I.A.M. Musing About…

The awareness of another minority government for incumbent Prime Minister Stephen Harper frustrated and saddened me, as the word-on-the-street prior to me leaving home was that it was not only going to be incredibly close — which wasn’t the case in the end, as the minority position for the Conservative Party was strengthened by gains in Ontario — but the election would see the ruling party voted against in numbers un-expected and due to the seemingly daft statements of the Party’s leader about the funding of the arts in general, and others about the economy which defied comprehension.

With the world’s financial crisis echoing at its loudest around the chambers of banks, financial institutions, and corporate offices large and small, Prime Minister Harper stating that “Canada’s economy is strong; we are not going to experience a recession in this country” flies in the face of not only what average Canadian citizens are experiencing at that time, but seemingly is blind to the fact that the country he was campaigning to remain leader for is the single largest trading partner for the United States of America, so ‘where goeth the USA, thus goeth us’; a fact that seems to escape the American Government on a regular basis, so perhaps its apt we should do so as well, in a gesture of ‘turn-about is fair play’. Invoking the spirit of English Prime Minister Lloyd George, Prime Minister Harper was casting himself in the role of single-handed economic guardian of the nation, stopping the economic crises spreading from the USA across the world’s longest un-defended border by sheer will alone. Like Gandalf resolute before the Balrog, he stood upon the bridge and cried, “You shall not pass!”

The arts, to him anyway, is something of a luxurious and non-important extra for the benefit of corporate sponsorship and tax discounts; instead of a means of expression for a country, a definition of the people and their lives, the mirror of reality reflecting back their hopes, struggles, aspirations, and both their successes as well as their defeats. Unlike what must be Mr. Harper’s driving attitude regarding work and play, most of the ‘average Canadians’ as he repeatedly referred to during the campaign do not rise every day with their single thought being work work and more work.

While I am not the best living advocate of the healthy philosophy of ‘working to live’, Mr. Harper not only ignores this attitude, but also casts to the side of the road the simple economic fact that a full ten-percent of Canada’s GNP is created by the Cultural Sector through things like the cinema, the television programmes, ballets, and stage productions who all require sets to be built, lights to be hung and operated, people to be fed and housed while working, adverts designed to promote them, tickets to be printed and sold and collected, and on and on. The actors at the ‘rich galas’ he mentioned in his frankly stumbling comments about the funding cuts his party accomplished are only the most glamorous portion of the army of individuals responsible for the presentations on stage and screens. Add the people in galleries hanging paintings and moving sculptures, the people in book stores and libraries discussing and explaining books created for all ages and reading levels, plus all the people who supply raw materials to those efforts as well as the ones earlier, and you wonder what sort of elitist, white-collar industry notion of ‘real life’ this blinker-eyed Ozzie and Harriet exponent has.

He’s entitled to his opinion, obviously; I am also entirely free to have the opinion he is woefully un-clear on the concept of what ‘culture’ is, as well as its place in every facet of everyone’s lives each and every day.

This entry was posted on Saturday, October 25th, 2008 at 1:38 pm and is filed under CANADA, NEWS, THINKINESS. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.