Art fights radicalization, boosts diplomacy and creates jobs, says Canada Council head

Ottawacitizen.com
Nov. 17, 2015
By Peter Simpson

Art can help to steer impressionable young people away from religious radicalization, says the director of the Canada Council for the Arts.

Simon Brault also says that a new government on Parliament Hill understands that Canada must restore the art and cultural arm of its international diplomacy, if it wants to have meaningful relationships with other nations.

Brault, who took over as director of the arms-length federal agency last year, said, in an interview Tuesday, that art education is critical in communities where young people can be tempted into radicalism - an issue that’s even more acute in the wake of terrorist attacks last week in Paris and Beirut.

“Right now in Canada we’re debating this question of young people who become radicals, and what we realize is there’s an emptiness there in terms of a sense of purpose in life,” he said.

Research consistently shows that extra-curricular programs in the arts, and in sports, can teach young men that “you can be part of a community, you can find an identity that maybe you don’t have. You can be someone else. You can be a hero, if you are scoring or if you are singing. Arts and sport give individuals the possibility to transcend their own personal conditions, and that is powerful.”

Without such programs there is a vacuum, he said.

“I think that if the arts and education are not there, religion will play that role, and it is playing that role for a lot of people.”

Reaching into diverse communities will be a tenet of how the Canada Council invests in the arts once a restructuring of its programs is complete. “It won’t be the only criteria, but it will be a clearer criteria than it has been in the past,” he said.

Almost 150 granting programs the council uses to distribute money are being reduced to six, making the process more manageable, coherent and modern for artists and groups in the rapidly changing digital world. To date, only the broad outlines of the new, streamlined programs have been made public, but more details will come in December, the council says.

Earlier on Tuesday, Brault told a lunch audience at the Rideau Club that cultural diplomacy is “resurfacing” after the recent federal election. He made oblique references to the election as a demonstration of “optimism as a force,” and in the “resurfacing” of cultural diplomacy.

Later, during our interview, he said art will resume the place in diplomatic affairs that it lost under the Harper government.

“There’ve been a lot of decisions to reduce costs that have had a very negative impact on the possibilities for our embassies around the world to play a stronger role, a more visible role,” he said, while seated in the club’s “Karsh Room” and surrounded by Yousuf Karsh’s iconic photographs of Winston Churchill, Ernest Hemingway, Maria Callas and others. “If you want to attract attention in a world where there is a lot of competition for attention, arts and culture is a way.”

The Liberal government has already sounded the first blast of that restoration of Canadian arts as a diplomatic force, Brault suggested. Only days after the Liberal election victory, two large paintings by Quebec artist Alfred Pellan were returned to their former place in the lobby of the Lester B. Pearson building in Ottawa, home of the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade. The paintings had hung in the prominent location since the building opened in 1973, but were replaced in 2013 with a photograph of the Queen, on the order of Conservative cabinet minister John Baird.

Giving the arts more prominence in global relationships is good for “all the aspects of international relationships that we rely on the create jobs, to generate wealth,” Brault said.

“I don’t see the arts as the ultimate or the only solution to problems in the world, but I think that more and more the complex problems of this world need to have art as one part of the solution.”

The arts as an economic engine, at home and internationally, will get more attention in the council’s new funding structure. In his speech he quoted UNESCO’s assertion that “placing culture at the heart of development policy constitutes an essential investment in the world’s future.”

While “the driver of decisions of the Canada Council needs to remain artistic quality,” he said, adding that all funding decisions must “take into context, in terms of our investment, all the impacts, including the economy, so we’ll talk more about that.

“We have been talking about that in the past, but not measuring so much the real impact. We are very aware that investing public money needs to produce public goods ... wealth, and communities.”

Justin Trudeau campaigned on a promise to double the council’s budget by 2018, a pledge reaffirmed in the new prime minister’s “mandate” letters to his new ministers.

“Over the last few years we heard a lot about the role of the market, the role of private funding,” Brault said. “All that is really important but, still, in a democracy there’s a role for public funding, and that role has been kind of not valued enough, not debated enough. There was not enough light shed on it.”