Protest the cuts in arts funding by the BC Liberals

Write to the BC Liberals about their ill-advised slashing of arts and culture funding.

Use one of these sample letters of protest.

Adapt or even just copy one of the letters below. Note: if you have time, it's always better to put things at least partially into your own words, so that our letters don't look like form letters.

Then either fax or email your letter to the Premier and ministers listed below, as well as to your own MLA, your local municipal politicians, business leaders and anyone else you can think of.

Note: Faxing your letter is better than email; if you don't have fax, email is way better than nothing. (They pay more attention to hard copies, and they don't print emails out.)

If you have other sample letters you'd like to see collected here, send them in and they will be added.

Write to:

Premier Gordon Campbell: Fax: 250 387-0087
gordon.campbell.mla@leg.bc.ca

MLA: Hon. Kevin Krueger: Fax: 250 953-4250
kevin.krueger.mla@leg.bc.ca

MLA: Hon. Rich Coleman: Fax: 250 356-7292
rich.coleman.mla@leg.bc.ca

The three emails together are:

gordon.campbell.mla@leg.bc.ca, kevin.krueger.mla@leg.bc.ca, rich.coleman.mla@leg.bc.ca

_____________________________________________

1. New letter from a writer in the performing arts:

Dear Minister of Finance, Colin Hansen (colin.hansen .mla@leg.bc.ca <mailto:rich.coleman.mla@leg.bc.ca> );
cc; Minister of Tourism, Arts, and Culture, Kevin Krueger ( kevin.krueger.mla@leg.bc.ca <mailto:kevin.krueger.mla@leg.bc.ca> ),
Premier Gordon Campbell (premier@gov.bc.ca):

I am writing to protest the recent devastating and economically indefensible cuts to the BC Arts and culture industry in the past month, which included cuts to the BC Arts and Culture Special Endowment, the re-allocation of the BC Gaming Funding, and cuts from Direct taxpayer investment. As a tax payer, professional artist, and voter, I find these cuts unreasonable and short sighted, as the reversal of the Direct Access cuts to three year contracts proves.

Every industry expects austerity in the midst of global recession. However, every other provincial jurisdiction has seen beyond the optics of "belt-tightening" to the economic benefit of maintaining arts funding in uncertain financial times. While it may not play well to party conservatives, arts funding is actually sound fiscal sense. As the online three-year plan for culture de-funding demonstrates, there is no practical strategy linking arts cuts to the desired pay offs in tourism and economic spin off. These cuts–80%-92% over the next year and a half–are far more severe than any sector should have to face.

Here are some reasons why these cuts should be reversed:

1) The BC Arts Community is a working economy. We are often partially funded by taxpayers, but we also generate money: on every tax dollar invested in Arts and Culture in this province, it returns between $1.04 to $1.36 in revenues ( http://www.tsa.gov.bc.ca/arts_culture/library.htm <http://www.tsa.gov.bc.ca/arts_culture/library.htm> ). The Arts and Culture sector in BC generates 80,000 jobs and $5.2 billion annually (Ministry of Tourism Arts and Culture Service Plans). The City of Vancouver concluded that every dollar spent on arts and cultural activity by the City resulted in almost twelve dollars in economic activity (2007 Cultural Plan). Cutting funding by 80-90% will not only devastate the arts: it will also negatively affect the rest of the economy at large. At this time when jobs and tax dollars are needed, it seems completely counter-productive to cut funding to a sector that is helping to create jobs and generate tax dollars.

2) The upcoming 2010 Olympic Games, which have demanded so much of our tax dollars, include a mandate to support culture: the second pillar of the Olympic Games is Culture; maintaining investment in the sector will allow BC to fulfill its commitments to the Winter Games and to meet its related goals of increasing Cultural Tourism and leaving a legacy in communities across the province.

3) Changing the allocation of the Gaming Funds represents a breach of the promise made to those communities which accepted casinos or slot machines based on the promise that the funds from these organizations would then be funneled back into the arts and their communities.

As my elected representatives in our government, I demand that you ensure the following:

1) any reduction in BC Arts Council investment from 08/09 levels be kept in line with the 7% discretionary grant reduction outlined by the Ministry of Finance in the February 2009 budget. (I think we should be willing to do our part. But I do not believe we should be asked to tolerate sectoral devastation).
2) Your government restores all gaming investments to annual culture/civil society organizations
3) Your government complies with the memorandum of understanding about gaming investments, and its implied social contract with all British Columbians, and commits to reaching the 33% investment level mandated by the memorandum
4) Your government makes a clear and unambiguous public commitment to the arts and culture sector of BC.

Thank you to you and your staff for taking the time in reading this letter, and for all the work that you do to ensure the prosperity and growth of our province.

Best regards,

__________________________________________________________

One writer added this introductory paragraph, mentioning the Olympics - put this into your own words and use it!:

I am writing to strongly oppose your cuts to the arts in British Columbia. I find it unconscionable that you would go back on your promises to fund the arts from gaming money. By your actions it appears that the whole issue of the importance of the arts to our culture and our quality of life in BC seems to have escaped you entirely. I am shocked by these actions. It appears to me and so many others that only the Olympics matter to your government, a bottomless pit for our tax dollars, for a two week extravaganza. This is not acceptable or sustainable.

__________________________________________________________

2. My letter:

Dear Premier Campbell, Ministers Krueger and Coleman,

I am writing to condemn your cuts to arts funding in British Columbia. These cuts are not only both socially and economically unwise, they represent a contradiction of the BC Liberals' own stated policies and election platform, and they constitute last-minute broken monetary promises to workers and organizations in BC.

Arts and culture workers in BC constitute an extremely significant employment and economic sector. Before the cuts, the arts employed well over 75,000 people in BC. The arts funds you promised - both the gaming funds and general revenue funds distributed through the BC Arts Council - supported the salaries of a very significant number of workers. These singularly underpaid yet highly productive workers contribute nearly 5 billion annually to the GDP. This contribution dwarfs the tiny subsidy you are giving the arts this year, which has already been slashed from 47 to 19 million, and will be slashed to a paltry 3.8 million next year. Meanwhile you continue to heavily subsidize other industries which show less productivity and growth. You are forcing the layoffs of some of the most productive workers in the province, in a time of recession.

As Minister Krueger said in July's annual report, B.C.'s creative industries are strong economic drivers; studies by Statistics Canada have demonstrated that money spent on Arts and Culture is a smart investment. For every dollar spent on the arts, $1.36 comes back to the BC government in general revenue; probably much more when you take into account culture's contribution to other industries. For example, the arts play a central role in attracting tourists to our province, and cultural tourists are wealthier and spend more than regular tourists. Your own studies document the fact that most cultural tourists don't visit us to see single events; they come to visit regions that contain culturally vibrant cities.

Quite apart from the convincing economic arguments, including your own, there are the equally convincing social arguments. Studies produced by the federal government, many nations, the UN and your own ministry have definitively proved that a healthy cultural sector is absolutely key to the liveability of cities and towns, to public well-being, peace and tolerance, to general levels of creativity and innovation, to the education and motivation of children, to psychological health and to a general sense of pride and direction.

The province of British Columbia has a long legacy of artistic excellence. Considering our relatively small population, our cultural exports enjoy a disproportionately high status nationally and internationally. Cuts like these will not only destroy our ability to prove ourself on the world stage and attract visitors, they will also result in a creative brain drain that will impoverish our region, harm tourism, and destroy the chances of related growth industries such as film, television, IT and video gaming to choose from a pool of highly creative and productive workers. Furthermore, private funding, if BC even had a culture of that, does not produce the culture of excellence and the quality of training that public funding does. You need to go back and read your own research.

This is a quote from one of your own service plans: "Research has revealed that 75 per cent of Canadians consider the arts and heritage essential to their quality of life, and that community quality of life is the second-most important factor people consider (after salaries) when choosing jobs."

Stimulus works in a recession, and in this case it will ensure BC's best creative minds stay in the province. Once you have devastate the BC cultural sector, it will take a very long time to rebuild it, and all of the industries it feeds will suffer. There is no culture of private arts funding in BC, and in any case, private funding does not produce the excellence that even a small amount of public funding does.

I insist that you reinstate the retracted gaming funds as well as the general revenue funds that support the arts. This is what a majority of British Columbians demand.

Yours sincerely,

__________________________________________________________

Great informative links on this issue:

To understand why the kind of economic policies the BC Liberals have adopted are outdated and are being abandoned almost everywhere else thanks to this financial crash and recession, read this article by Nobel Award-winning economist Paul Krugman in the New York Times titled "How Did Economists Get It So Wrong?"

Facebook group - Organizing against Campbell's Cuts to the Arts

Facebook group - Save BC Arts and Culture

The Tyee - Flex Your Muscles, BC Arts

Georgia Straight on the Independent Media Arts Alliance statement

Restore Arts Funding Now!

Georgia Straight - Ministers in Hiding

Write to the BC Liberals about their ill-advised slashing of arts and culture funding. Use one of these sample letters of protest.

See also this list of helpful links.

1. New letter from a writer in the performing arts:

One writer added this introductory paragraph, mentioning the Olympics - put this into your own words and use it!:

2. My letter:

Great informative links on this issue:

Write to the BC Liberals about their ill-advised slashing of arts and culture funding.

Use one of these sample letters of protest.