ARTS AND CULTURE: GETTING HIGH WITH A LITTLE HELP...

Artitorial

If you look at the world a certain way, you'll see that news items --and
other things --have a ways of overlapping that look like, feel like, smell
like, some sort of divine message.

The Liberal cabinet announcement came to me first, via email, from two
concerned sectors. Arts, which has always been tagged at the end of
portfolios like Small Business, Tourism, and Culture or Parks, Recreation
and Culture, has been buried in a portfolio that might as well be Kitchen
Sinks, Assorted Flotsam, and Culture.

Responsibilities for the Ministry of Community, Aboriginal and Women's
Services include a staggering 53 specific and disparate entries, from the
obvious to things like municipal affairs, leaky condos, immigration policy,
seniors, fire commission, volunteers, water and sewers, child care,
housing, arts, sports, libraries, and heritage conservation, to touch on a
few. Even the board of the B.C. Festival of the Arts --the largest arts
festival in Canada --is part of this hodgepodge. By lumping us all
together, it suggests an undervaluing of the whole works; I am equally
concerned for anyone on the list. Go to
http://www.gov.bc.ca/bcgov/popt/summary/ for the full inventory.

I was mildly worried when I read the short version of the Liberal platform
and found no reference to arts and culture. Now I'm really worried. I'm
worried for arts, and museums, and libraries, and the things I hold dear.
With a 25 percent tax cut on the doorstep, my fear is that culture, in the
broad sense, will be at the cinch-end of the belt-tightening, as always.
Grants to arts councils have remained the same for 23 years; no one should
go 23 years without a raise. I read the list, and shook my head.

Then I picked up the NDN and read about the substantial pot bust in
Fairview, and an epiphany struck.

Because while I don't have any strong ethical objections to the growing of
marijuana, I have strong ethical objections to it's tax-exempt status. It
is something that has bothered me for a long time.

If you make a buck in the marketplace, I believe, you are obliged to put
some of it back, and that doesn't mean taking yourself to Costa Rica every
winter. People who run grow-operations should be obliged to pay out to
charity at least as much as they'd pay to Revenue Canada, on an honour system.

Many may already be quietly donating money to good causes. Don't think for
a minute that people who use marijuana are unethical; there are certainly
no more unethical people in that community than there are in, say, politics
- --but then, perhaps I've just negated my own point.

But the real point is that charity, and good example, begins at home.

I hereby propose that grow-ops pay their tithe to the larger community
through charitable donations, or barring that, that all beleagured sectors
- --health, education, arts and culture --begin their own grow-ops in order
to address the shortfalls in government funding. That way, a fair portion
of profits will go straight to charities and social services. Hospitals
would save a bundle on demerol, too.

With such an apparently disinterested government, what other recourse do we
have?

Then I picked up the Saturday Vancouver Sun and read that our own
MLA-elect, according to an article by Ian Mulgrew, made a pitch for a
federal contract to grow a national supply. The article mentions
Suffredine, the Kootenays, and even Holy Smoke, like comfortable
bedfellows. Surely we're all just a handshake from settling our differences.

And I'm positive there is potential benefit here for underfunded sectors,
such as culture, whether it's through over-the-counter taxation or
under-the-table fundraising. It's healthier than a tobacco sponsorship, and
more politically correct.

Okay, yeah, I'm kidding. But the NCP and the RCMP and everyone else knows
that grow-ops are not going to go away. Neither are the Liberals, for at
least four years. But neither, too, are arts and culture, because they are
just as pervasive as our economically potent little green weed.

I hope that cabinet is still shuffling, the portfolios shaking out, and
that this first lump-'em-all-together approach is just a little misguided
haste, soon to be addressed. In the meantime, we'll lobby for that pay
raise and find legal ways to fundraise for our causes, because that's what
we do.

But purveyors of subversive Kootenay greenstuff can make anonymous
donations any time they like. Now THAT would be divine.