Sean Bickerton

Here are ten heartfelt wishes for our city in 2010:

1. That we host one of the most successful Olympics & Paralympics in history; that credit is shared with everyone that did the heavy lifting to make it happen; and that Canada owns the podium throughout!

2. That the city recognizes its mistake and restores the decades-old Vancouver minimum standard of 2.75 acres of parkland for every 1000 residents for all new development.

3. That we take simple steps to make Vancouver a more pedestrian-friendly city.

4. That the Mayor releases a comprehensive and credible plan to match his promise to end homelessness in the next five years.

5. That the entire city comes together in order to develop the badly missing infrastructure necessary to sustain the vibrant arts sector of our economy.

6. An end to STIR-type corporate giveaways with no public benefit just to build market-rental housing instead of subsidized or stabilized rentals.

7. The restoration of regular order, courtesy and an atmosphere of respect in City Hall.

8. That the viaducts come down, a thousand parks bloom in their place, and Chinatown is completely revitalized.

9. That the City of Vancouver starts to play its expected role in leading Metro Vancouver  into the future and begins by repairing damaged ties with the UBC Endowment Lands.

10. That the Blue Moon that ushered in 2010 heralds a booming, broad-based economic recovery lifting all boats!

UPDATE 1/2/10:  (Revised)

NEWS UPDATE ADDED 12/21/09 2:01 pm

I’m pleased to report that VANOC has issued a formal apology to Maestro Bramwell Tovey and the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra for “putting it in an ‘untenable’ position” according to today’s report from The Globe and Mail by David Ebner.

Nonetheless, it remains deeply troubling that our own grammy-award winning orchestra and internationally celebrated Music Director Bramwell Tovey will not be featured during the Opening Ceremonies seen around the world.

We were told the Olympics would showcase our city and province to the entire planet. So why are they missing this opportunity to showcase one of our greatest cultural crown jewels, the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra?

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(POSTSCRIPT ADDED BELOW ON 12/21/09 11:01 AM)

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ORIGINAL ARTICLE 12/19/09

Today The Globe and Mail published an article by Marsha Lederman and Rod Mickleburgh entitled The Day The Music Died, which begins:

As the Winter Olympics near, the Games are being hit by defections from the opening and closing ceremonies.

The Grammy-winning Vancouver Symphony Orchestra and its celebrated conductor Bramwell Tovey walked away from the opening ceremonies this week after being asked to prerecord music that would then be mimed by others during the live, lavish spectacle. Yesterday, Mr. Tovey called the plan fraudulent, likening it to Canadian sprinter Ben Johnson’s “faux gold medal” at the 1988 Summer Olympics. Mr. Johnson was stripped of his medal when he tested positive for performance-enhancing drugs. “In our field, for you to plagiarize somebody else’s recording – to mime it and pretend that it’s you – is absolutely on a par with Ben Johnson’s fraud. … It’s non-Olympian in spirit and VANOC really should have known better.”

Mr. Tovey, meanwhile, said VANOC’s plan to have an orchestral segment mimed during the opening ceremonies reminded him of the furor over lip-synching by a young girl at the 2008 Summer Olympics. “I said ‘no’ to VANOC, because I felt it was dishonest. I thought it was fraudulent. It’s promoted with public money, and I didn’t want anything to do with this kind of dishonest practice.” After the Beijing lip-synching controversy, B.C. Premier Gordon Campbell vowed there would be no lip-synching during Vancouver’s opening ceremonies.

But that was then. Now we learn that instead of setting a new low, the 2008 Olympics set a new Olympic standard for muzzling dissent and the Milli Vanilli-style faux-performance embraced by those producing Vancouver’s opening ceremonies.

On my way to hear Renee Fleming’s spectacular recital at the Orpheum Theatre last night, I stopped by the ThinkCity debate on the 2010 City Budget in order to deliver the NPA response, and to hear Paul Sullivan of the Fair Tax Coalition and Professor Douglas McArthur spar over the new budget.

It was highly educational, quite entertaining and there was a thorough and lively exchange of views between the two main proponents and the audience.

It was disappointing that Vision didn’t see fit to send a representative to the debate after the strong support they received from ThinkCity before the election. I felt the comments offered by the COPE representative and myself as the NPA representative added value to the discussion and addressed points not raised in the debate.

My own remarks follow:

My name is Sean Bickerton and I speak today as a member of the Board of Directors of the Non-Partisan Association, as a former candidate for City Council during the last civic election, a small business owner and resident of Vancouver.

We’re told that our city is facing a $60,000,000 budget shortfall, and that after identifying $30,000,000 in one-off savings, our Mayor is now looking to identify an additional $30,000,000 in savings through staff and program cuts. I feel it’s a shame we didn’t know about this shortfall before they started firing the stop non-political staff at City Hall, costing taxpayers millions in severance packages and new-hire incentives.

Nonetheless, while alarming, the budget crisis offers an unprecedented opportunity to bring the city together and re-examine our priorities and I commend ThinkCity for doing exactly that this evening. Working together and taking the best ideas offered, we could implement far-reaching, imaginative solutions that would avoid painful cuts to critical services while saving the city money in the long run, not just this budget cycle.

Unfortunately, though, consultation has been poor at best, and Mayor Robertson is resorting instead to short-term, short-sighted measures that don’t change the fundamentals, and could leave us in bad shape for years to come.

It is particularly painful to see hours at libraries, sports facilities and community centres being cut, and our beloved McMillan-Bloedel Conservatory axed when alternative financing is available. If we don’t invest in our youth and those facing challenges today, we will pay an even greater price for that neglect long into the future.

Where I agree with the Mayor is the need to keep any tax increase under 2% during hard times. I also agree with continuing the politically difficult tax shift from small businesses at least, which are currently taxed on their property at the highest rate in Canada. Small businesses generate 60% of all new jobs, and in a city with few head offices, we need to foster small business and entrepreneurship.

I’m also pleased to see Mayor Robertson’s administration restore its support for our embattled arts sector after cutting the arts budget 9% his first year in office. The arts are vital to Vancouver’s creative economy and need our support right now.

I’m so concerned about the state of the arts in Vancouver that I’m hosting a high-levl review on January 30 in the Revue Stage at the Arts Club Theatre on Granville Island. I encourage you to join a blue-ribbon panel of top leaders in the City’s Arts, Business and Funding communities for a review of the city’s inadequate arts infrastructure alongside a parallel effort to address the need for more sustainable funding models in these wrenching economic times. So I want to salute Council’s renewed arts support in this context.

But where I find myself in disagreement with the Mayor’s misplaced priorities is with his insistence on hiring 100 new police officers at a cost of $12,000,000 a year when we already have the highest number of police per capita in Canada and crime rates have droped 20% over the past four years.

There is a better solution. Our police spend 1/3 of their time dealing with mental-health-related issues. Why not hire ten social workers to ensure that two are on call 24/7 working in direct support of the police, freeing them for more urgent priorities? It would cost less than $1,000,000 / year instead of $12,000,000, and the net savings of $11,000,000 equals 1/3 of the total savings the Mayor is seeking.

Other savings opportunities abound. Peter Ladner reports in Business In Vancouver Magazine that there are $30,000,000 in unpaid fines and bylaw violations owing to the city, and suggests asking the the province to stop renewing drivers licenses until all city fines are paid. That would solve the problem in one stroke.

He also suggests asking all city managers to forego salary increases next year, which would produce $1.5 million in savings. If the unions would agree to do the same – in exchange for no staff layoffs – that would produce another $20,000,000 in savings.

For me, cutting libraries and parks while adding 100 additional police we don’t need makes absolutely no sense and may generate a self-fulfilling prophecy of a lost generation. I urge Mayor Robertson and Council to re-think these wrong-headed priorities and bring the city together instead of dividing us with short-sighted cuts to core services.

My thanks to ThinkCity for bringing us together this evening, and my thanks to you for your kind attention.

Thank you!

I first heard Grammy Award-winning Soprano Renee Fleming singing Strauss’ Four Last Songs at Carnegie Hall as part of a fundraising concert for Classical Action: Performing Arts Against AIDS. I’ve never forgotten the beauty of her voice since. She is simply one of the greatest singers on the face of this earth.

Musical America‘s Vocalist of the Year in 1997, Renee Fleming also received the inaugural 1996 Solti Prize from L’Academie du Disque Lyrique. Her recording of American arias, I Want Magic, recorded in New York with James Levine and the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra was named “Record of the Month”, by Gramophone Magazine, naming her in the review as one of the all-time greats.

Repértoire Magazine reviewed the recording as “The most beautiful manifesto imaginable for the last fifty years of American operatic creation.” The New York Times wrote: “Ravishing melodies, ravishingly sung…Ms. Fleming convincingly gives lie to those who maintain that the golden age of singing is past.”

UPDATED 9/25/09 (see related articles below)

In just five months, thousands of the world’s greatest athletes will be gathered inside BC Place from every corner of the globe, all of the world’s nations standing together, waiting to compete peacefully on a global Vancouver stage.

Imagine, if you will, the opening ceremonies for those 2010 Olympic Winter Games, with tens of thousands of spectators from more than a hundred countries waiting expectantly in the stands for those first electrifying strains of the Olympic fanfare. Picture the sight of that massive crowd, packed to the rafters. Think about the billion-plus viewers watching on TV and online for the lighting of that ancient torch, symbol of Athens, cradle of democracy.

Now imagine that … but without any music. Without any musicians. Without any lighting or choreography or dance or movement. Without costumes, sets or decorations. Without performance of any kind – no one to entertain or enlighten us. No text or symbolic meaning, no poetry, no actor’s soaring rhetoric  … nothing.

What are we left with? A cold, dark stadium of athletes standing in silence listening to politicians give speeches. As much as I love politics, that has to be one of the more depressing and Orwellian sights one could imagine.

Yet that is the world we seem to be contemplating as we start to face the real costs of a worldwide financial crisis triggered by the profligate greed of financiers not satisfied with just fleecing the world’s consumers.

Here in Vancouver, the effects are just starting to be felt as governments at all levels slash support for the arts.

To give credit where it’s due, the federal government got into the act first, demeaning the arts and its contribution to Canadian culture during the last election campaign. According to The Toronto Star:

Prime Minister Stephen Harper has sparked a culture war in the federal election campaign with a claim that “ordinary people” don’t care about arts funding.

Under fire for his government’s $45 million in cuts to arts and culture funding, the Conservative leader yesterday said average Canadians have no sympathy for “rich” artists who gather at galas to whine about their grants.

“I think when ordinary working people come home, turn on the TV and see a gala of a bunch of people at, you know, a rich gala all subsidized by taxpayers claiming their subsidies aren’t high enough, when they know those subsidies have actually gone up – I’m not sure that’s something that resonates with ordinary people,” Harper said in Saskatoon, where he was campaigning for the Oct. 14 election.

These comments caused a great hue and outcry, and audiences jammed all-candidate forums to discuss the arts and their importance to a country overwhelmed by a commercial culture to the south that is oblivious to our values, history and our place in the world.

Some went so far as to question how it’s even possible to assert Canadian sovereignty without a unifying culture that makes us that very thing – Canadian. Compounding irony upon irony, this question is actually inscribed on our Twenty-Dollar bill, in the words of Gabrielle Roy, one of Canada’s many internationally-celebrated writers: “Could we ever know each other in the slightest without the arts?” Nonetheless, Mr. Harper’s government was re-elected, and the cuts went ahead.

Surprisingly, the City of Vancouver joined in. As a longtime advocate for the arts, I was proud to take part in a civic election which confirmed the broad and unanimous agreement among all three major parties of the centrality of the arts to a healthy, vibrant society, and the unique importance of the arts to Vancouver’s emerging economy.

The party I ran for, the NPA,  has a long history of strong support for the arts. The last council increased arts funding significantly and undertook a number of creative new initiatives. These include a new program of cultural tourism, the new post of Vancouver’s own Poet Laureate, public art programs, the international Vancouver Art Biennale now underway and Vancouver 125 – a cultural celebration of Vancouver’s 125th birthday in 2011.

The NPA also conducted a highly-successful, inclusive and consultative city-wide review of arts programs to streamline and reduce administration costs for granting programs while increasing funding. The NPA also approved a $150,000 study in an effort to help save the Pantages Theatre project.

Our main opponents during that election, Vision, agreed with our assessment of the arts’ centrality to a liveable, economically-vibrant, creative city. According to Gregor Robertson:

A world-class city needs to foster artistic creativity, and attract innovators from all sectors around the world. It’s time we ditched the red-tape, ‘no-fun city’ label and embraced a culture of creativity, entrepreneurship, and innovation, to help our artistic and small-business sectors thrive in a competitive economy. Together, we will make Vancouver a creative capital in North America.

Vision campaign literature stated: “A successful city … invests in talent. It has the courage to reward creativity and celebrate innovation.”

Yet the first act of the new Vision council after the campaign was to cut arts funding by 8%. No increase. Not even the status quo. An 8% cut.

Now, it wouldn’t really be fair to say they’ve done nothing for the arts. As their campaign literature proudly notes:  ”Vision openly opposed arts funding cuts in the 2008 federal budget.” And I suspect they’ll make a show next week by ‘openly opposing’ the arts funding cuts in the new provincial budget as well.

But the motion we’re sure to see passing the next council criticizing the province will accomplish nothing more than reducing the arts to a political football useful only to those interested in scoring points against the BC Liberals. It will do nothing to provide leadership on the arts sector now so sadly lacking, and worse, it won’t do anything to put their money back where their mouth was during the campaign.

Incredibly, the Mayoral debate sponsored by the Alliance for the Arts between Peter Ladner and Gregor Robertson was actually billed as a debate about Gregor Robertson’s new plan for the arts. Unfortunately, we now know what his real plan was. But before the election, here’s what the Mayor promised:

Based in part on those campaign promises, Vision won a resounding political victory which presented a unique opportunity to bring the entire city together in a united effort to address the many challenges our city now confronts.

Instead, the Mayor appears to have emulated the Pythonesque political lunacy of Yes Minister, adopting Sir Humphrey’s motto: “In Defeat, Malice. In Victory, Revenge.” He could have dealt with the international financial crisis now rocking our world by seeking a broad consensus on the best way forward. But our Mayor chose to use the crisis and its impact on the Athlete’s Village to launch an attack on the already-defeated NPA, politicizing a situation resulting from mandates imposed by three different administrations. As a result of tactics like these, our City remains divided at the very time we face some of the most serious challenges in decades.

How do those challenges affect the Arts sector of our economy? That brings us to the Province. Last in, but taking the biggest kick at the can. I’m completely sympathetic to those elected officials handling our Province’s finances at a time of financial crisis and fin-de-siecle, epochal global change. Their first obligation has to be ensuring the province’s families have healthcare and education along with the other crucial services relied on by all.

But in recent years, we have spent billions of taxpayer dollars on infrastructure projects, including the spectacular new Conference Centre which was, ironically, built on land long promised for a public concert hall. Businesses have received millions more in tax reductions and direct subsidies. Hundreds of millions more are scheduled to pay for the new roof of the soccer stadium, a subsidy to benefit the private owners of the BC soccer franchise.

Yet once visitors get here for their conference, won’t they want to take in a play or a concert, the way tourists do in every other major city on earth? Who will be left to perform in our new retractable-roof stadium?

In general, tourism to Canada is sadly crashing, dashing our fond hopes for all those green, tourism-related service jobs. The aquarium I love is not enough. What will attract the tourists of the future to come here?

In the past two and half years, I’ve seen great artists perform in Vancouver that I was never able to afford in New York. During a recent performance by the Jerusalem String Quartet, I spoke to a woman who had flown all the way from Japan just to hear that performance! A friend who operates cultural tours in Europe tells me that business is booming. Why can’t we bring those tourists here?

Our vibrant arts economy has made Vancouver an international leader in film, music, game design and other related fields. Yet, according to the Globe and Mail, the provincial Arts Council budget is being reduced from a paltry $22 million – already one of the lowest per-capita in Canada – to some $2.2 million over the next two years. A 90% reduction.

I’m sorry, but that’s not a budget cut. It is a knife-edge applied to the throat of the arts in this province and inimical to the kind of province I want to live in.

In addition, two factors have combined to make the impact of what amounts to an all-out assault on arts funding even worse. The first is the way it’s been done, in what I can only describe as an irresponsible ‘now-you-see-it, now-you-don’t’ funding debacle:

• Arts groups may get grants from two sources provincially – the BC Arts Council, and the Gaming / Lottery fund. There are strict conditions and they are reviewed by experts in each field.
• Last March, the  BC Arts Council announced it’s budget had been cut nearly in half, from $19 million to 11 million.
• Within a month however, grant recipients were then told that they would get a supplemental grant from the Provincial budget surplus to make up most of the lost arts council funding.
• Then all the Gaming funds were frozen, leaving many staff working unpaid over the dry summer months and hoping for a reprieve this fall.
• In late August, arts groups then received three different letters – from the Arts Council, the Minister of Culture and from the Gaming Commission saying that they would receive their grants, but the monies would be paid through the Gaming accounts with restrictions making it harder to use the funds.
• Then, recipients of the usual annual Gaming grants, who had been waiting since May to learn their fate, were told that they would receive no funds this year from Gaming grants.
• A few days later, 534 groups who had previously received letters from the Gaming fund advising them of a multi-year commitment of funding, were told that, despite the freeze, they would actually receive their Gaming funds this year as promised.
• That still left the majority of arts groups, those with no multi-year commitments, with no Lottery funds this year.

Confused? Consider how difficult it is for these cultural institutions to plan for the next week, let alone their usual five-year window.

Where does this leave the arts groups in Vancouver? Internationally-celebrated gems like the Vancouver Art Gallery or the Grammy-award winning Vancouver Symphony Orchestra? This year, now that the dust has settled, many are OK. But next year, they face the prospect of a 92% cut in Provincial funding in the very year the world will be coming to our doors expecting to celebrate our cultural diversity.

The second factor aggravating this crisis is the timing. On top of severe government cutbacks, Arts groups are already taking it on the chin thanks to our new Great Recession:

• Individual donations are holding, but trends are worrying because of the economic environment.
• Business sponsorships for the Olympics are dropping like flies. Can you imagine what business support for the arts is like in this environment?
• Ticket subscriptions – the financial lifeline of all arts organizations – for the largest institutions are doing OK, but are a challenge for smaller groups. People are buying tickets, but to fewer events and buying cheaper seats, so overall revenues are down.
• The foundations where most well-run organizations keep their endowments have taken a severe hit, facing arts groups with the devil’s choice of going without endowment income this year or having to dip into principal to maintain their budget.

And finally, the fact that the province waited until after the election to tell these groups they weren’t getting anything this year leaves many arts organizations in the red with no time to balance their budget before the end of their fiscal year – for most, the end of August. That unavoidable deficit will now make them ineligible for funding from the Canada Council and other granting agencies this coming year, setting in motion a cascading devastation to the arts sector that will unfold for years to come.

Where is the leadership we need? Our core arts institutions in the City of Vancouver are in crisis. To preserve their viability and badly-needed contribution to our economy and the city’s livability, there must be a non-partisan arts summit that brings together the Arts Alliance, the Vancouver Board of Trade, all three levels of government, arts organizations, granting bodies and foundations to work out a plan to help these core cultural assets survive until the economy recovers. Above all they need predictability and stability.

The Enlightenment happened centuries ago, but it is not, as some think, a fixed event in history that automatically innoculates all subsequent societies forever more. The commitment to Reason and Science, the Arts and Democratic ideals, to the Enlightenment itself, must be renewed by every civilization, each generation, by every person in fact, one individual at a time.

At the moment, those prospects appear to be dimming in the City of Vancouver.

UPDATE I (9/26/09)   RELATED ARTICLES:

Arts-cuts website paints gov’t as ‘disastrous’

B.C. government Report On Socio-economic Impact of the Arts Removed from Arts Ministry Website

Vancouver politicians must unite to fight arts cuts