Margaret Atwood, Canada’s queen of literature, recently pondered the above question…and no one can skewer the Harper government with poetic invective with the talent that Ms. Atwood brings to the table.
On Saturday, she wrote an editorial in The Globe and Mail, lamenting the fact that the Harper Conservatives have cut the entire budget that funded programs designed to promote Canadian artists abroad…every penny.
It would seem irrelevant that the funding was minuscule to begin with, and that the recent surplus of $13 billion could have continued to supply its measly amount…but there you have it.
As to why it was cut, Ms. Atwood has arrived at various, deliciously worded, reasons:
(1) Ignorance. The Harperites have no idea how much money the arts generate.
(2) Willed ignorance. They’ve seen the figures, but have labelled them “junk economics” in the way they once labelled global warming statistics as “junk science”.
(3) Hatred. The Harper Conservatives think artists are a bunch of whiners who don’t have real jobs, and that any money spent on the arts is degenerate frill.
(4) Frugality. There’s lots of arts around. We can get them cheaper from across the border than it costs to make them here, and if you’ve seen one art, you’ve seen them all.
(5) Stupidity. They thought they were gassing a hornet’s nest, not poking it with a stick.
(6) More hatred. They tried to slash local museums, until too many people screamed. They’ve cut the Canada Council top-up proposed by the Liberals down to a sixth of its size. They’ve stuck the knife into the National Literacy Program, perhaps on the theory that they won’t be able to set up a working dictatorship if too many people can read.
And if that isn’t enough, Ms. Atwood hits home with the philosophy that could be behind all of this cutting (not that we didn’t know…):
But maybe the Harper Conservatives don’t want a society in which the arts and the creative industries are important. Maybe they don’t want the jobs in those fields to exist. Maybe, as in so many other areas of their thinking, they want to turn back the clock to the good old days – some time back in the golden fifties, when there wasn’t all this bilingualism and multiculturalism, or indeed any lingualism or culturalism at all, and most Canadian artists left the country, and those who remained could be referred to jokingly in Parliament as a bunch of fruits jumping around in long underwear.
This is what lies ahead, if the Harper morons EVER manage to be elected to a majority government. It almost makes me long for the days of Brian Mulroney…and I’m admitting this without the influence of mind-altering chemicals.
Harper must go. Put on that long underwear and let the fight begin…
