The slash and burn approach to arts and culture this week has left me gutted. Steve Harper wants to be a player on the world stage. Well Steve, the other players that count, beside that dry drunk jackass you defer to in the oval orifice, actually understand that art and culture are what binds a nation. We are more than a corporation, we are not defined by a bottom line and our story is not told on a spreadsheet. Josée Verner is a traitor. The Heritage Ministry is not some Orwellian organization, it is the governmental conservator and facilitator of the living culture. Until now.
Canadian Heritage Minister Josée Verner defended the cuts saying the government only wanted to help arts and culture organizations in a more efficient manner and those being axed failed to demonstrate that they were providing sufficient returns for the dollars invested.
Well what could be more efficient than starvation, eradication and oblivion? Besides, this whole scorched Earth approach to the arts sector will leave that much more money for pissants like Weepy Pete MacKay to try and buy more votes. Sufficient return on dollars invested. Fuck you. Where is the return from a government that was elected on a platform of accountability, transparency and responsibility? What have we to show for our investment? A fucking deficit. The sideshow antics in the ethics committee show just how much of each of those famous campaign slogans actually mean. This government will play every angle and sneak every nickel into an endless campaign, game the system at every turn and react like spoiled eight year olds when caught.
Well I think it is high time we gave the Harper government just the kind of help that Josée Verner is giving the arts and culture sector, cut off at the fucking knees. At this point I'd grit my teeth and vote for Dion's Liberals. I think we've seen enough of the Harper gang's balkanization of this nation. It is time we stuffed a few reams of ten per centers back up their smug, obstructionist arses and showed them the door.
9 comments:
PSA, sure wish the citizens of this country could see through these phoney pious pigs the way we do. I don't think we're there yet and "god" help us if an election is called and these morons form a majority, which it looks like they could very well do if the younger generation doesn't get off it's ass and vote.
They understand the price of everything but the value of nothing.
I know you understand this, psa. Probably better than I do and I have worked closely with many of my city's perf. arts groups over the past two decades.
Beijing York, who really does understand the mechanisms very well, lays it out in a comment here over at Red Tory's.
Their ideological rigidity does not allow them to realize that they are attacking and tearing down the very mechanisms that assist in, and you think they would get this, increasing business, making the arts and arts groups more commercially viable and fiscally responsible.
I feel your pain, my darling. I wish you the best of luck giving those rat bastards the kick in the arse they deserve.
I wish our society would grow the fuck up so that 30% of us didn't see these assholes as some sort of viable political choice.
Nice one, psa.
I do wish the 'New Conservatives', although they smell way past their best before date, realized that there is a difference between efficient and effective.
I just read this to my roommate, who's worked in government for many years, and she says that as much as she dislikes the Cons, the program these cuts were made under came from a Liberal government. So while this all falls into Harper's plans, and he's only too happy to remove Canadian culture from Canada entirely, the idea of having business-like metrics for the arts can't be laid at his feet.
You can bet he wishes he thought of it, though.
"Grit your teeth"? Hee hee, cute pun!
Over the years, like them or not, the Libs got Canada stabilized and the budget balanced and whatnot. They also did some things I bitched about at the time, like the GST, but those taxes were, I believe, a necessary part of the balancing act.
Meanwhile Harper and his boys rigged a leveraged takeover of not one but two old(er) political parties, blended them into a new party, duct-taped the mouths of all but a few representatives, and focused on slowly (but not secretly) whittling away a lot of the things Canadians value most.
Two things are obvious -- first, the New Conservative Party is actually pretty good at what they do. Second, what they want to do is not what we want done.
No teeth-gritting required. Hand me that ballot.
Noni
Yeah, that's one reason I will never call the Steven Harper Party "Tories". They're Reformers who took over the party, but they're not what the Tories always were before that.
I never agreed with either group, but at least the Tories had some passing relationship with running a country, rather than ruining it.
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