You had the chance, Mr. Mathieu Lacombe, Minister of Culture, to be the privileged witness of an unprecedented movement which saw artists from all disciplines of the performing arts come together this spring to demand that we recognize the precariousness of their situation and the importance of their role within our society.
You were able to hear numerous testimonies from artists practicing their art and living in poverty. You were able to feel the distress of artists carrying their works at arm’s length, contributing, in silence, to the gigantic body of our national culture and living painfully on a small-time basis. You may have discovered that many of us not only work for free, but pay out of our own pockets to perform on stages in Quebec.
You know the concerns of our community. You know the ridiculous financial situation of our Council of Arts and Letters (CALQ). You understand that the funds allocated to culture are insufficient. And yet, we are not writing to you today to ask you to release new money for the performing arts.
This great movement of artists from all disciplines, which you have witnessed, has created a lot of hope, opened horizons and a desire to find new avenues. An idea appeared at first a little fuzzy then became clearer and clearer. We are writing to you today, Mr. Lacombe, to share this project with you in the hope of finding an ally in you. More than an ally, we are convinced that you could be the key player in its incarnation, its realization. This project could be a major contribution to Quebec society.
It would be a question of equipping ourselves, as a nation, with a declaration which would put culture at the heart of our common life, of living together. An unequivocal affirmation of our French-speaking cultural identity which would bear witness to our mixed fabric and which would be like a beacon, like a legacy for future generations. This declaration could be the basis of our desire to bring our arts and our artists to life and shine in a world where the discoverability of national cultural productions is increasingly threatened by entertainment giants.
This would involve voting for a declaration decreeing culture as the backbone of our Quebec nation. Thanks to this declaration, Quebec budgets and laws would have a cornerstone to find meaning, a guideline that would never again leave artists and artisans on the margins of society. And which would allow this same society to grow, proud of its cultural belonging.
This could be read as follows: “We, people of Quebec, crossed by a tumultuous river of desire to live, arrangement of all waters, where so many mixed centuries of the future flow and will continue to flow, convinced that here, territory of freedom, everyone has the right to be, all, in the land here, fiercely express this freedom, particularly through the sublime medium of the French language, we wish to decree loudly that our culture, heritage of so many cross-breeding, is considered as the ultimate lever of our existence, as the anchor point of what we are collectively and is brought to the center of civic life. We, people of Quebec, are a great people, artisans of life and will proudly carry this culture of ours over time. »
Would you be ready to endorse this declaration that we are proposing to you today? Should we insist on the ministries concerned so that they integrate it into their budgetary vision as a guarantee of sustainability for our culture? To risk proposing it in a transpartisan way so that it can be adopted in the National Assembly and thus become, all parties combined, the common core of our living together? Hoping to find in you an unwavering ally of culture.