ve worked on and behind theatre productions, those designing and staging cultural events, those trying to build a true arts centre with theatre and gallery here, those teaching the arts in and out of class and those orchestrating concerts to raise funds for young musicians have all been extraordinarily ordinary.
Indeed the very creators of the original Celebration of the Arts, 23 years ago, were salt of the earth citizens – former pub operator Ron Tindley, filmmaker Christopher Chapman and organist/choir master Tom Baker. Now I’ve known those three gentlemen to enjoy expensive Scotch now and again, but “rich gala” types? Hardly.
By coincidence this week, friend and colleague in The Writers’ Circle of Durham Region, Ruth Walker offered her take on the prime minister’s view that “ordinary working people” don’t care about the arts.
“Just who does he think produced the art and culture in this country?” she asked in her open letter. “Who paints the theatre scenes?…Who organizes the thousands of grassroots festivals and community events on shoestring budgets or even less?…Who teaches our children to draw, act, sing, dance, film, photograph, paint and write?”
As a poet, playwright, instructor and editor, Ruth Walker subsidizes her own writing by working as a provincial civil servant. She’s been published in Canada, the U.S. and Britain and her short stories and poetry have earned her international awards and recognition. None of it has gone to her head. Ruth Walker is one of the hardest working writers I know (not to mention the first one to volunteer her time and expertise gratis to assist regional writing festivals, publications and community programs.) She concludes in her letter:
“The prime minister must be referring to those other ordinary Canadians…who are not arts or culture consumers and have no one in their family or social circle involved in the arts or culture…All three of them.”
But Ruth Walker isn’t the only main-street artist setting the prime minister straight on the relevance of the arts. This week, Margaret Atwood, writing in the Globe and Mail, referred to the prime minister’s own government statisticians for evidence. Rather than an insignificant sector of the Canadian economy, Atwood explained that “Canada’s cultural sector generated $46 million, or 3.8 per cent of Canada’s GDP in 2007.” She also noted that the arts and culture sector accounted for 600,000 jobs “the same as agriculture, forestry, fishing, mining, oil and gas and utilities combined.”
For the prime minister to say the arts are, in effect, elitist and have no resonance with ordinary people, is a little like saying Santa Claus doesn’t exist. And we all know how silly the prosecution looked trying to quash Santa, in the movie “Miracle on 34th Street.” Remember? Defence used the thousands of letters addressed to the U.S. Post Office as evidence that an official government body recognized Santa’s existence.
It appears the prime minister needs to be reminded how crucial and grassroots the arts are to Canadians. In a letter to the Toronto Star last week, Phillip Silver, of the Fine Arts Department at York University, pointed out that Manitoba author Gabrielle Roy once wrote:
“Could we ever know each other in the slightest without the arts?”
Silver then suggested, if the prime minister needed verification of that fact in this country, he could find that very quotation inscribed on the back of every ordinary Canadian $20 bill. Case closed.
