By David Maggs, Metcalf Fellow on Arts and Society

A profession we might think about with a little more compassion these days is policymaking. Shaping policy to address the unpredictability, polarization, and decline our country is facing is not an enviable task, and while cultural policy is very much in this boat, it may have an extra paddle in hand. Given stable commitments to arts funding in Canada, the strategic investments we need to learn our way towards brighter futures should be easy to activate — if only we could change an unhelpful assumption that got itself baked into cultural policy over the years. That is, that public funding is seen as a means to protect organizations from changing environments, changing fortunes, and growing precarity. The cost of this assumption is that public funding can become an enabler of stagnation rather than an incentive for adaptation, and the significance of that cost is rising steeply as the world transforms itself without us.

A Fork in the Road

During the pandemic, Canada’s cultural sector arrived at a fork in the road. Were we going to approach the event as a disruption to viable operations or as a reprieve from pre-existing conditions of decline? Was Covid cruelly interrupting a functioning system? Or mercifully pausing conditions of deepening precarity? While there was truth to both perspectives, it was frustrating to see most of the rhetoric and policymaking focus on the former, wrapping us in a comforting story of sudden disruption amidst functional operations. Disruption was rampant, yes. And we know those stories well. But has anyone tracked the data on how many cultural organizations actually balanced their books for the first time in decades during the pandemic?

Rather than simply interrupting a functioning system, the pandemic offered our accelerating decline an unprecedented opportunity, complete with the time and resources to pursue deep strategic adaptations. Seeing it primarily as disruption abdicated responsibility for the challenges we were facing before Covid, squandering the chance to do something about them while hoping things would somehow magically “build back better” on their own.

We stumbled out of the pandemic burning up once-in-a-generation funding on our back to business-as-usual strategy, and the rest is now painfully familiar. By 2024, The Globe and Mail, Toronto Star, The Local, Canadaland, Calgary Herald, Maclean’s and many other papers and podcasts from across the country were busy documenting an unfolding crisis in Canada’s cultural sector.

I keep turning over this sequence of events in my mind because the lessons it holds for us seem both numerous, and, as far as I can tell, unlearned. How can we watch that opportunity pass by, see its immediate consequences playing out around us now, and not find ourselves scrambling to do something different? That is, to not find ourselves making the same mistake all over again by maintaining a policy environment that does more to enable stagnation than to incentivize change.

The Silver Lining

The good news is that while our actions have been slow to align with the moment we are in, our awareness is certainly getting there. In talking to a lot of different practitioners and policymakers over the past year, there is a growing appreciation of having missed an important opportunity during the pandemic, of having told ourselves comforting but unhelpful tales, and of facing circumstances for which we are increasingly unprepared. Rachel Penny, Senior Producer at Factory Theatre said in a gathering of Toronto companies recently, “the systems we are working in have changed so much that the knowledge we hold is out of date.” Jonathan Christenson of Catalyst Theatre in Edmonton was even more candid during a recent Zoom call. “What used to work simply is not working anymore.”

While there is plenty of nuance to the observations people are making within the sector right now, I see this growing awareness revolving around three broad insights: We can’t reboot the model. Money isn’t the problem. Sustainability is a systems affair.

We can’t reboot the model

We saw in those early post-pandemic years, a hope that we could reboot the model — that the pandemic had simply unplugged the sector, and all we had to do was plug it back in and everything that wasn’t working, suddenly would. As we realize this strategy isn’t viable, we turn increasingly to an obvious question: How do we figure out what will work? Here we see the need for stronger experimentation at scale, a broad range of coordinated, collective learning across the sector. Rather than shaping policy and practice that puts our heads down and gets us back to doing the things we know how to do, we need programs that enable the opposite — that help us lift our heads up instead, so we can look around and start learning things we don’t know how to do, instead.

Money isn’t the problem

One of the more sacrosanct beliefs in Canada’s cultural sector is that all we need is more money. So at first glance, the past decade seems to have given us what we needed? Most provincial arts council budgets increased, the Canada Council budget doubled, and other regional funders saw even larger increases. So, to find Canada’s cultural sector facing historic levels of precarity following historic levels of investment should make us suspicious that money is all we need. Yet given our long preoccupation with this belief, we may have blunted our ability to be precise and insightful about what, exactly, we do need. Different leadership? Stronger board governance? Sharper business and entrepreneurial skills? More accountability to audiences, communities, and markets? Different platforms? Different offerings? None of the above? Money will be essential to transformative efforts, of course, but if we can’t figure out what those actions need to be, money will buy us nothing more than a slower pace of decline.

Sustainability is a systems affair

Finally, the path our sector has taken towards sustainability has largely been through fostering organizational growth. Despite our love of ecological metaphors, we struggle to value, relate to, or even understand ourselves as a system. Without the ability to do so, you can pour funding into the sector and still not end up with a resilient system where organizations thrive through dynamic and enriching exchanges of value, talent, intellectual property, and expertise. Instead, you get a lot of organizations scrambling to survive in a system so degraded that the battle gets more uphill everyday. Learning to intervene in broader dimensions of systemic health rather than keeping organizations on their feet no matter which way the cold winds blow represents a central policy challenge of our day.

What’s Holding Us Back?

If these, and other insights are now washing through the sector with refreshing clarity, why aren’t they showing up as policies and programs? Why are things going in the opposite direction instead? For example, why, last year, did we see major arts funders cut their experimentation programs and move that money into preserving the status quo instead? Just when it was time to get in our boats and head off in new directions, we got out and burned our paddles for a bit of warmth instead.

Another way to think about this is to wonder why policymakers are asking artists and organizations to do things differently without doing anything different themselves. As Patti Pon of Calgary Arts Development said, “how can we ask artists to innovate if we policymakers aren’t willing to take the same risks?”

These questions are not rhetorical, and I am not asking them to shame our policymakers. Having talked to a lot of them in recent years, it is clear most of them know something radically different is needed, and most of them want to do it. So why don’t they act on what they know? Of all the reasons this might be the case, the most regrettable may simply be fear, of blowback, of anger, of outrage — from us, the sector, the artists, the organizations, the practitioners.

We all know that we can’t reboot the model, that money isn’t the problem, and that a systems approach is crucial to our survival. We know this, and we share this understanding amongst ourselves. But when we talk to funders and policymakers, do we invite them to respond progressively to these insights and help us find collective ways to thrive in new worlds? Or do we pressure them to keep the old world going — if just for our individual organizations and needs — no matter how unrealistic and counterproductive that might be for our collective futures? When it comes to what we invite and encourage our policymakers to do, rarely do we act on what we know either.

A Duty to Act

Our policy community knows it is facing the challenge to construct a bold, future-focused vision, that redirects resources away from battening down the hatches and towards forging new paths into compelling futures. Everyone in Canada’s cultural sector knows that something fundamental is broken. I hear it all the time now, everywhere I go. Broken, broken, broken. It’s on everyone’s lips. But a policy response designed to preserve broken things will inspire nobody (and won’t work).

Clearly, we need more out of our cultural policy community. Too much policymaking is motivated by protecting the broken, avoiding the anger, and enabling the unsustainable. We need to reorient a much larger portion of policymaking and funding away from protecting organizations from the inability to adapt and change, and towards incentivizing and de-risking experiments in transformation.

But we cannot expect them to do this without our help. And by god, they bloody well deserve it. Throughout their existence they have been cheering us on, working anonymously and tirelessly behind the scenes for our successes, and encouraging our boldest, wildest, dreamiest dreams. Now it’s our turn to do the same for theirs. Tell them to go for it, tell them not to fear our anger, tell them we’ll have their backs when they try something new. Protecting us from short-term pain in direct cost to long-term viability is a failure of vision, courage, and duty. Go hug your local cultural policymaker today, and tell them this is the arts, and we’re ready for something daring.