It is with his head held high that Simon Brault will end his second and final term this summer as head of the Canada Council for the Arts (CCA), whose financial situation is in better shape than ever. That of many artists in the country remains precarious, however, agrees the outgoing director, who calls on the various levels of government to tackle this issue.
Mr. Brault will not attempt to run for a third term at the head of the ACC and will therefore leave his current position within the organization on June 23. The former director general of the National Theater School of Canada, who was also president of Culture Montreal from 2002 to 2014, led the Arts Council for nine years, after first serving as vice-president for 10 years.
He will thus turn the page on 19 years of his life during which he contributed to increasing the grants awarded to members of diversity and artists from Aboriginal communities, in addition to helping the CCA to provide more support to emerging artists and organizations. that accompany it.
I really wanted it to be a mandate under the sign of democratization, of access, and I feel immensely privileged to have been able to move in this direction with my team.
“I’m not leaving at all because I’m not happy or because I want to rest,” says Simon Brault in an interview, who notably plans to start writing a new book this summer. If he leaves, it’s simply because nine years at the head of the CAC, where most directors have only held one term, is enough, he says on the phone.
Since his arrival at the head of the CAC, the organization has made significant changes. Formerly considered a “bank that distributes subsidies”, the Arts Council has come out of its “ivory tower” to be “closer to people”, rejoices Simon Brault. The organization is also “more capable of intervening than before” with artists, largely due to the doubling of its five-year budget initiated in 2016 by the federal government, not to mention the additional financial assistance to which the CAC was entitled during the health crisis.
“I really wanted it to be a mandate under the sign of democratization, of access, and I feel immensely privileged to have been able to move in this direction with my team,” said Mr. Brault.
Artists left behind
However, this same pandemic has simultaneously brought to light “systemic injustices to be resolved and multiple inequalities to be addressed, in addition to making even more evident the endemic problems of remuneration and the lack of social protection that affect the majority of artists and workers and cultural workers,” noted the outgoing director on Monday, in an open letter published on the ACC website. He then deplored the “obviously too slow” increase in the income of Canadian artists, in a thinly veiled criticism of the lack of interest given to art by the various public authorities.
“The arts and culture sector is one of the few sectors of the economy for which we have not yet found a way to provide a social safety net for the people who work there,” continues Ms. Brault, in interview. Many artists, however, can only work part of the year, like many other seasonal workers in various fields who benefit from a social safety net financed by the State, underlines Mr. Brault.
“It remains a sector whose value has not yet been recognized by our governments,” he adds, referring to the arts and culture community. However, during the pandemic, artists have “for the first time been recognized as all workers”, by also being entitled to the Canadian Emergency Benefit, continues the outgoing director. “So we know it’s possible,” notes the man who believes that a reform of employment insurance to better take into account the reality of artists is “essential”.
Simon Brault also believes that the person who will succeed him, whose identity should be revealed soon, will have the challenge of finding a “balance” between the financing of emerging artists and organizations as well as that of well-established artistic institutions, at a time when the rapid growth of the Council’s budget in recent years may well slow in the current economic downturn.
“Obviously when you look at the immediate future, I don’t believe there will be any growth in the budget [du CAC] marked or pronounced in the next few years”, foresees Simon Brault. Thus, “I think that there will be a major challenge in distributing subsidies to ensure that there is equity between the different groups, the different artistic disciplines, continues the outgoing director. I think this will be one of the most important challenges of the next few years. »