How much support do federal and provincial arts funding bodies provide to Canadian creators in the “elbows up” era as compared to a decade ago, or even a half-century ago?
The Globe and Mail contacted seven of these crucial arts and culture agencies for historic budget numbers and adjusted them into today’s dollars with the Bank of Canada’s inflation calculator. If they weren’t around in their current form in 1975, we looked at their first available numbers. Per capita figures were calculated with population estimates from Statistics Canada.
Some conclusions: At least since the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec was created, that province has always funded its arts per capita better than anywhere else in Canada – and now, is more than twice as generous as any of the other provinces surveyed. Meanwhile, the Ontario Arts Council has always penny-pinched on the arts as compared to its peers, and having neither adjusted for population growth nor inflation over the past decade, is today the most miserly of them all.