Defunding Alternative Voices

The Tories' funding cuts to the SummerWorks Festival reflect a broader agenda to silence critics.

It has been a rough year for indie theatre artists and Toronto’s SummerWorks Festival.

The trouble started last August, when Sun Media’s David Akin broke ranks with the media pool. With the rest of the journalists at Rideau Hall agreeing to ask Prime Minister Stephen Harper a question about the long-form census, Akin used one of two English-language questions available to the press to ask about Catherine Frid’s play Homegrown, which had just played at SummerWorks. Harper replied that he was “concerned” that federal funds had gone to support the play about a lawyer’s relationship with a convicted terrorist, even though he had not seen the play.

No one ever got to ask the PM a question about the census.

The news got worse for SummerWorks in the winter, when the very same journalist revealed, through a freedom of information request, that the festival had filed a grant application late. Said journalist then used this faux-bombshell to generate more outrage-inducing headlines for his Harper-aligned media conglomerate. The shoe finally dropped in June, when it was announced that SummerWorks was being denied federal funding – causing ticket prices to increase by 50 per cent.

The response to the defunding of one of the country’s most important generators of contemporary performance art was immediate and significant. In an open letter to artistic directors, playwright Michael Healey called on every theatre that received federal funding to participate in a reading of the play Homegrown as an act of national cultural solidarity.

Two weeks later, over 70 theatres across the country – from Whitehorse to Stratford to Vancouver to Halifax – participated in public readings of the play.

Heritage Minister James Moore, himself an ex–radio host, took to CBC Radio’s Q, where he discussed the decision to cut funding to the indie theatre festival while announcing that 10 times as much federal money would be given to the Walk of Fame Festival, which celebrates important Canadian artists like Alex Trebek. When the host of the show, Jian Gomeshi, questioned him about the decision, Moore responded saying, "People can draw up whatever conspiracy theories they want. The fact is that funding went to another festival, and other festivals are going forward."

Whether or not you entertain conspiracy theories, it’s hard not to perceive this as a move to use cultural funding in much the same way that the Conservative government has used other discretionary monies: a riding-by-riding funding system that shores up Conservative support and abandons those citizens that are unlikely to vote for the party.