Source : Toronto Star

Helene Chalifour Scherrer, the newly appointed federal minister of Canadian Heritage, flew into Toronto yesterday to give five of Ontario's biggest arts organizations hope that their funding crisis may soon be over. "I asked all five of them what they would do if they were running the ministry of Canadian Heritage," Scherrer explained later in an exclusive interview with the Star. "All five of them said they would create sustainable financing for the largest arts organizations." The hour-long round-table meeting, which took place in a studio of the Canadian Opera Company headquarters, included Richard Bradshaw of the COC, Kevin Garland of the National Ballet of Canada, Colleen Blake of the Shaw Festival, Andrew Shaw of the Toronto Symphony Orchestra, and Marty Bragg of the Canadian Stage Company. "I think they raised an interesting problem that needs to be addressed," Chalifour Scherrer told The Star after the meeting. "I heard their message very clearly, and I think they are quite right to ask that their funding be sustainable." When Paul Martin named Chalifour Scherrer to the post in December, it didn't seem like good news for the Toronto arts world. After all, she was a Quebec francophone with little experience in the cultural world. But yesterday's whirlwind visit to Toronto made a couple of things clear. First: Chalifour Scherrer — a high-energy, good-humoured woman — is determined to be perceived as a minister who responds to the arts constituency and takes action to solve problems. Second: No one should confuse her with her predecessor in the job, Sheila Copps, who let this problem fester for years while the country's most important arts organizations were clinging to the side of a cliff by their fingernails. They all thought their troubles were over in May, 2001, when Copps and former prime minister Jean Chrétien staged an enchanted evening at the CBC Broadcast Centre to show how much they loved the Toronto arts world. They came to shower $560 million on the arts over three years. It was supposed to mark the end of the dark ages for arts funding, after a decade of slashed subsidies and cutbacks had turned the arts into a community of beggars. Though the details were never spelled out in public, leaders of the big arts organizations had been assured by senior members of the heritage ministry that part of the money would be used to end their years of living dangerously and give them the stable funding they would need to carry on. Alex Himelfarb, who was then deputy minister of Canadian Heritage, was a great supporter of these organizations, which he recognized as the jewels in Canada's cultural crown — the ones that would bring the country international cultural prestige. He had carefully laid out a plan under which the Canada Council would get an extra $25 million a year to stabilize the major organizations. But Himelfarb left to become clerk of the Privy Council, and his plan went awry. "In fact, we received almost nothing," says Bradshaw, general director of the opera company. The catch was that under the rules of the Canada Council, allotment of funds is determined by peer juries. In the age of political correctness, peer juries are notoriously unwilling to give money to large organizations. For the 2002/2003 season, for example, the COC received $1,665,000 of support from Ottawa, and the Toronto Symphony got $1,670,000. The National Ballet got the most money, $2,150,000. The Shaw Festival got $493,000; Stratford received $753,000; and Canadian Stage got $476,000. In all cases, the money represents a very small part of the annual budget. The irony: despite a spending spree of government money to put up new cultural buildings, the big organizations have trouble raising enough money to put anything on the stage. While in Toronto, Chalifour Scherrer also had a meeting with her Queen's Park counterpart, Ontario Culture Minister Madeleine Meilleur — who is also new to her job. "I want to work side by side with my counterparts in every province," not above them, Chalifour Scherrer said. "And I want to make sure they understand I really mean it." Her eagerness to meet Toronto arts leaders so soon after her appointment was seen as a positive sign, especially since it took years to get a meeting with Copps. "We're very lucky to have her, and I can only believe the future will be brighter," Bradshaw said. For the past several years his organization has been balancing its books only with the help of about $2.5 million a year of emergency transitional funding to tide the company over until it gets into its new opera house in 2006. How much money would it take to solve everyone's problems? Probably about $100 million a year. "It would be nothing in terms of the over-all budget," says Bradshaw. "They wouldn't even notice it."

Asked whether she might be hampered by the Prime Minister's spending freeze, Chalifour Scherrer replied: "I think we're talking about reallocation rather than new spending. There are some programs inside Heritage that have been going on for 30 years, and they need to be looked at again to make sure they meet the needs of Canadians now."

© The Toronto Star