By David Maggs, Metcalf Fellow on Arts and Society
As Canadian as…
We started this essay series on Arts & Social Finance with the claim that the standard ways of making sense of our lives are falling short of the realities we now face. A parallel disconnect has come for Canada too, where standard nation-building strategies are also falling short of their present realities, thrusting “Canadian-ness” into action at every turn, even if it means letting that delicious bourbon gather dust upon its shelf.
But what is Canadian-ness? What, exactly are these elbows up to defend?
Bless the CBC — it tried to figure this out years ago, charging its listenership with the urgent task to find the Canadian equivalent of “as American as apple pie.” I confess, I can’t actually remember if it was the winning response or not, but the one I have never managed to forget?
“As Canadian as possible, given the circumstances.”
Until recently, such an elliptical correlative degree construction consisting of a comparative adjective phrase modified by a supplementary non-finite participial clause would have delighted the nation. We would have been (quietly) proud of so indeterminate, relational, and contestable an identity. And yet now it sounds as responsible as resting our nation’s future on a gleeful faith in American virtue.
Watching Canada rebuild its nationalism feels like watching a friend get divorced. Shattered illusions, harsher realities, big existential questions, and, of course, lots and lots of shopping. New fighter jets, new data centres, new nuclear reactors, new mines, a new container port, and a bunch of other stuff waiting for the Major Projects Office to cave in and just say “oh, alright, why not?” Let’s be honest with ourselves Canada, let’s stop calling it the Major Projects Office and give it its proper name. The Department of a Whole New You? The National Midlife Crisis Bureau?
While Canada’s cultural sector has been eager to play our part in this cultural sovereignty moment, we know we aren’t firing on all cylinders these days, with budgets and leadership stretched to their breaking points. While we may still want to be the biggest, most important force of identity, value, belonging, and sovereignty in all the land, we need to start imagining some plausible strategies to actually get ourselves there.
A Major Project of Our Own?
How about a major project of our own? Something new, something transformative, something that isn’t more of the same urgency to hold on to status quo, but that brings a vision of moving beyond precarity, beyond growing grant dependence, beyond the limits of what we think cultural nonprofits can and should be doing in their communities?
Arts & Social Finance is a strategy to develop national investment infrastructure designed to support the imaginative visions of our cultural sector while attracting new capital to those visions, and applying new capacity-building to help them succeed. If we insist that cultural sovereignty is not a luxury, then we need infrastructure proportionate to that claim — cheap, patient capital paired with rigorous readiness supports and a system capable of learning at a national scale.
A Taste for Scarcity?
But oh, how we flinch at anything so grand. Our faces scrunch, we make cautionary noises, tsk at the audacity, or huff indignantly into the air. Why? Is it because we know better? A strategic awareness that has long learned the errors of scope and scale? Canada is a progressive place, a country of careful calibration. We hedge. We consult. We pilot and reflect. And in process we trust. And trust. And trust. (And then reach for more of those supplementary non-finite participial clauses so that we feel okay about the outcomes, or lack thereof.)
We aren’t alone. In their best-seller Abundance (2025), Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson show that societies like Canada seek progress not by finding ways to make good things happen, but by finding ways to prevent bad things from occurring. We regulate, constrain, veto, and prevent. We multiply oversight, expand consultation, and extend procedural frameworks. As a result, progressive cultures develop the tastes and strategies that excel at critique and calibration but struggle with development and delivery. As their book reveals in exploring major projects like housing, transportation, and energy transitions, trying to make sure that nothing goes wrong is a great way to ensure that nothing goes anywhere.
In this mindset of scarcity, it is important that we recognize a basic crisis of faith. A structural disbelief in better things to come. Good things are what you can only do your best to hang on to as much as possible. Good things are what you develop policies, procedures, and programs to prevent from eroding further. But good things are not what you can bring about. Good things cannot be grown, or nurtured. They are scarce and must never be allowed to die no matter how feeble they become, because we know that nothing good will grow back in their place.
How much does this inform the governing spirit of cultural policy in Canada? When we tsk and huff at talk of a national cultural fund that pledges transformative impacts or reduction in precarity, limits, and duress, our discomfort may be less strategic and more dispositional. A matter of taste, where hesitancy, modesty, and caution are traits we’ve learned to display amongst our peers like good manners.
Working at the Scale of the Problem
They are not, however, the surest path to progress on all fronts, particularly in moments of significant disruption such as these. If we are trying to address structural precarity across a national sector, then the intervention needs to operate at structural and national scales. Something can be the right idea at the right time in the right place with the right people doing the right things — and yet still fall short of its larger effects if mismatched to the system it seeks to influence.
Canada’s cultural sector is not facing localized funding gaps that can be addressed through targeted grant allocations. We are facing a system that converts grant-based supports into renewable fragility. It is a pattern that will not be sufficiently addressed by marginal adjustments but by efforts, instruments, and vision proportionate to the problem. As we attempt to scale Arts & Social Finance to the challenges it is designed to confront, consider the following:
- Lowering Cost, Raising Quality
When capital pools are small, everything becomes expensive. Legal work, due diligence, administration, monitoring — the overhead per dollar of lending is high, and that cost is either passed on to borrowers or steadily collapses the initiative. Scale reduces the cost of capital, making loans more affordable and less burdensome for cultural organizations. Scale allows for a stronger administrative backbone. Instead of delivering the initiative off the side of someone’s desk, scale sustains experienced teams, thoughtful underwriting, and meaningful post-investment support. - Reducing and Absorbing Risk
Small funds are cautious, as one failed investment can destabilize the entire vehicle. A large fund can absorb risk across a diversified portfolio spanning regions, disciplines, revenue models, and project types. A substantial first-loss capital base attracts new capital by signaling stability and resilience to investors. With that, investment committees gain confidence to look beyond narrow limits of financial return, allowing cultural and social returns to feature in decision-making. - Attracting New Capital
If we want to bring new money into the sector, we need to signal stability. With a clear vehicle, transparent governance, and sufficient scale to manage risk, new forms of capital can begin to participate. As private sponsorship continues its “capital flight” from the sector, a national fund offers a structured opportunity to rebuild relationships between culture and capital that go beyond narrowing squabbles over remaining sponsorship opportunities. - Strengthening Funding Landscape
A national fund can weave itself into existing programs to strengthen the broader resourcing landscape. For example, if loans are integrated into capital projects, organizations have to be much more clear and precise in their operational plans, in contrast to the often vague or inflated descriptions that can satisfy capital grant programs. Blending finance can make granting smarter as due diligence from investment adds complementary dimensions to current resource distribution priorities. - Learning and Market-Building
In the essay on grant dependence, UK research showed an organization’s capacity for learning to be more predictive of precarity than revenue mix alone. Arts & Social Finance requires changes to mindset and behaviour. Organizations must learn to assess risk differently, design revenue-generating activity, manage repayment schedules, integrate financial discipline, and navigate shifting and drifting of mission. Scale allows us to convert isolated experimentation into broader sectoral insight, strengthening success, derisking innovation, while building the broader market for further investment. Imagine if the pathways from successful creative production to international commercialization were familiar, structured, and supported? That we could shift from occasional good luck to clearer strategies for giving creative outputs broader cultural reach and wider markets?
Building National Things
While this could make scale sound obvious, it shouldn’t make it sound easy. To make cheap capital available to organizations, while supporting them through a transformation of their business models and operational capacities, Arts & Social Finance faces the challenge of any national project: provincial and territorial collaboration. Lending to arts organizations at cheaper than market rates while funding significant capacity-building to help bring significant change to the sector will take coordinated effort, requiring a combination of reasonable sticks and irresistible carrots.
Stick: Ideally, for Arts & Social Finance’s lending and granting programs to be available to organizations in a particular region, that region would put capital into the mix. The more provincial and territorial participation, the cheaper the capital and the stronger the supports available to everyone.
Carrot: In this way, minimal provincial and territorial contributions access significant amounts of capital, along with the capacity-building, collective learning, and wraparound supports that come with it. High-leverage, one-time investments unlock new resources and new supports in pursuit of a sector that is less grant-dependent, more risk-tolerant, and — as we will explore — in some instances, more relevant to the cultural needs of its communities.
We are, however, building Arts & Social Finance with acute awareness of regional budgeting challenges, and are beginning dialogue with the provinces and territories to ensure as much participation as possible.
Given the Circumstances…
Like much of Canadian society, our cultural sector stands perched on the edge of a different world. The pressures are not episodic, but structural. Capital is consolidating. Platforms are centralizing. Middle powers are facing the choice of alignment or erasure. Incremental adjustments to systemic risk may be more avoidant than prudent given the circumstances.
Our sector has spent the last decade securing historic installments of public funding. Those increases sustained organizations, rectified exclusions, and diversified participation. But they failed to address the underlying mechanics delivering us into precarity. If we persist in treating scale as indulgence, redesign as betrayal, and obsolescence as failure, scarcity will remain the taste and strategy of our domain.
Arts & Social Finance is not an argument for abandoning or reducing grants. It is an argument for abundance — for shedding the scarcity mindset, dropping the priority of harm reduction as the noble path to good, and believing in the generative forces of the art-society relationship. Arts & Social Finance is a recognition that if culture is to stand alongside energy, data, infrastructure, and defence as a component of national sovereignty, then it must be structured like one. Scarcity is our instinct; abundance must become our strategy.
