Canada Reinvents its Arts Funding Strategy

As much of the Western world flirts with retrenchment into a nativist crouch, Canada is doubling down on what [Melanie Joly, minister for Canadian Heritage,] describes as the basic “social contract,” which has always included the arts as a fundamental part of the national budget. But she and [Simon Brault, the head of the Canada Council for the Arts,] also stress the need to reform the existing system of cultural funding.

At the government level, Canada has to grapple with laws that were meant to encourage the production of Canadian “content” but were drafted in an age before the Internet, Netflix and the almost universal availability of diverse entertainment options. And at the Canada Council for the Arts, Brault is streamlining the process for funding arts and culture to reflect the increasingly amorphous lines between artistic disciplines, and the emergence of new kinds of collaboration and interaction.

Both Joly and Brault stress another issue central to the Brexit debate: the perceived sense that government serves only elites. “In order to save the idea of public funding for the arts, we need to reaffirm its democratic foundations,” says Brault, who emphasizes a larger role for social impact and “outcomes.”