If the above headline appeared in prairie dog it would be shortened to two words. I’ll leave it to you to figure out which word would be deleted. But the article appeared in today’s Leader-Post. Here’s a link.
If you read the article, which is by Postmedia’s Jamie Portman, you’ll learn that after getting in a huge amount of hotwater last election for dismissing the arts as a niche area that ordinary Canadians didn’t give a rat’s ass about, the Harper Conservatives have rebuffed numerous opportunities in this election campaign to articulate their policy on the arts.
Last election, Harper went beyond dismissing the arts (which as a sector, Portman notes, now employs over 630,000 Canadians and represents 7.4 per cent of the GDP), he also essentially slandered artists by saying that they hobknobbed at rich galas where they whined about their funding. In Quebec, in particular, and in larger centres like Toronto and Vancouver, that earned him the wrath of artists and their supporters, and quite likely cost him a majority government.
This time around, the Conservatives have adopted a head-in-the-sand approach to the arts although their vow to conduct a strategic review of spending has raised concerns about what havoc a future Conservative majority government might wreak on the arts sector.
To close, here’s a link to an Exclaim! news report about a song on Regina pop-rock band Library Voices’ upcoming album Summer Lust called “The Prime Minister’s Daughter” that protests cuts to arts funding that were made by the previous Harper administration. There’s a second link at the bottom of the article where you can download the song and give it a listen.
