Source : Globe & Mail

Author and journalist Gwynne Dyer, who became a poster boy for wasteful federal spending when the Tories axed a program to send arts and culture abroad, says he travelled at the government's request and never applied for the grant he got.

Mr. Dyer was labelled a "left-wing" writer with plenty of money in a leaked Conservative Party memo that identified several recipients of PromArt grants, which help pay for artists' travel, as "not exactly the foot that most Canadians would want to see put forward." Mr. Dyer travelled to Cuba in 2007 to speak about democracy. The memo was leaked on Friday.

Mr. Dyer told The Globe and Mail that a Foreign Affairs official at the Canadian embassy in Cuba called him and asked him to speak in Havana, promising to cover his travel expenses. He said he was given $3,000 in cash to cover his airfare, hotel and expenses in Cuba, and that he had never heard of PromArt until last week.

"It suggests to me this is the gang who can't shoot straight. My surmise ... is that they didn't have a pot of money that they could easily fit this into, so a little creative bookkeeping was done ... and you take it out of the PromArt budget," he said.

Mr. Dyer's comments are the latest wrinkle in the controversial elimination of two programs designed to raise the country's international profile.

The government announced on Friday that Trade Routes, an annual Canadian Heritage program focused on exporting culture, will be reduced and then ended in 2010. Just hours earlier, the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade cancelled the $4.7-million PromArt as of March 31, 2009.

A spokesperson for Foreign Affairs Minister David Emerson declined to comment.

Jean-Paul Picard, former manager of the performing arts arm of PromArt, said the program transformed the international image of Canadian artists and the way they saw themselves, suggesting acts such as Cirque du Soleil could never have survived without it.

But he also said PromArt was not without its flaws. The performing arts division was unbalanced, with grants going predominantly to Quebec, and having arts and culture under the Foreign Affairs roof made for strange bedfellows, he said.

The cuts to arts programs hit on a favourite theme of the Tories - cutting spending that appears wasteful and elitist - to gain political advantage in some target markets.

Conservatives say the Prime Minister's Office, not the Foreign Affairs Department, leaked the axing of PromArt, in an effort to seize the initiative before the news got out. The Conservatives focus much of their election message on the less affluent middle-class, and like to portray themselves as favouring NASCAR and curling over cocktails and galleries.

This time, the party highlighted a handful of projects that might raise public ire for funding lefty, artsy or controversial projects, and steered clear of the far larger sums that go to bringing foreign buyers to Canadian film festivals, for example, or Quebec-based dance troupes or theatre production companies. And they focused their message mostly on news outlets in the West.

A cabinet committee had already secretly decided to cut the programs under a process called strategic review, aimed at finding money to create other programs.

Although the 2006 Conservative election platform had little to say about arts funding except a promise to "preserve the role" of agencies such as the Canada Council, the party's 2005 policy convention produced a resolution closer to its traditions, emphasizing charitable contributions, not government money, to finance arts.

© Globe and Mail