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Speeches

Speech by John Hobday to the 2004 Chalmers Conference

Notes for remarks by John Hobday
Director, Canada Council for the Arts
At the 2004 Chalmers Conference
Panorama Room, National Arts Centre
Friday, Feb. 27, 12 noon.

Good afternoon, everyone.

It is a pleasure to be here and to see the turnout for this conference. The presence of so many of you testifies, not only to our shared passion for the arts, but to the urgent need that we all, I think, recognize for stronger and more relentless arts advocacy.

I would like to start by thanking the Minister of Canadian Heritage, Madame Hélène Chalifour Scherrer, for her remarks at this morning’s breakfast. Her commitment to the arts, diversity, and the sustainability of arts organizations is encouraging indeed, and I greatly appreciated her candour, openness and humour. Last week, the Council’s Acting Chair, Nalini Stewart and met briefly with her. We were most encouraged by her quick grasp of the issues. In the weeks to come, we will be presenting to her more fully the statistics and arguments I am briefly outlining here.

As the head of one of the agencies who benefited from the Tomorrow Starts Today initiative, I was also very encouraged by her comments regarding the future of this funding. Needless to say, I will be more encouraged when I see it in the budget – Show me the money! -- but I believe her implicitly when she says she is commited to pushing within Cabinet for increased and sustained arts funding.

Secondly, I would like to express the Canada Council’s support for the members of Ottawa’s arts community, who are fighting for the restoration of arts funding in the City of Ottawa’s budget. Ottawa is not just the nation’s capital – it’s the fourth largest city in Canada, with an outstanding and dynamic arts community of its own, above and beyond the major national arts institutions that call the National Capital Region home.
It is also a community of passionate and committed arts audiences, and the proposal to reduce the city’s arts budget by 80 per cent flies in the face of everything we know about the crucial link between creativity, urban development and the quality of life. What kind of message does this send to other municipalities?

The fact that the Canada Council invests more than $3 million a year in Ottawa artists and arts organizations is a testament to this community’s artistic excellence and the contribution Ottawa artists and organizations make to the Canadian arts scene as a whole. I want to assure the members of Ottawa’s arts community that the Canada Council supports you 100 per cent, and I personally will be there for the march on city hall next week.

When I addressed the last Chalmers Conference in May of 2003, I described the relationships the Council would be working to clarify and the challenges we would be helping artists and arts organizations to address.

Today, I want to present a brief “State of the Nation” report on what we have accomplished in this respect over the past year.

Beyond the ever-growing demands of business-as-usual, the major initiative now under way at the Council is a large-scale planning exercise to tailor all our programs to the effective pursuit of our goals. This is the drafting of our Corporate Plan for 2005 to 2008, to which the Council board gave approval in principle at a retreat last week.

Our current three-year Plan remains in effect until March 2005. However, in light of the change of government and the accompanying expectation of an intensive government-wide program review, we are already assessing current programs to aim more closely at the goals identified in our new plan.

I stress that the changes are not radical turnarounds. The Council’s fundamental mission has not changed, and the new plan will reflect considerable continuity with the existing one.

Some of you will have heard this yesterday, but I want to summarize briefly, nonetheless, the areas of continuity and change.

There will be continuity:

  • In the centrality of the principle of excellence,
  • In sustained funding of high-quality arts organizations,
  • In the Council’s commitment to serving individual artists,
  • In reflecting the full diversity of Canadian society, and
  • In engaging audiences of all ages.

Some of the most important changes include :

  • An increased focus on the benefit to the Canadian public of the arts and of investment in the arts.
  • A stronger emphasis on improving organizational health in order to sustain the excellence of arts organizations. An important part of this plan is to identify management and governance tools and indicators to help organizations self-assess their organizational well-being. Tools – and hopefully, grants – to aid in organizational change will be provided. Eventually, our operating grant criteria will more fully reflect the importance of organizational health.
  • Discussions with the Department of Canadian Heritage aimed at reasserting the Council’s role as the primary federal funder of the professional arts. This means determining whether certain programs currently administered by the Department might find a better home here at the Council.
  • Similarly, an engagement to work with the relevant federal departments and agencies to build a common and coherent and robust federal policy framework and improve structures to support Canadian artistic activity in the international arena.
  • A leadership role in facilitating a new and more cooperative relationship with other arts funders, including the provinces, territories and municipalities.This is something we are already actively engaged in: under the leadership of John Goldsmith, we have been participating in funders meetings across the country with a view to working on joint initiatives in such areas as advocacy, arts education, the challenge of finding the balance between the funding of “key” and emerging organizations, the development of support for Aboriginal and culturally-diverse artists and arts organizations, and of course, audience development.
  • And perhaps most importantly, a commitment to make a case for a substantial increase in the Council`s Parliamentary appropriation to address the chronic underfunding of the professional arts sector. We know that any other plans we may have to improve and sustain support for the arts in Canada will be predicated on our ability to obtain significantly increased funding.

I would now like to talk a little about the challenges to the arts which I raised at last May’s Chalmers conference.

The first was the challenge of dealing with growing numbers of artists and arts organizations.

Given the dramatic increase in artists and arts organizations across the country – and the consequent increase in applications to the Canada Council -- it is absolutely clear that public funding must increase, and increase significantly, if the support offered through the Council to the arts is to retain its status, influence and effectiveness as a beacon of excellence.

It is a corollary of asking for more funding that audiences – and ideally markets – must also grow.

Encouraging public involvement in the arts is a goal that we will ask both individuals and organizations to embrace still more fully. Audience outreach and market development will be important markers as we bring sharper focus to our grant criteria and develop important services.

With regard to individual artists, our grants will be focused, less on sustaining artists over a long period of time, and more on offering support at key career transition points.

We will make every effort to strengthen our support to artists at periods when they are preparing to:

  • make sea-changes in their artistic vision,
  • explore promising new partnerships, or
  • take advantage of opportunities for market and audience development, research and publication.

Another way of managing high demand is through the honing of grant criteria.

In the past, the Council has been generous, sometimes over-generous, in giving organizations a second, third and even fourth chance when they got into artistic or financial difficulties. Generosity like this has a down-side. It can absorb funding that is badly needed by creative, innovative and well-managed organizations being funded or hoping to be funded through the grant program.

In light of the growing number of applications, the Council will be establishing new criteria for entry of deserving organizations into its funding programs and the exit of organizations that fail to maintain the highest standards of excellence.

The second challenge I identified last year is the uncertainty of government funding.

Cooperation, rationalization of programs and relentless advocacy are the tactics for addressing this challenge.

Over the past nine months, as I mentioned in a meeting with the National Arts Service Organizations yesterday, we have made welcome progress in developing more collaborative relationships with other arts funders.

By developing shared understanding, research resources, and assessment and management criteria, we will be able to reduce administrative burdens on arts organizations, to apply funding more effectively, and to share in the development of joint advocacy initiatives that will strengthen and broaden appreciation of the public value of the arts.

Our new Corporate Plan is paving the way for the development of a package of advocacy messages and materials that will be accessible to arts organizations and arts interest groups across the country. These messages will promote the arts as attractive, enjoyable, important and rewarding areas of activity and interest. They will promote the Council as an insightful and effective instrument in support of the arts. They will be available when we launch our new website on March 29 to coincide with the Council’s 47th anniversary.

They will celebrate:

  • the increasing international presence of Canadian artists and arts organizations,
  • the high level of accomplishment in all arts disciplines and across all parts of the country, and
  • benefits deriving from the inclusiveness of the arts, which encompass our Aboriginal heritage, both our official languages, our varied regional practices, the interests of all age groups and the diversity of the cultural influences that touch on our lives.

A third challenge is shifting levels of private-sector support.

It is very clear that box office and private and corporate support are an essential income stream, one that many arts organizations will have to work hard to maintain and strengthen in the face of both foreseeable and unforeseeable challenges. But in talking about box office support, we must always remember that a key issue is affordability. Canadians – and particularly young people – must have access to the arts regardless of income level, and merely raising ticket prices to generate additional revenues is self-defeating and contrary to this fundamental principle of accessibility.

The Council is playing its part by developing criteria and tools to assist organizations in the professional management of promotion, fundraising, volunteers and board members.

Competition from other leisure activities is another challenge that is not going to go away.

With the support of the arts community, in all our advocacy efforts, we intend to highlight the public value and public excitement of the arts. We will work to attract new audiences of all ages. A significant focus of this activity will be the celebration of the Council’s 50th anniversary in 2007. Plans are already under way.

We plan to use this opportunity of 2007 not only to celebrate artistic achievement but also to provide clear evidence of the role the arts have played in the economic and social development of Canadian communities, in social cohesion and in Canada’s international reputation.

Beyond the 2007 celebrations, there are many opportunities within communities across the country to foster closer connections between the arts and daily life. We are committed to maintaining and, as resources become available, hopefullly, developing arts education initiatives and expanding our Artist and Community Collaboration Fund. In the three years this program has been running, arts groups across the country have shown enormous interest in it.

The fifth and final challenge I mentioned last year is the increasing complexity of administrative demands.

This complexity, as we all know, has many sources: in new labour and tax legislation; in stricter standards of governance and financial accounting; in developments in information technology; and, quite frankly, in the inherent tendency of bureaucracies to become more complex over time.

The Council is fostering a two-pronged attack: to equip organizations with the knowledge and tools – such as the Flying Squad, which I mentioned earlier – to deal effectively with complex administrative requirements; and to promote the reduction of administrative complexity wherever possible and desirable.

I want to leave you with a message that may sound self-evident, but is nonetheless terribly important. For advocacy to be successful in the long run, it must promote real achievement. My reason for believing that we can develop new audiences and attract new funding is that Canada’s artists and arts organizations have achieved a tremendously high degree of excellence and are reaching insatiably for more. The arts in all their forms are one of Canada’s great success stories; the sad reality is that too few Canadians – and particularly too few decision-makers – are sufficiently aware of this.

I am delighted to see that the theme of this year’s Chalmers conference is arts advocacy, because it is time that all of us who care about the arts – both within and outside the arts community – join together and take action.

And by action, I’m referring to a sustained and committed effort to convince decision-makers, community leaders, the media -- and the Canadian public -- of the crucial role the arts play in the quality of life of our citizens and the development of our communities.

But it is not enough to preach to the converted. It is not enough to talk about this at arts conferences. The only way we will succeed in obtaining sustained investment in the arts – from all levels of government and the private sector – is by bringing the evidence and the arguments directly before the people who hold the purse-strings.

Organizations like the Canadian Conference of the Arts – and the arts service organizations many of you represent -- have a key role to play in this endeavour. But you also have a significant resource within your own communities -- the Board members of your organizations and most importantly, the people and communities your membership reaches, including arts audiences. They are the ones who can testify first-hand to the impact the arts have on their everyday lives -- and they can convey those messages to their elected representatives with passion and conviction. We look forward to working in partnership with you and the broad arts community in an effort to make the case for the arts and increased public and private investment in the arts.

I profoundly believe that the arts are everyone’s responsibility, and the more we work together, the better chance we have of making the case for the arts once and for all..

I hope that the CCA and the other organizations represented at this meeting will continue to work with us.

I look forward to answering your questions.