Advocacy

Direct link to the Creativity Counts website.

Creativity Counts is a call-to-action initiative of the Alliance for Arts and Culture. 

Please follow the link above where you will find a range of  tools available for your use in supporting the arts.  

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BACKGROUND & HISTORY

After eight years of reasonable evolution of support for the arts under a Liberal government, the arts and culture sector in BC is possibly in the midst of its biggest crisis ever.

Given the global economic situation and sharply reduced revenues, the BC government has been trying desperately to keep its deficit down for this year, and has made a number of controversial moves that affect the arts and culture sector.

Given that health and education take up most of the budget (and most governments understandably can’t stomach the outcry from cutting much there) cuts have been made to other areas. The most significant for our purposes has been the cuts to community arts, culture and sports groups.

To make things more complicated, the cuts have not been entirely straightforward. Different numbers, changing funding sources and shrinking budgets has led to a lot of confusion about what the real story is.

While the cuts for this year are argued to be anywhere from 11 to 26 percent, the main focus of the cuts has been at the community level, where they have been the most devastating.

There are fears in the arts and culture community that because of the lack of information or any commitments at this time about the future, the cuts for next year and the year after that could be up to 90 percent.

When the budget was tabled in February 2009, the government was expecting a 40 percent budget shortfall for the arts. Using a $7 million surplus from the prior fiscal year, funds were advanced to the B.C. Arts Council to disburse, in advance of the cuts, to its client base. Groups were told not to spend that money at that time because they would not be getting as much in the coming year.

With the current budget, the BC Arts Council was cut further. Without core funding for the council’s obligations, the government took gaming funds to bring them to their normal budget level, but took that money from the same cash pool that funds the community gaming funds Direct Access grant program. This has led to a cash crunch in that grant program and a smaller pie for community-based arts, sport and environmental groups to share.

This means that, on the government’s books, the projected spending on arts and culture is dropping to $3.6 million from $19.5 million. But this was because the $13.3 million spent by the B.C. Arts Council last year came from general revenue, which is now coming from gaming. The $3.6 million remaining on the ministry’s books pays the salaries and administrative costs of the council.

The gaming grant program was cut to $131 million from last year’s $156 million, and was forced to absorb the B.C. Arts Council’s budget. This meant that funds ran short and hundreds of grant applications were rejected or reduced. Grants to community sports groups shrank from $29 million to $19 million, with many groups allotted a fraction of their requested funds.

This year, the province’s community gambling grant program approved only 350 of the 953 applications for funds requested by cultural organizations, for a total of $8.9 million. Last year, 840 applications were approved, totaling $18 million.

A handful of this year’s rejected Direct Access applications were reconsidered and approved by the government because they had been promised three years of stable funding. Cabinet found $20 million to rescue those multi-year deals two be split between several hundred community arts, sport and environmental groups.

The 130 arts groups with multi-year deals will get about $3.2 million this year and next, but the rest are out of luck.
According to the Vancouver Sun, last year, the gaming grant program and the B.C. Arts Council distributed $31.3 million combined, along with $4.2 million in legacy funds for a total of $35.57 million.

Again, using the Vancouver Sun’s numbers, this year -- if you include the $7 million in emergency funds -- the total funds distributed through the gaming grant process, the B.C. Arts Council and other various grant programs will be $31.65 million.
By the Vancouver Sun’s numbers, the drop in funding to the arts from last year to this is 11 per cent, about $3.7 million, but only after the $3.2-million infusion from the government’s contingency accounts, which was the arts community’s share of the government's $20-million two-year rescue. This also deals just with grants to the BC Arts Council and the gaming monies. If you include money for administration, the cut is 26% of the overall investment.

No matter how you slice it, unless something changes, the cuts for next year will be much more devastating than this year.
If we don’t succeed in changing the government’s course, the cuts will be 85 percent for next year, and 92 percent after that.