Toronto City Council’s Executive Committee frequently hears ardent deputations but last week’s entreaties on the subject of strategies for arts and culture funding were surely among the most heartfelt in recent sessions. In fact, Mayor Miller, commenting on remarks made by young Scarborough arts advocate Lakesha Bambury, above, noted that, “This is the first time in about eight Executive Committee meetings that the whole room has been silent for a deputant and that’s because of the power of what you said. So thank you.”
Bambury’s plea for continued and increased funding to grassroots local arts service organizations (LASOs) was sandwiched by impassioned remarks from actors Albert Schultz and R.H. Thomson, as well as from TIFF’s Cameron Bailey and the National Ballet’s Karen Kain, among others.
Jim Fleck, a representative of the business community, reminded Committee members that “having a significant cultural infrastructure [is] a way to attract and retain high tech people . . . these are highly mobile workers, Silicon Valley is after them, Austin, Texas, is after them and we can’t provide the same weather but at least we can try and provide the cultural amenities that are so important to the quality of life.”
“Money to the arts is not a gift,” concluded Fleck, “it’s an investment.”
The subject of funding for arts and culture is being revisited as part of the 2011 Budget process. With two years to go before the City’s 2003 Culture Plan is fulfilled, funding to the arts is stalled at $18 per capita, well short of the Council-approved target of $25 per capita: Montreal, by comparison, invests $33 per capita in culture.
The funding recommendations put forward at Toronto’s Executive Committee August 16 were approved and will be voted on tomorrow or Thursday as part of the final session of the current City Council. There’s no guarantee that the incoming Council and new mayor (to be elected on October 25) will follow-through on current Council commitments but the decision to continue moving toward the $25 investment target has been City policy for most of the past decade.
As Lakesha Bambury told Executive Committee last Monday, “I went to Scarborough Arts Council and told them, ‘I need help.’ They sent me to places where I could get funding; they are actually my mentors because they know how to run an organization, I don’t. They gave me all the ideas I needed. Organizations like this really need funding because without it they wouldn’t be able to help youth like me.”
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Council voted nearly unanimously to support the recommendations and move toward the $25 per capita target for arts and culture funding; only one vote against.