On behalf of Terres en vue, a company for the dissemination of indigenous culture, I expressly ask you, Madam Minister Pascale St-Onge, to redress the direction in which the ministry to which you have just come is moving. be named, that of Canadian Heritage. Indeed, from the appalling neglect in which the files of Montreal’s cultural metropolis were left by your predecessors, we are only just beginning to grasp the extent of the calamitous effects it leaves in its wake.
Following a significant reconversion, Montreal has managed to reinvent itself as a creative city, recognized worldwide, with the old manufacturing economy giving way, in recent decades, to innovative industries. A real ecosystem was then created with, in particular, festivals as a factor of multifaceted creativity and a driving force of the tourism industry. With cinematographic expertise as a generator of foreign investment and local production. With a network of public and private institutions giving sparkle to the creative effervescence of the city within the city.
But the clouds are accumulating on the horizon. In turn, we learn that funding for festivals is being reduced. Naive minds might have believed that we would have been careful to spare the international FIPA Indigenous Presence festival — already seriously underfunded — given this government’s bombastic speeches on a necessary reconciliation with indigenous peoples. No: indigenous cultures will also be put to the test, with the FIPA being heavily affected by the upcoming cuts.
Then it is a heritage jewel, witness to the great hours of the history of cinema, a legendary place where film festivals find a home, the Imperial itself, which we would let go to waste.
And as if that were not enough, it is the cinema sector that is alarmed: Telefilm Canada will no longer be able to support the production that promotes Montreal, Quebec and Canada around the world because of short-sighted policies.
Should we conclude that the federal government has decided to extinguish the energy of Montreal which makes it a luminous cultural metropolis? That the fine words about reconciliation are only charades, while we seek to quietly reduce the emergence of the artistic talents of the first peoples, their voices disturbing the cozy intellectual comfort of self-satisfied politicians sitting on distant Parliament Hill?
The very dynamism of the metropolis will be undermined by a regressive policy which, if maintained, will affect Montreal, a city of culture and reconciliation more than any other region in Canada. You have a few weeks left, Madam Minister St-Onge, to change the course of things. Please act!