ArtsVote BC tries to reach voters at a "tipping point" for cultural community
The BC Alliance for Arts and Culture’s Howard Jang encourages a look into parties’ longterm policies
Howard Jang
EVEN BY USUAL standards, the arts have received little attention during this year’s pandemic-era federal election.
That’s left ArtsVote BC, the nonpartisan initiative by the BC Alliance for Arts and Culture, scrambling to focus on two priorities before polls close on the night of September 20. First, they want to educate artists, arts workers, and arts fans about the platforms of each party. And second, they want to make sure people simply know how to vote in this unprecedented year of mail-in ballots and socially distanced polling stations.
All this, when the arts industry is at what Alliance interim executive director Howard Jang calls a “tipping point” that makes this election crucial.
“So much has happened in the last 18 or 19 months, particularly around not just the issues of the pandemic and the impact on the artists and the arts organizations,” Jang tells Stir, “but also around the larger social issues and the way we are thinking about how we need to engage in the world differently. So it feels like there's a lot more at stake.”
Jang is speaking not just about the need to support artists and arts organizations trying to rebuild from the pandemic, but about a larger acknowledgement that things might never return exactly to the way they were.
“In terms of recovery, we’ve been using the phrase for several months now that there’s ‘light at the end of the tunnel’, but I would certainly say that the light we see at the end of that tunnel is so different than the light that we entered in on,” he observes. “We aren’t really sure what the environment is going to look like.”
And so Jang is encouraging those who have yet to vote in this federal election to look not just at the direct attention party platforms put toward investing in the arts. He warns that the arts play a strong role in wider issues that Canada is grappling with.
“We should start thinking about the ways that arts are a catalyst around the way the world is working today—particularly around areas of social justice and Indigenous knowledge and beliefs,” Jang says. “And when we think of crises that have happened in the world, whether they be world wars or 9/11, the arts community has always rallied around these things and they’ve always been part of the solution for how the world heals itself. But in this case the arts community doesn't have the resources to do that again. And that makes the stakes a lot higher for our community and for where our world is at today.”
Check out the platform breakdowns on ArtsVote BC’s website and you’ll discover that the Greens and NDP would allow arts and culture workers income-tax averaging, or that the Greens are promising to provide protection for Indigenous intellectual and artistic property rights. Elsewhere, the Liberals plan to match ticket sales for performances to compensate for pandemic restrictions on venue capacity. And the Conservatives are creating a Canada Job Surge Plan that would pay up to 50 percent of the salary of new employees for six months.
Jang also says it’s important to look at policies beyond putting out the immediate pandemic “fire” we see in front of us—though that’s certainly important. The Liberals, for instance, have committed to hold a summit, within the first 100 days of re-election, on plans to restart the industry, with $300 million over two years for the Recovery Fund for Heritage, Arts, Culture, and Sport sectors. The NDP also outline a rebuilding package for the performing arts, while the Greens have pledged $25 million in additional funding to aid museums and cultural organizations in both post-pandemic reopening and continuing to offer accessible digital work.
But Jang stresses, “What we’re encouraging our community to really take note of in this election is the longer-term approaches that parties are putting investments in.”
You can find more on the party platforms from the Canadian Arts Coalition.
Related Articles
