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The images were downright jaw-dropping. Giant prints—some wider than many living room walls—featured sculpted, polished and glimmering blue glacier ice, some resembling splendid precious gems. Others showed no ice at all. Dry rock, bare, sharp ridgelines, rubbly moraine slopes, naked cliff bands. Dark, dirty, dry and withered ice. Dying ice. On one hand, the ultimate eye candy for a glacier lover; on the other, a bitter aftertaste of reality.

MELTDOWN was conceived by Jim Elzinga. A groundbreaking Rockies-based alpinist since the 1970s, Elzinga led the 1986 team that supported Canmore’s Sharon Wood to become the first North American woman to summit Mount Everest, climbing a never-repeated route. Elzinga followed up with a 25-year international career as an organizational development consultant.

Now, with his hardest climbs behind him, the glacier-draped peaks and ice cliffs he ascended are diminishing too.

The loss of these inspired him to found Guardians of the Ice, a non-profit focused on the steadily shrinking Columbia Icefield as indicator of the worldwide climate crisis. Spanning approximately 200 km² atop the Continental Divide where Jasper and Banff parks meet, that icefield is a significant bellwether of Earth’s warming climate.

“One of the many reasons I want still photography to be part of the Guardians project is the ability to make large high-quality prints that immerse the viewer, like an IMAX film,” Elzinga said. “I feel this is the best way to create an emotional connection with the viewer and provide an experience as if they’re actually in the mountains. Our purpose is to effectively engage the public to build support for a low-carbon future.”

Using a high-resolution Phase One medium format camera, Elzinga partnered with friend and cinematographer Roger Vernon. To create each image required three people—one to hold the camera, another to recalibrate the settings on a laptop, and a third to pilot the helicopter.

Leanne Allison, Jim Elzinga, Roger Vernon and Tiffany Shaw. Whyte Museum

That January 2025 night at the Whyte, however, was more than a photo exhibit. It was also the official launch for the Canadian branch of the 2025 United Nations International Year of Glaciers’ Preservation. The IYGP was proposed in 2022 by Tajikistan, whose 13,000 glaciers supply the mountain headwaters for Central Asia and some two billion people downstream.

The IYGP Canada co-chair is long-time Canmore resident Bob Sandford, senior government relations liaison on Global Climate Emergency Response at the UN University Institute for Water, Environment and Health. Most of the world’s glaciated countries are participating, and with Switzerland’s glaciers having lost 10 per cent of their volume in two years alone—2022 and 2023—that country and France have announced major commitments. “But even countries without glaciers, like Holland, are participating in the full realization of how much glacial ice contributes to the thermoregulation of the entire global climate system,” Sandford said.

The purpose is to raise awareness of the vital role glaciers, snow and ice play in the climate system.

Western Canada’s mountains (combined with the US northwest) comprise one of 19 regions around the world represented in the IYGP, alongside New Zealand, Greenland, Antarctica and the southern Andes. The Year’s purpose is to raise awareness of the vital role glaciers, snow and ice play in the climate system and water cycle, as well as the far-reaching impacts of rapid glacier melt.

A full quarter of Earth’s remaining ice is found in Canada, with some 18,000 glaciers in the mountain west. Alberta’s Rockies hold more than 1,100, including the best-known and most accessible glaciers in the country. This makes Alberta the natural centre for the Canadian IYGP initiative. “The latest scientific research regarding the state and fate of our glaciers originates here,” Sandford said. “As Parks Canada rolls out its 2025 UN Glacier Year program, Canadians all across the country will learn what the Dutch already know: that even if there isn’t one nearby, glaciers contribute enormously to the stability of the global climate.”

Canada’s IYGP objectives include promoting Canadian snow and ice research to improve scientific understanding of climate change impacts and recognizing snow and glacier ice as more than just water resources, with an emphasis on artistic and Indigenous perspectives.

“Terminus.” Jim Elzinga and Roger Vernon

MELTDOWN’s image titles speak volumes: “Terminus,” “The Black Hole,” “Battered Hero.” The latter depicts Mount Athabasca, a peak that’s been trod by countless crampons since J. Norman Collie and Herman Woolley were most likely the first to stand on its summit in 1898. Reaching the mountain back then took 19 arduous days on horseback from Lake Louise; nowadays it’s a two-hour drive. From that summit, they viewed the massive Columbia Icefield, noting that its meltwater flows to three oceans—the Arctic via the Sunwapta, Athabasca and Mackenzie rivers; the Atlantic via the North Saskatchewan, Saskatchewan and Nelson rivers; and the Pacific via the Columbia River.

More ice melted from the glacier in 2023 than in any of the 10 previous years.

Compared to historical photos in the Whyte’s bookshop showing Athabasca’s slopes blanketed in plush white snow and ice during Collie’s time, the MELTDOWN image shows dingy ice clinging to rocky slopes like a threadbare sheet.

Climbers and tourists remain drawn to these peaks. The Columbia Icefield Centre (CIC), located where the Athabasca Glacier terminated a century ago, now hosts nearly a million visitors annually, with more than 400,000 riding specialized snowcoaches onto the glacier. Hundreds more join walking tours, whose guides safely lead them to peer into crevasses and experience coursing meltwater streams close enough to get splashed. MELTDOWN images are now on display at the CIC’s Glacier Gallery having left the Whyte.

Jasper is one of seven national parks—along with BC’s Glacier National Park—where hundreds of glaciers are carefully monitored by Parks Canada. Geological Survey of Canada and Parks Canada researchers recorded more ice melt from the Athabasca Glacier in 2023 than in any of the 10 previous years. In Glacier, as of 2018, 129 glaciers remained, down from 337 in 1978. The next survey is planned for 2026. Scientists estimate that if all the glaciers in Glacier National Park melt, the area’s creeks and streams would carry one-third less water. Many could disappear completely.

“By partnering in the IYGP, Parks Canada can encourage hundreds of thousands of Canadians to reflect on the importance of glaciers and the role of protected areas,” said Louis-René Sénéchal, a Parks Canada manager. “We want to inspire them to do something about climate change and share with them the knowledge to make a difference.”

If all the glaciers in Glacier National Park melt, local creeks and streams could carry one-third less water.

The 2023 NFB film Losing Blue was playing continuously behind a privacy screen at the Whyte. Visually exquisite, poetic and soul-stirring, the 16-minute film by Canmore’s Leanne Allison (whose previous award-winning films include Being Caribou and Finding Farley) posed the question “What does it mean to lose a colour?” The narrator references how the world’s glacier-fed lakes are losing their beguiling turquoise hues as glacial content declines. Drone imagery brings viewers seemingly close enough to touch the glaciers, soaring mere centimetres above an ice cave—which I recognized as Peyto Glacier’s toe, which has since melted and flowed onward to Hudson Bay.

“The ancient bond between glaciers and lakes is ending—the bond that gives the lakes their otherworldly blue,” states the narrator.

A smaller gallery presented an exhibition of images by Canmore’s Glen Crawford titled Etched in Ice. The photos shared perspectives captured by drone at his backcountry lodge in the Rockies north of Golden, BC. Intimate and abstract, their subtlety balanced the raw power of the MELTDOWN images. Dull-grey ice, bisected by a long, skinny strand of whitish snow dribbling into a dingy-green meltwater pool. Pebbles and dirt filling the creases of dark, scrawny ice. Ice resembling hammered metal, scratched and beaten.

“I’ve been very fortunate to live in the Bow Valley and explore the nearby mountain wilderness for 50 years. Glaciers are an integral part of this landscape,” Crawford told me. “They’re also key in helping understand how climate change has an effect worldwide. With potentially 15,000 years of climate record stored in glaciers, they’re a natural archive that is now endangered. I hope the UN IYGP promotes awareness, discussion and motivation that help enact change.”

That hope is shared by other IYGP partners, including Tim Patterson, an IYGP Canada ambassador. A member of the Lower Nicola Indian Band of the Interior Salish-speaking peoples of BC, Patterson is a hiking guide who owns and operates Zuc’min Guiding—the name means “red ochre,” with which Indigenous people painted their faces before entering the mountains.

By sharing Indigenous perspectives with his clients—including during walks on the Athabasca Glacier—Patterson aims to foster Indigenous perspectives and knowledge of Canada’s glaciers, water, ice and snow among international travellers and Canadians alike.

While many of the IYGP Canada team members are Albertans, Québécoise ambassador Caroline Côté shares perspectives as a polar expedition guide. Long before her first Arctic expedition, she was awed by remnants of an ancient glacier, the Laurentide Ice Sheet, which covered much of Canada 20,000 years ago.

“Glaciers are at the centre of my life,” she said. “But I also believe that they are, and must be recognized as, the centre of every Canadian’s life. If you head east of Baie-Comeau, you can still see traces of the last glaciation. What struck me the most was the sheer power of ice, its ability to move mountains and carve valleys, leaving its mark on the rock. Our world, as we know it, was shaped by glaciers thousands of years ago.”

“Battered Hero” Jim Elzinga and Roger Vernon

Early in her career, Côté dreamed of exploring Antarctica, a dream she felt fortunate to fulfill. But she later realized Canada was home to more than 20,000 glaciers, and she needn’t travel so far. “To protect glaciers, my goal in the coming years is to reduce my travel and make more conscious choices.”

During the formal launch of the main UN IYGP in Geneva, Switzerland, on January 21, Canmore resident John Pomeroy, director of the University of Saskatchewan’s Centre for Hydrology and its Canmore-based Coldwater Laboratory, spoke in his role as IYGP advisory board co-chair. He laid it bare. “Global concentrations of carbon dioxide have risen from 315 to 425 parts per million, and as a result winter temperatures in northern Canada have risen over 6ºC during my lifetime. Counterfactual industries and regimes around the world would deny these measurements, but they can’t deny their culpability in the destruction of glaciers that’s occurring before our eyes. Glaciers don’t care if we believe in science; they just melt in the heat for all to see. The International Year of Glaciers’ Preservation provides a mechanism to kick-start renewed efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and increase the science and adaptation necessary to prepare for a warmer, less icy world. There is still time to turn this around.”

This statement brought me to a MELTDOWN image titled “After the Heat Dome.” Dark, severe, rough broken rock dominate the frame, with a thin layer of glacier ice resting on the highest ridgetop, its days obviously numbered.

A 2015 study established that western Canada could lose 60 to 80 per cent of its glacier ice by 2100, and the bulk of the melting would happen between 2020 and 2040. Since then I’ve had one question. What would the melting look like?

For decades, I’ve skied across glaciers and icefields in winter and hiked among them with my camera in summer. The 2021 heat dome that engulfed Alberta and BC was a regional gamechanger, breaking temperature records and being cited as a leading cause of some 600 deaths. It accelerated the deaths of our glaciers too.

On June 30, 2021, Jasper reached 40.8ºC, its hottest temperature ever recorded. The resulting flooding caused by rapidly melting snow and ice resulted in catastrophic damage to trails and bridges in the area; the Berg Lake trail in Mount Robson Provincial Park is still under repair. Heat-absorbing soot from wildfires—including the 2024 Jasper fire—coats glacier surfaces and accelerates melting. Globally, 2024 was the hottest year ever recorded—after 2023, which had set the previous record—all directly caused by humans burning fossil fuels.

In a handful of years, glacier loss has become visible to the naked eye.

Western Canada’s glaciers had been gracing paintings since before the Canadian Pacific Railway was completed in 1885. In decades since, photographers, filmmakers and writers have shown us this icy landscape. Adventurers have skied across glaciers for days, weeks, sleeping in tents or snow caves. Guides earn their living on glaciers. We create memories on them.

As they melt, we can honour glaciers by sharing these stories and artworks.

“In this coming year, we will celebrate Canadian researchers and institutions studying snow and ice, and honour writers, poets, artists and photographers working to help us understand what the loss of glacier ice means,” Sandford said. “The UN Glacier Year allows us to halt backsliding in terms of climate action by learning more about what we face, and provides an opportunity to shine on the world stage as an example of everything we stand for.

“After the Heat Dome” Jim Elzinga and Roger Vernon

“We want to be able to tell the world that we as Canadians listened for an entire year to what the disappearing ice was trying to tell us.”

At the Whyte Museum that night, I listened as Alberta-based Métis artist Tiffany Shaw explained how she created her glass sculptures from casts taken from the Athabasca Glacier. “I think these will last longer than the glacier,” she said, “which is really sad.”

Lynn Martel is writer in residence for IYGP Canada, an accredited hiking guide, and the author of three books about local mountain culture, including Stories of Ice (RMB, 2020).

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Read more from the archive “Goodbye to Peyto Glacier” September 2022.

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The word “bloom” usually refers to a large swarm of jellyfish or an excessive growth of algae. Here Hajnoczky is referring to the explosion of plastic pollution in the world’s oceans. Her cyanotypes are inspired by renowned photographer-botanist Anna Atkins’s work with seaweed.

Julya Hajnoczky was born in Calgary and is a graduate of AUArts. She uses digital and analog photography to explore the complex relationships between humans and the natural world.

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Fortunately, on the phone from Calgary, Sharon was anything but “prickly.” She was warm and friendly and full of laughter. And her guidance to me was solid. She said aspiring playwrights should try to get as much life experience in and out of theatre as they could, in part because that would inform their writing, but also because that’s simply a recipe for living an interesting life. As for playwriting, she was blunt: the profession is frequently challenging and enormously frustrating, even for her. “I don’t mean to be discouraging, but I really don’t have a lot of positive things to say,” she said. And then she laughed.

We spoke for close to an hour, much longer than I had intended. This from one of Canada’s most widely produced playwrights, a two-time winner of the Governor General’s Literary Award and a three-time winner of the Gwen Pharis Ringwood Drama Award. Back then I didn’t think someone of her stature would have much time for a young, inexperienced person like me. But as I learned later, when it came to young writers and artists, Sharon could be generous with her time, mentoring and supporting them however she could. That mentorship was a part of her devotion to theatre as a whole. In a comprehensive biography, Sherrill Grace writes that Sharon had experience doing just about any job you could think of in a theatre, from acting to being the artistic director to running the box office. When I asked Sharon why she was a playwright, she said it’s because theatre lives and breathes in the same space as the audience.

Her road to a life in theatre was a rocky one. Mary Sharon Chalmers was born in 1936 in Fredericton, New Brunswick. Her father was a hard-working and respected physician, while her mother was a former nurse who left the profession to raise a family. Life at home was far from idyllic. Her father’s absence and persistent infidelity caused deep marital strain, and her mother’s unhappiness as a housewife led her to alcoholism and increasingly erratic behaviour, and she ultimately died by suicide. It all left Sharon with profound emotional scars.

While attending the University of New Brunswick, Sharon met Ross Pollock. The two married quickly and moved to Toronto, where she became a housewife and mother. But Ross was physically and emotionally abusive, to the point that Sharon’s misery led to a moment of desperation when she unsuccessfully tried to poison him.

Amid her demanding life as a mother, Sharon began attending plays and eventually joined an amateur theatre group. Ross disapproved. After a particularly violent incident, she fled back to Fredericton with their five children. She got involved with another theatre group and soon began a relationship with a fellow actor, Michael Ball. When he was offered a position in the drama department at the University of Calgary, Sharon moved west with him. In Calgary she toured with the Prairie Players through small-town British Columbia and Alberta, earning accolades including best actress at the Dominion Drama Festival.

Her road to theatre was rocky…. She tried to poison her disapproving husband.

While pregnant with her sixth child, Sharon wrote her first play for the stage. A Compulsory Option won the 1971 Alberta Playwriting Competition and was produced the following year. Her next work, Walsh, about the relationship between a North-West Mounted Police officer and the Sioux chief Sitting Bull, premiered at Theatre Calgary in 1973 and was subsequently produced at the Stratford Festival. Walsh brought Sharon wide public attention and more productions, and by the time she was 38, she had begun a promising career as a playwright. She started to write plays in part out of frustration with not seeing Canadian stories on the stage. “I wanted other actors to stand up and say my words,” she said, “to speak directly through an experience I shared with those other Albertans and Canadians.”

Walsh was an important development in Sharon’s career. It demonstrates her storytelling gifts—a reviewer in the Ottawa Citizen said Walsh had “that indefinable magic that is the essence of the art” of theatre—and reveals her strong inclination to write about historical injustices.

But I didn’t read Walsh until just after I had finished my degree, and by then it would only affirm my deep admiration for her as a playwright. It was Blood Relations that first exposed me to Sharon’s work, when the University of Lethbridge drama department produced the play for its mainstage season in 2003. The two plays had different impacts on me in my early twenties, but when I reread the two scripts at 41, I noticed both are about individuals caught in oppressive social and political systems. In the case of Walsh, we get a glimpse into the Canadian bureaucracy that was seemingly designed to inflict hardship on Indigenous people, with NWMP colonel James Walsh being a captive and reluctant agent of this bureaucracy, and into the Sioux people, led by Sitting Bull, being forced to return to the United States from which they had fled. “Honour, truth… the lot… they’re just words,” says Walsh in the play. “I gave my life to them, and they don’t exist.”

On the other hand, Blood Relations examines how the repressive roles imposed on women cause the protagonist to lash out in a horrifying way. The play is about Lizzie Borden and the circumstances leading up to the 1892 axe murders of her father and stepmother, of which she was accused and acquitted. Though the story may seem far removed from Sharon’s experience, she felt a personal connection to Lizzie’s case. “Prior to working in the theatre,” she wrote, in the afterword to the Methuen edition of the play, “I was married for some years to a violent man. I spent a great deal of time devising, quite literally, murderous schemes to rid me of him…. I would have killed to maintain my sense of self…. And so it is with Lizzie.” In Blood Relations, Sharon was less concerned about whether Borden committed the murders and more interested in why she might have done it.

I saw the play well over a decade before the #MeToo movement and, at 20, my comprehension of feminist issues was juvenile. Yet even someone as oblivious as I was could see that Blood Relations was about how accepted social conventions restrain women. Lizzie is trapped in a strict Victorian family that suppresses her personal ambitions and independence. She’s pressured to spend time with a suitor she despises. She watches helplessly as her father signs title to the family farm she loves over to the stepmother she hates. She’s refused the opportunity to get a job to attain her own independence, and her father refuses her the money to live on her own. Her stepmother tells her she has no rights. Later, when Lizzie protests too much, her father butchers her beloved pet birds.

But the play doesn’t just catalogue the ways women have historically faced limited prospects for freedom and were punished for seeking autonomy. When I saw the play, what stood out to me was its moral ambiguity. Lizzie’s violence can be seen as an act of defiance against subjugation, making her character and her actions morally complex. The crime was heinous, no question. But at the same time, it was clear to me that Lizzie’s legal options were limited, that she had been backed into a corner, and under that extreme duress she became desperate and reckless, lashing out at the people who had pushed her too far. Sharon didn’t offer a safe separation between guilt or innocence, instead confronting her audience with serious ethical questions about violence as a reaction against oppression.

I had never seen a play like Blood Relations. At that time in my life, I was only studying drama in university as a stopgap toward going to film school, with no plans to finish my degree or take up theatre as an artistic practice. The production of Blood Relations didn’t single-handedly change that, but it did open my eyes to how the stage could tell a deeply layered story as rich as anything I’d seen on film.

In Blood Relations Sharon was more interested in why Lizzie might have done it.

It wasn’t just the thematic elements of the play that struck me, but also the way in which Sharon told the story. The action that unfolded before me wasn’t a linear, by-the-facts murder mystery, but a twisting and turning play-within-a-play that introduced me to a new level of theatricality. In the play, as the stage lights come up in the theatre, an Actress character is standing centre stage in an upper class Victorian room, reciting Hermione’s lines from Act 3, Scene 2 of The Winter’s Tale:

Since what I am to say must be but that
Which contradicts my accusation, and
The testimony on my part no other
But what comes from myself, it shall scarce boot me
To say “Not Guilty.”…

Lizzie Borden then enters and, after a brief exchange with the Actress, the two of them decide to have some fun by acting out the events leading up to the infamous crime. I watched the Actress don Lizzie’s costume to play Lizzie Borden, while Lizzie herself put on a costume fit for an observer servant. From there, the action seemed to go back in time as characters from the past entered the stage to re-enact what happened.

Pollock performing in Blood Relations at Theatre Calgary in 1981. Her play is based on the true story of an unsolved double-murder in 1892

This play-within-a-play device jolted me out of my passive observance. What was this extra layer of psychological and temporal complexity being thrown at me Of these two women, who was the real Lizzie Borden Why include this role-playing at all Why not simply tell the story in a simple, straightforward fashion But of course, I embodied the answer to this latter question: I leaned forward in my seat and paid close attention, piecing the action together in my own way, while the audience around me was likely doing the same. What might have been a chronological, facts-of-the-crime murder mystery became something more engaging and thought-provoking, pulling the audience into more-active scrutiny of the unfolding drama. The play-within-a-play device pushes Blood Relations deeper into the realm of theatricality and imagination, lending itself well to different readings and varying interpretations, raising questions about identity, memory and truth, and ultimately making the whole experience more subtle and artful.

Two moments from the play remain as vivid to me now as they did then. The first occurs late in the play, when Andrew Borden lies napping on the couch, and the Actress, playing Lizzie, hums a soothing tune as she approaches him, carrying a hatchet. Standing over him, she raises the axe, and just before she swings it down, the lights in the theatre go out. In the darkness the voices of monstrous children sing the now infamous skipping rope rhyme:

Lizzie Borden took an axe
And gave her mother forty whacks
And when she saw what she had done
She gave her father forty-one

The second memorable moment happens at the play’s end. After a confrontation with her sister, Emma, during which Lizzie grips the hatchet, the question of whether Lizzie committed the crime comes up.

Emma: You didn’t… did you?
Miss Lizzie: Poor Emma.
The Actress: Lizzie. [She takes the hatchet from Miss Lizzie.]Lizzie, you did.
Miss Lizzie: I didn’t. [She smiles.] You did. [The Actress looks to the hatchet, then to the audience.] [Blackout.]

From left to right: Sharon Pollock’s play Walsh, about Sitting Bull’s exile in Canada after the massacre at Little Bighorn, Talonbooks, 1973; Blood Relations, NeWest Press, 1981; Doc, Broadview, 1985; Saucy Jack, about Jack the Ripper, published in 1994 by Blizzard.

Sharon revealed a different kind of theatricality with her 1984 play Doc. This was one of the few plays I read as an undergraduate that really lit a fire under me to write for the stage. Ironically, when I first read it, I was oblivious to how autobiographical the play is to Sharon. Doc draws heavily on her family history growing up in Fredericton, with characters who are extensions of her overworked physician father, her despairing and alcoholic mother and the playwright herself.

In an interview with Canadian Journalist, Sharon said every play she writes “begins as an attempt to understand the world around me. I make up a story in which I can control the elements and the motivation of the characters. I create a little world which I know has meaning and makes sense. When I’m finished doing that, I’m better able to cope with what began as something incomprehensible to me.” So it seems she wrote Doc to clarify her thoughts and feelings surrounding her family’s troubled history, believing theatre can process, explore and make sense of complex personal relationships.

When I first read the script, it showed me that an intense family conflict can also be highly theatrical. Rather than presenting a linear, kitchen-sink drama, Doc is a memory play where the action shifts across time, with characters living and dead occupying the same space. The aged doctor and his estranged daughter Catherine reunite and try to make sense of their dark past, their conflicting memories playing out against one another. Temporal barriers are broken down, with characters from different time periods addressing one another, creating an elaborate and fluid interrogation of the past. In Doc, Catherine and Katie are the same person played by different actors at different stages of life, yet they speak to each other, each trying to come to grips with events in their own way. And all of it written with dialogue that avoids tedious melodrama and instead presents five humans with their own psychologically complex voices.

She wrote Doc to clarify her thoughts and feelings about her family’s troubled history.

In one scene, Ev, a worn-out doctor, stands isolated onstage while his wife, Bob, watches from the shadows.

Ev: We had the worst goddamn polio epidemic this province has seen, 11 years ago. We had an outbreak this year. You are lookin’ at the attending physician at the present Polio Clinic—it is a building that has been condemned by the Provincial Fire Marshal, it has been condemned by the Provincial Health Officer, it has been condemned by the Victoria Public Hospital, it’s infested with cockroaches, it’s overrun by rats, it’s the worst goddamn public building in this province! When is the government gonna stop building liquor stores and give the doctors of this province a chance to save a few fuckin’ lives!
Bob: Haven’t you got enough?
Ev: Enough what?
Bob: Enough! Enough everything!
Ev: You’re drunk.

As personal as Doc is to Sharon, this passage reflects how relevant it is to the rest of us. We are living in a time in Alberta when doctors and nurses are similarly burning out from overwork and the healthcare system is in crisis. Such is the power of Sharon’s craft, transforming the deeply personal into the universal, the private into the public.

Nicole Garies as Lizzy Borden in the University of Regina theatre department’s production of Blood Relations, November 2018. U of R Photography

Sharon continued working as a performer off and on throughout her career. In 2011 she was in rehearsals for Verb Theatre’s production of Marg Szkaluba (Pissy’s Wife), a one-woman show about a survivor of domestic violence. One day, the show’s director, my friend Jamie Dunsdon, emailed me to ask if I would come to the last week of rehearsals and be on book for Sharon, following along in the script and providing her with her line if she forgot.

I attended the rehearsals, watched Sharon work like a pro, and only had to cue her lines a few times. On opening night, I watched her onstage at the Ironwood in Inglewood, where she embodied blue-collar Marg Szkaluba’s fiery wit and defiance with passion and humour. After the show I was invited to join the creative team for drinks. There we were, a handful of eager artists in our mid-twenties having a beer with a 75-year-old woman who happened to be one of Canada’s most accomplished playwrights—youthful ambition and seasoned mastery converging over a shared passion for theatre.

That was Sharon for you. Despite her stature and achievements, she remained grounded and approachable, and shared her knowledge and experience in a way that nurtured the next generation of artists. Theatre was much more to her than a mere job or a pleasant pastime. It was central to her identity and sense of purpose. She devoted her life to it as a performer and as an administrator and, most importantly, as a playwright who gave voice to Canadian stories and sensibilities at a time when such things were almost entirely absent from our stages. Yes, she could be blunt, perhaps by some estimations even prickly, but she was always striving for excellence in craftsmanship, and she did so with great respect and generosity.

Since 2021 Sharon Pollock is no longer with us. For people who didn’t know her as a close friend or as family, all we have left are her plays and our memories of having seen them. For me, Sharon will always be the one who transformed how I conceive of theatre—this art form that lives and breathes with its audience. Every time I go to a play, I hope to be captivated the way Sharon’s plays captivated me, that there may be moments as brilliant as the ones I witnessed in Blood Relations, that the experience might light a fire under me the way Doc did. When the show is about to start, my anticipation goes up as the lights in the theatre go down.

Andrew Torry is a playwright in Calgary. His work has been shortlisted for the Gwen Pharis Ringwood Award for Drama.

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Nickle Galleries

“Solitude”

“Resilience”

Teresa Posyniak is a Calgary-based artist and activist who has been creating art for over 40 years, yet the full extent of her extraordinary practice was not understood until recently. It seems as if this 73-year-old artist was “discovered” in 2024. That June, her monumental painting “Grasslands Tapestry” was the showstopper among the hundreds of commissioned works in the new BMO Centre. A few months later the Nickle Galleries in Calgary presented Teresa Posyniak: Resilience, the most important exhibition of her long career. While not a retrospective, this exhibition was a curated selection of works demonstrating the major themes that have driven the artist’s work over four decades, primarily women’s issues and the environment.

What was striking to gallery visitors was the variety of styles, subjects and formats, ranging from a massive installation to paintings of great delicacy and intensity of feeling. Of note too was the number of media employed by the artist: steel, wood, concrete, handmade paper, felt and silk, as well as oil, acrylic, encaustic (hot wax) and cold wax. All of Posyniak’s works, in whatever material or format she uses, explore themes of vulnerability and resilience in her unique voice.

The exhibition was grounded by a dramatically lit installation entitled “Resilience,” set in a darkened gallery space evocative of ceremony and ritual. Its genesis can be traced to 1983, when Posyniak reacted viscerally to the sexual harassment she faced as a graduate student at the University of Calgary. Her response was to create a huge installation, effectively a metaphorical refuge she called “Sanctuary.” Over the years, elements harvested from “Sanctuary” were reused, remade and readapted in other works. One work of art begat another.

“Resilience” was the most recent iteration, comprised of fluted columns and strangely anthropomorphic vertical sculptures, like sentinels. In the gallery an altar-like frieze of splayed uprights silently beckoned. Although its parts are recycled from earlier works, every unique vertical bundle was a new entity. Several of the sculptures resonated with echoes of the artist’s heritage and childhood. Collaged doilies, crocheted fabrics and lace were sealed into their skins by coats of hot wax and painted with oil and cold wax. Layers of overlapping bindings both concealed and revealed, as apertures exposed open wounds while tightly bound surfaces restrained tension.

The artist’s focus on women and increasingly on motherhood continued as she transitioned to painting through the 1980s. Posyniak created haunting figurative works in which female nudes occupy indeterminate, unsettling spaces. In many works, an isolated woman reveals her pain and desperation through the bundle she clutches. When Posyniak became pregnant in 1986, she was overjoyed but also afraid. She expressed her feelings in powerful abstract paintings, such as the monumental triptych “Annunciation,” in which a sense of vitality and growth is conveyed through movement in sweeping lines, flowing shapes and high contrast. Here, the beginnings of life are intuited, expressed in fluid visual metaphors drawn in sinuous, overlapping and intertwined shapes.

In her art Posyniak strives to portray an interconnectedness between all life forms. Through a series undertaken over the past 15 years, represented in this exhibition by two stylistically different paintings, she explores the structure, shape and significance of microscopic plankton, which supply half of the world’s oxygen through photosynthesis and are under threat from climate change. In Posyniak’s hands, scientific fact is transmuted into a world of mystery and wonder. The exhibition included paintings that reflect not just the beauty of the patterns in nature but also its vulnerability. A case in point are her textured and coloured paintings that deal with the violence wrought by the mountain pine beetle on the ponderosa pine, an ecological disaster exacerbated by a warming planet.

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For almost 60 years Glenbow has been one of Canada’s most important museums. But the building’s systems and concrete exterior envelope were beginning to fail. In 2021 renovations began to transform the museum, replacing those failing aspects and creating new spaces—including high-density collections storage systems. Throughout this process the collection was carefully managed and protected as it was moved within the museum. These photographs provide a peek at this complex game—packing objects, moving them, renovating spaces and carefully migrating precious items into their new homes. Glenbow is expected to reopen in late 2026.

Text and photos by George Webber
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Masked characters handed out chocolate almonds. A Gorilla curated a banana-peeling contest. The silent antics of Chaplin and Buster Keaton danced on the wall. This was not a “wake” in the original meaning of the term. There was no chance the body could reawaken (though Keith would have approved of such a prank): the patron saint of impro had donated his body to science. Even after death, his lifelong desire for others to learn through exploration prevailed.

Months earlier, on March 11, 2023, the English-turned-Albertan mentor to comedians, actors, screenwriters, playwrights and directors around the world had died at Rockyview Hospital. The official cause was complications related to diabetic sepsis, though few would argue he had not lived a long enough life, least of all himself.

“Who wants to be 90?” he liked to joke. “Anyone who’s 89!”

Tributes flooded the internet, obits ran in The New York Times, the Hollywood Reporter, The Guardian, The Globe and Mail and the Calgary Herald. Keith’s former students, self-proclaimed “enfants terribles” of the Loose Moose,

Mark McKinney and Bruce McCulloch of Kids in the Hall, joked about playing the hat game (a collaborative challenge Keith invented) on his grave.

Johnstone is the author of the seminal text on improvisation, Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre (1979). He expanded on his formats, games and techniques in Impro for Storytellers (1999). He is the creator of popular competitive formats of improvisation including Theatresports, Micetro Impro, The Life Game and Gorilla Theatre. Today Theatresports is arguably the most popular invention out of Alberta after ginger beef. This team-on-team format is played on every continent except Antarctica.

Impro—or improv—is widely considered to have two traditions. Viola Spolin developed a series of exercises and games to train actors in the mid-1950s and taught these alongside her son Paul Sills at the University of Chicago. Sills founded the Compass Players in St. Louis and co-founded The Second City. Spolin and Sills trained Del Close, who went on to be the “Chicago style’s” most influential improvisation instructor and mentor to the likes of Tina Fey and Bob Odenkirk.

With some notable exceptions, fewer improvisers south of the border are indebted to the Johnstone style. According to Jeremy Lamb, an Austin-based performer, “Chicago-style improv is US football, while Johnstone is soccer: predominant in the rest of the world.”

When Better Call Saul actor Odenkirk visited Calgary in the winter of 2014, he dropped in on a show at the Loose Moose on a day off from shooting Fargo, only to learn that this was in fact Keith’s theatre. Not only that, Keith lived in town and had lived and taught here since 1971, for more than half his life. Would Odenkirk like to meet him A May 19, 2014, caption of a selfie with Bob and Keith on Bob’s official social media reads:

“My fucking mind blew a gasket. Guys, I bought this book [Johnstone’s Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre] the day I met Del (Close)… and I made notes in it, and did the exercises in it with my dumb friends at college (Tim Thomas—a teacher in Rockford, Illinois) and it set me off on my life path.”

Mark Ravenhill, a British playwright, connected deeply with the techniques and theories in Impro, as Odenkirk had, and partook in a workshop with the man himself in London in 2017. He shared his first impression of Keith in an editorial for The Guardian:

“He arrives, a natural clown. His teeth sit widely and uncomfortably in his mouth, his trousers are high on a generous belly, his trainers are unfeasibly large. He’s carrying a plastic bag full of balloons, hats and cards containing lines of dialogue in gobbledegook. He grins, sighs and blinks at us through thick glasses.”

Today Theatresports is arguably the most popular invention out of Alberta after ginger beef.

Keith was born on February 21, 1933, in Brixham, England, a poor fishing town in the southwest county of Devon. His father was a pharmacist. The family of four lived above his shop. His mother, much younger and larger than his father, was prone to terrorizing her young children by chasing Keith and his sister around the kitchen table with a fire poker as a “game” while Keith’s father turned a blind eye. The first chapter of Impro begins, “As I grew up, everything started to grow grey and dull.”

Their home in Brixham was on the harbour, and, with the onset of the Second World War, became a target of German bombing. In 1940, at age seven, Keith was sent off to Glastonbury to a preparatory school, where he astounded his teacher with his ability to read at an adult level. There was no “Cat Sat on the Mat” for young Keith; he could read the newspaper aloud, having taught himself by memorizing comics. Keith thrived, was spared the cane and was deemed clever. He was recommended to attend the prestigious Totnes Grammar School. Here, though, things quickly went downhill. “I decided right before my ninth birthday not to believe a word the grownups said,” writes Keith. “And the next day I decided to see if the opposite could be true. I think it changed my life. I’ve been doing it ever since. It taught me to be looking for the obvious and not the clever.”

At age 10, while playing, Keith fell off a cliff. Suddenly he felt a different version of “self” take over as he grabbed onto branches and scrambled to safety. He realised he had developed a social self to please grownups that was not his authentic self. Verbal thinking and intellect interfered with being in the moment.

“Much of my work has involved ways of interfering with speech so that ‘something else’ can operate,” he has written. By recognizing a performer’s ability to bypass fear and be in a state of non-verbal thinking, magical things could be unleashed.

In his later work with Trance masks, Keith draws on this idea of human beings having many social selves. By creating large or expressive faces, performers stare into a mirror in trance and discover a mask character who frees them of their set idea of self.

Perhaps the worst stab at Keith’s childhood gusto was not inflicted by sharp branches as he scrambled to hang on to that cliff, nor by the bully whose pencil took out Keith’s eyesight in his left eye, but rather by his educators. In his blog he writes: “It’s difficult to destroy the curiosity of an ape, but Totnes Grammar School regularly achieved it.”

Keith went from being the top of his class to being at the bottom, and he wanted to understand why. “Students who are not eager to learn have been damaged. Instead of assuming that they were born that way, conscientious teachers should see it as a chance to heal the school-inflicted wounds.”

He eventually attended St. Luke’s teacher’s training college in Exeter and began teaching children in the government housing area of Battersea, experimenting with more playful and explorative forms of learning.

Keith writes in a chapter titled “Notes on Myself” in Impro: “I began to think of children not as immature adults but of adults as atrophied children.” Education left people atrophied, and with the wrong attitude to failure. Embracing failure was necessary to learn, according to Keith. He discovered techniques and ways to remove fear of failure, whether it was stage fright or writer’s block. Beginners of improvisation are taught to say “yes” to offers. In a TED talk, Keith’s iconic words appear on a title card: “There are people who prefer to say ‘yes’ and there are people who prefer to say ‘no.’ Those who say ‘yes’ are rewarded by the adventures they have. Those who say ‘no’ are rewarded by the safety they attain.”

Battersea and life in London was when the colour returned to Keith’s life as he met and exchanged ideas with kindred spirits: artists, filmmakers, actors taking in plays and films and live music together. After seeing Peter Hall’s production of Waiting for Godot, a life-altering experience that spawned a friendship and mentorship from Samuel Beckett himself, Keith was inspired to move from teaching into theatre.

Keith Johnstone influenced many star performers

Johnstone began as a play reader, and then taught acting and playwriting. He wrote and directed several plays himself at the Royal Court and the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA) in London for most of the 1960s. Here, Keith evolved into the impro pioneer who could teach the unteachable: the misfits and the outliers, the drama school stragglers.” One such straggler was Jonathan Pryce, who earned an Oscar nomination for his performance as Pope Francis in the film Two Popes. In an interview for the docuseries On Keith: Artists Speak on Johnstone and Impro, Pryce recalled Johnstone’s influence: “To me, Keith is the man who released any inhibitions I may have had when I went to RADA in the late 1960s.”

At that time in Britain, the Lord Chamberlain had to approve plays and scripts before they could be performed in front of an audience. Improvisation was strictly forbidden. Keith found a way around that by hosting open workshops, marking the beginning of his trademark side-coaching, or directed improvisation, another major departure from the Spolin tradition. Keith continued to work on the games, techniques and theory he developed at the Royal Court and through his work with Britain’s first travelling improv troupe: the Theatre Machine.

While teaching at the Royal Court Studio in the early 1960s, Keith became inspired by British professional wrestling, where the competition is fake, yet elicits a sports-like passion from an audience. As he says in Improvisation: The Origins of Theatresports: “The exaltation among the spectators was something I longed for, but didn’t get, from ‘straight’ theatre. Sometimes the performers would lie on the canvas and hug each other for minute after minute while the crowd yelled insults and witticisms. Our Royal Court audiences were like whipped dogs in comparison—probably because once an event is categorised as ‘cultural’ it becomes a minefield in which your opinion can damn you.”

Education left people with the wrong attitude to failure. Keith discovered techniques and ways to remove fear of failure.

Keith was a healthy young man of 40 who didn’t smoke—a real feat for any person in the 1970s. Yet in London he often felt ill or as if he couldn’t breathe. There was no room for Keith to continue experimenting. Keith accepted a visiting lectureship at the University of Calgary in 1972 and was offered a full-time tenure position in 1975. It was not until he emigrated to Alberta and arrived in the can-do, yeehaw, “git yer stompin’ boots on” Stampede culture of Calgary in the early 1970s that he blossomed into the world-renowned leader in the field of improvisation. “Calgary was a place where literally, physically and intellectually there was space,” said the late Kathleen Foreman, original Loose Moose member and former U of C Drama faculty member, in an interview for Theresa Robbins Dudeck’s Keith Johnstone: A Critical Biography.

Keith was consistently finding better ways of teaching and continued to work on his discoveries in improvisation. He hand-picked his U of C students for further experimentation outside of the university. Early drama students included Foreman, Dennis Cahill, Frank and Tony Totino, Veena Sood, Jim Curry, Dave Duncan and Betty Poulson. Keith preferred to keep the peace at the first sign of dissension from certain faculty members who did not feel his unconventional drama experiments were welcome on campus. He searched for an off-campus home for his growing gang of improvisers. They found one at the Pumphouse. There Johnstone and veterinarian Mel Tonken co-founded Loose Moose Theatre in 1977.

Cahill, current artistic director and an original member of Loose Moose, recalls, “We started doing weekly performances at the Pumphouse on Sunday nights. I think the improvisation is what really got people’s attention, just because there was nothing quite like it, not in Calgary, not really anywhere.”

In Calgary Keith found the freedom to create new techniques and create performance formats, beginning with Theatresports, which quickly exploded. In Impro Keith writes, “Now that I’m teaching ‘playwriting’ in a Canadian university, I’ve adapted from this early game into a way of teaching narrative skills. Two students obey a third, who tells them what to say and do.” This is the source of the “Typewriter Game,” a narrative exercise played in impro theatres everywhere, where a player mime-types a story for others to fill in. Big discoveries happened with the early students at Loose Moose and the company grew. Early houses frequently sold out.

Keith travelled in the summers while he was at U of C, and then further developed techniques he began abroad in his classes in Calgary and at the Moose. He developed The Danish Game, a component of Theatresports, while teaching in Denmark. Maestro Impro was originally created in the Netherlands, but Keith developed the format further at Loose Moose. Cahill says, “At some point, Keith started to introduce the theory behind the games, which, if you were going to teach or invent your own games, was invaluable.”

Keith retired from U of C in 1995, and, instead of a gold watch, was given a balloon ride. He handed over the artistic reins to Cahill in 1998, but often returned to teach or co-direct. Generations of Loose Moosers have made waves in the entertainment industry since, such as Pat Kelly of CBC’s satirical news radio program This is That.

“Probably the greatest influence Keith had on me was teaching me that a performer ‘should not try to be interesting’—being average was more compelling,” Kelly said. “It unlocked everything for me when I understood that being subtle worked. It has informed everything I’ve done in comedy.”

Dave Lawrence, creator of the cult hit FUBAR, says, “Studying with Keith from such a young age helped me with FUBAR [for] the simple fact that characters need to be altered. I don’t think I would have known that if it weren’t for Keith.”

Keith pioneered huge parts of this now ubiquitous art form right here in Cowtown, beside his beloved Rockies. Yet he got no rewards or prizes; he was never white-hatted. There’s no mention of this legend’s name on the webpage of the University of Calgary’s drama department, where he taught for nearly 25 years, no plaque or scholarship or rehearsal space named after him on campus. Improvisation at the Loose Moose Theatre—having miraculously survived the pandemic—receives minimal provincial funding compared to other more “respected” art forms such as ballet and scripted theatre. To this day, Keith and his work have received no formal recognition from the local community or the provincial government.

As Mark Ravenhill wrote in his editorial for The Guardian about his workshop with Keith:

“After one class, I try to tell Johnstone what an inspiration he has been to me. He’s evasive, ducking my attempts to praise him. He is wary of the guru status that many in improvisation have given him. ‘It stops them inventing for themselves,’ he says. What’s the thing he is proudest of in his life He stares into the distance for a long time, then says: ‘I did once invent a totally new way of peeling a banana. I’m very proud of that.’ ”

Back at the Pumphouse last June, Dennis is wrongfully declared the winner of the banana-peeling contest, Mark McKinney leaps to his feet in mock protest, telling Tony Totino he was robbed, “and this shit has been going on for years!” Dave Lawrence, dressed as his FUBAR character Terry, attempts to patch in a group in Brazil, sending screeching feedback through the string quartet’s performance of Beethoven. Terry yells down at the crowd from the booth: “Sorry. I boned it right up!” They roar with laughter and heckle him, the perfect summation of Keith’s teachings: embrace failure, be obvious, misbehave, relax, the competition isn’t real.

Immanuela Lawrence is a comedy writer, improv performer and co-creator of FUBAR: Age of Computer. She lives in Calgary.

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When Arthur Penn acquired the screenplay rights to the novel Little Big Man from Marlon Brando in the late 1960s, he also acquired the near impossibility of making it into a movie. The book, written by Thomas Berger and published in 1964, presented a big problem for Americans by muddying their glorified saga of Custer’s Last Stand at the Battle of the Little Bighorn in 1876 with the violence and senseless massacre of innocent Native Americans, many of them women and children.

Told through the eyes of Jack Crabb, the oldest living white survivor of the massacre, who had been raised by the Cheyenne, the story meanders between the two very different cultures and reveals the unchronicled hypocrisy and cruelty of western settlement from a Native American perspective. Crabb conveys admiration for the Cheyenne languages, their spiritual beliefs and their gentle, dying way of life, rooted in the relationship between all living things and depicted as much more honourable than white-centric myths of their own nobility in the classic Western.

A prolific and genre-breaking director, Penn saw his star rise steadily through the 1960s. He was part of a tsunami of young directors such as Francis Ford Coppola, Richard Donner, Robert Altman and Martin Scorsese who ushered in New Hollywood with films made on location and heavily reliant upon realism. These films addressed shifting social values and the unprecedented political upheaval of the times, using the directors’ own opinions as an agent of change.

Penn’s 1967 movie Bonnie and Clyde, the iconic saga of a pair of glamourized criminals and their adventures on the lam during the Depression, changed Hollywood forever. The film condemns the horrific atrocities carried out by Americans during the Vietnam War by introducing graphic and gratuitous violence to movie-making with what The New Yorker called a “frightening power.”

His 1969 movie Alice’s Restaurant highlighted the absurd attempts to persecute and prosecute a group of hippies during their communal Thanksgiving dinner in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. Penn received Best Director nominations from the Academy Awards for both movies.

In Little Big Man Penn saw an opportunity to make a movie that revised the typical Western narrative and its glorified white heroes. To examine the history of racism in North America. “American cinema has continually parodied and ridiculed native Indians, depicting them as savage beasts in order to justify the fact that we wiped them out,” Penn said in a 1971 interview. “A mythic and heroic account of the settling of the West might ease some people’s consciences, but I’m having none of it.”

Penn could have made any film he wanted. But every time he found a studio executive willing to greenlight the movie, Little Big Man was sabotaged by unrealistic “false” budgets that would doom the project before production even started. When he finally asked why, he was told: “You can’t treat Indians this way. They gotta be the bad guys.”

Indians weren’t always the bad guys. In the first Westerns, they were most often portrayed as noble savages, primitive people of the Old West wilderness uncorrupted by the trappings of civilization. When legendary filmmaker Thomas Ince, today known as “the father of the Western,” started making motion pictures in 1909, his dramas, comedies, farces and “social problem” movies explored the stories of his times, from cosmopolitan foppery to the merciless march to conquer the wilderness. Ince was obsessed with realism, the radical art of reflecting the world back to movie audiences using natural landscapes to convey settings and characters that embodied the truth of the human condition.

Most of his one- and two-reelers chronicled cagey varmints who bastardize tiny white outposts with their unsavoury ways, lurking along rough-hewn train tracks splayed across the prairies, ready to snatch supplies destined for the hardy pioneers. Occasionally they encounter mystical savages who inhabit the land they’ve come to take, who sometimes help catch the varmints.

A small number of Ince’s films strayed from the noble savage trope to examine the inherent violence of colonization, such as Blazing the Trail (1912), a gory saga of the attacking of a wagon train moving west by “treacherous Indians.” In what has become a standard Western plot device, a young white girl is captured and whisked back to their camp, where she is tortured “by the squaws.”

As Ince flourished, he moved away from directing and began producing, attracting talented young directors (most in their late teens or early twenties and most of them now acclaimed film pioneers) such as Frank Borzage, Reginald Barker, Lynn Reynolds, John Ford and Burton George.

The Western didn’t really become the Western we know today until Ince teamed up with writer/director and all-around authentic man of the West William S. Hart, whose lone-nomad movie persona “flourished on the border, when the six-shooter was the final arbiter of all disputes between man and man,” and who single-handedly and with burlesque-like flair eradicated any hostiles who got in his way.

Their simplistic plots were increasingly coloured with the racism infecting American society, both through government attitudes, agendas and treatment of Native Americans and in the powerful potboiler literature that romanticized and lionized white settlement of the West. In what became the dominant, white-reconstructed narrative of Westerns, noble settlers were brutalized and murdered by hostile and savage Indians as they fought to take and civilize the land for the good and glory of all.

As studios began making their money by churning out formulaic movies en masse, filmmaking was caught in a struggle between artistry and profit. Realism was viewed as too expensive to be feasible, and not necessary.

Ince’s disillusionment with the Western genre became more racist, and he flew against convention by creating Triangle Films with Mack Sennett and D.W. Griffith. He and his stable of young comers made feature-length dramas, Westerns—and an Alberta-specific genre of the Western known as NorWesters (short for Northwest melodramas), which were lavish, artistic, technically masterful and rooted in realism.

Like Westerns, NorWesters were survival dramas set in the last wilderness frontier on the continent at the time—Alberta, which was being heavily promoted as such in government settlement and tourism campaigns. As American landscapes became increasingly depleted by industrialization, Alberta became the embodiment of a mythical God’s country, a Great North Woods, where man and beast lived in beautiful harmony amid the natural powers and wonders of the vast wilderness.

Most early NorWesters were shot against California landscapes around Los Angeles that replicated the Canadian Rockies. But in 1917, in his “search for the natural,” one of Triangle’s youngest directors, Frank Borzage, headed to the Stoney Nakoda reserve at Morley, just west of Calgary, to shoot several authentic scenes of the real northwest for a “tragedy of the land of snows,” Until They Get Me.

The Stoney Nakoda are the only Indigenous people in North America who have a lasting cinematic record of their traditional way of life and culture as it changed over the last century. They have worked with some of the biggest directors of all time, including Penn and Borzage, but also Kevin Costner, Robert Altman, Alejandro G. Iñárritu, Edward Zwick, Raoul Walsh and Walt Disney.

Many movies filmed in Alberta feature Stoney Nakoda involvement as film professionals—actors, musicians, crew members, cultural consultants, mountain guides, location scouts and horse wranglers. These people often speak their own language in the films, a rare indication of the unique relationships and underlying respect from filmmakers coming to this small reserve at the foot of the Canadian Rockies.

Morley lies on a tract of barren, beautiful land between the plains and mountains, with long, sweeping expanses of grassland that rise through foothills to the majestic mountains on the western horizon, perfect for long shots and super-saturated with the cinematic realism Ince and his filmmaker were so obsessed with. The luminescent quality and drama of the natural light on the reserve is particularly exquisite.

Two very different stories of white settlement exist in North America: the sunny, bloody history in the US, and the less violent though just as oppressive confiscation of Indigenous lands
in Canada.

Most movies filmed in Alberta over the next 40 years were variations of the second, marking a return to the noble savage trope, with Indians as heroes or helpful cohorts of white heroes as they struggled to tame the unforgiving wilderness. In Frank Borzage’s 1922 film The Valley of the Silent Men, the Nakoda are filmed in their own clothes and tipis, helping a Mountie find a varmint in the wilderness. The Blood tribes of southern Alberta, once the fearsome, powerful Blackfoot Confederacy, rescue a train being robbed by varmints in Cameron of the Royal Mounted (1921), despite being vilified and accused of the robbery.

As the decades passed, however, Westerns became more racist and many clichés about Indigenous peoples became embedded in American culture with a force that remains almost unmovable. Movies such as Canadian Pacific (1949), filmed on the Morley reserve with Randolph Scott, and the extravagant remake of the Mountie classic Rose Marie, filmed in Jasper in 1953, have appalling displays of gonzo racism and the objectification and sexualization of Indigenous women, leaving horrific ramifications of murder, genocide, rape and disposability to white men for Indigenous cultures that continue today.

But the summer of 1953 also marked change in Hollywood, a very slow shifting from old to new. Westerns in particular were conservative, formulaic, racist and problematic, unappealing to the young hipsters and beatniks bursting out of the suburbs and redefining normal. Two movies shot in Alberta in 1953—Saskatchewan, by director Raoul Walsh, and The Far Country, by Anthony Mann—both a blend of Western and NorWester, helped take the genre from an undeviating glorification of the Old West to a genre that revealed the racism and psychological conflict and trauma inherent in that narrative.

John Ford’s The Searchers, filmed in part at Elk Island National Park in the cold March of 1955, created an even more powerful, unsentimental look back. It gives disturbing insight into the permanent, personal and psychological scarring that resulted from the gruesome struggle to settle the American west and expropriate the lands of a people who had lived and flourished there for thousands of years. In The Searchers there is no single hero but two: a white man, played by John Wayne, and a Comanche chief, each battling with horrifying resolve to preserve their people.

As the 1960s ended, Arthur Penn, like Ince before him, was searching for realism. He wanted to film Little Big Man, the first and most important revisionist, or post-classical, Western in authentic settings with authentic people. Production finally began in July in southern Montana, with battle scenes shot on the Crow reservation beside the Little Bighorn River. Scenes were also shot in Billings, Montana, where the city’s merchants celebrated the filming with “Little Big Man sidewalk sales.”

Penn again used his movie to denounce the horrific violence of the Vietnam war and drew parallels between the massacre of innocent civilians in Mỹ Lai in 1968 and the slaughter of American natives by Custer and his troops at the battle of Little Bighorn.

At some point he decided to shoot on the Morley reserve and with Nakoda actors, because he wanted the superabundance of the naturalism in Alberta landscapes that had attracted so many major directors here. Production of Little Big Man moved to Alberta in the bitterly cold early days of January 1970. Parts of the horrific massacre were shot at “The Bend in the River” on the banks of the Bow in Morley, a location Hollywood has now been using for a century.

In 2015 and 2016 I undertook a communal project with 15 Nakoda Elders, the Stoney Film Project, to capture the community’s largely uncredited history in film and its importance to the industry. When we watched Little Big Man, Elders Clarice Kootenay and Kathleen Poucette said they felt traumatized by the massacre scene.

Their then-15-year-old sister Cecelia Kootenay had played one of Dustin Hoffman’s young wives, who “copulated” with Crabb in a tipi before the massacre (both actors wore nude body suits). Kootenay and Poucette recall how Cecelia (who is no longer living) was always dancing and singing around the living room of their tiny house on the reserve. Their mother had taken Cecelia to Hollywood to film the scene; she remembers being impressed with the respect shown them both at the studio.

Great Chief Old Lodge Skins, the hero in Little Big Man, is played by Salish Chief Dan George. Film critic Roger Ebert wrote in his review that the Chief’s gentle and frequent use of the simple phrase “human beings” evoked a rare empathy and reflection in audiences. “Most movie Indians have had to express themselves with an ‘um’ at the end of every other word: ‘Swap-um wampum plenty soon’ etc. The Indians in Little Big Man have dialogue reflecting the idiomatic richness of Indian tongues; when Old Lodge Skins simply refers to Cheyennes as ‘the Human Beings,’ the phrase is literal and meaningful and we don’t laugh.”

Little Big Man, which Time called “a new western to begin all westerns,” left a powerful legacy. Major filmmakers, many the vanguard of the American New Wave, soon followed Penn to Alberta, as others had followed Borzage in the 1920s, many to make their own films that reconstructed the Western.

Robert Altman came to the Morley reserve in 1976 to film Buffalo Bill and the Indians, or Sitting Bull’s History Lesson entirely at the rodeo grounds, with a Nakoda cast, saying he wanted to “stay close to truth and far from myth.” Paul Newman, as Buffalo Bill, is an unhinged egomaniac, driven mad by his quest for power and money. He is constantly upstaged by the stoic, intelligent and artful Sitting Bull, played by Nakoda Chief Frank Kaquitts.

An even more damning examination of western settlement and white self-glorification than Little Big Man, Buffalo Bill was not well received. White viewers were not ready to see themselves this way, to have their heroes appear so openly deranged and ignoble—damagers, not the damaged. “I hope everyone left their grenades at the door,” Newman remarked to reporters in New York after the movie’s cold reception at its first screening. He added: “I don’t think there’s an audience for any kind of pain in this country.”

In 1978 Terrence Malick shot Days of Heaven in southern Alberta, using glorious fields of wheat to elevate the old NorWester into a poetic, beauty-filled homage to the early directors who filmed in the province. In the movie, realism and naturalism come alive in a mystical other-realm. Even the magic hour—the mythical, uber-cinematic light that cracks through the Alberta sky for brief moments at dawn and dusk—is a character in the movie, a flash of time when nature is most enchanting and people more bewitching and alive. Like many of the earliest NorWesters by Borzage and Reginald Barker, Days of Heaven is a story of survival in an increasingly industrialized world, the plot secondary to the visuals.

Perhaps the most brutal version of the NorWesters shot in Alberta is the 2015 survival/revenge film The Revenant, made by Mexican director Alejandro G. Iñárritu. It stars Leonardo DiCaprio as Hugh Glass, an undying fur trapper who endures against the power of the natural world and the odious realm of men. Like Crabb in Little Big Man, Glass moves between white and Indigenous worlds. Crabb takes an Indigenous wife, who with their baby is massacred by Custer and his men. Glass has a Pawnee wife who is massacred by Metis fur trappers, his surviving son murdered by a repulsive trapper whom Glass had saved in a Pawnee attack. The Alberta scenes were again filmed at “The Bend in the River” at Morley, now known to Hollywood as “Revenant Flats.”

Realism dominates the action, moods, visual magnificence and movement in the movie. It is almost a masterpiece. During the Stoney Film Project, one Nakoda Elder told me Iñárritu had insisted that Nakoda extras be smeared with a foul-smelling mixture of dirt and mud. When the Elder protested, saying his people were not a dirty people, the director replied: “History says you were.”

Mary Graham is the author of A Stunning Backdrop: Alberta in the Movies, 1917–1960 (University Calgary Press, 2022).

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Good evening, everyone. I am so honoured to be speaking to you tonight about that shining star of Canadian fiction, the quietly brilliant, seminal novel of the Canadian West, W.O. Mitchell’s Who Has Seen the Wind.

Many of you here tonight will have known W.O. well. My only encounter with him happened maybe 35 years ago at a post-reading reception in the Swift Current, Saskatchewan, library. Peter and I had driven the hundred miles north strictly to lay eyes on him, to hear his actual voice. A country man through and through, my husband had come because of Jake and the Kid. Trying to teach myself to be a writer, I was there for Who Has Seen the Wind; I was there to stare at this icon of Canadian literature in wonder, hoping the sight of him, the sound of his voice, the way he moved and his fleeting expressions would tell me… whatever it was I needed to know to do what he had done.

After his reading the chairs were rearranged against the walls, and sandwiches and tea were served. When he turned away from the tea table, he saw an empty chair, headed for it and sat in it—right beside me. When I recovered, I knew I should speak to him, but every time I thought of something to say, turned my head to him, opened my mouth, no sound would emerge, and I would turn my head away again, while he sat there, teacup in hand, looking straight ahead in a not-unfriendly way, chewing on something that, although he claimed not to chew tobacco, was probably tobacco, and saying not one word. Thus we sat, squeezed in side by side, for a half hour, I in misery, and he… rest…fully. Then it was over, and cringing with shame, I slunk away. All these years later, now knowing his reputation, I realize he had been playing a game with me.

The book is sprinkled with intense beauty, the language chosen with a poet’s precision and originality.

But when you think of it, what do you say to the man who wrote a masterpiece about your own world The very world you, a novice writer, are trying to find a way to see—whole—past the harsh facts of a rural agricultural person’s daily life, and at the same time, to the glistening, otherworldly mirages, to the omnipresent wind, to days the air is so hot you have to push your way through it, or so cold that in the icy, frost-ridden stillness you can hear voices speaking from miles away, while all around you the sky leans down on you or soars away, and the grass whispers to you. The prairie being so much more, it turns out, than “the skeleton requirements, simply, of land and sky.” All of these giving you hints, clues, intimations of the Great Mystery inherent in it that the boy, Brian Sean MacMurray O’Connal, seized by it, over and over again, comes to a halt in wonder, puzzlement and yearning.

Up to the publication of Who Has Seen the Wind, most fiction set on the Saskatchewan prairie tended to be “realist” recountings of pioneer life. Macmillan, on receiving the manuscript, must have seen that it had a Canadian classic on its hands, that it was privileged to publish a novel of such rare sensitivity, and especially authenticity, and, wonder of wonders, set in and about the heretofore “boring” Canadian prairie West, and yet, not to be classified as “prairie realism.” Even though Mitchell broke that mould with Who Has Seen the Wind, for many years after that too many prairie writers—myself included—kept on writing realistic fiction, for the most part, unable to find a way to do what Mitchell had done.

Who Has Seen the Wind was first published in February 1947, and in what is still a coup, simultaneously by Macmillan in Canada and Atlantic Little Brown in the USA (although the American edition cut about 7,000 words). It didn’t initially sell particularly well, but as time passed sales began to improve until by the 1960s it was a steady seller, as its fame and the recognition of its true worth grew. Cumulatively, to this day, it approaches sales of up to a million copies, and it keeps on selling, it keeps on being read, taught and admired by writers and readers of all ages, although Mitchell insisted this was not a children’s book.

It has been said by who knows how many writers, scholars and statesmen-and-women that a place does not exist until a writer writes about it. From Catherine McLay’s 1986 essay:

“Robert Kroetsch remarked to Margaret Laurence, ‘As Western Canadian writers [we] are involved in making a new literature out of a new experience…. In a sense we haven’t got an identity until somebody tells our story. The fiction makes us real.’”

W.O. Mitchell, in Who Has Seen the Wind, created the Western Canadian prairie, and all we writers of the prairie West since have paid homage to him, fought against him, argued with him in our prose, trying hard to find another way to write about it, or trying to write of the same world but through the eyes of adults, not children, or of women, not boys and men, or of farm or ranch kids, not town kids as Mitchell was, or, especially, of those not so privileged as he had the good fortune to be. The privileged had, in that era, childhoods of both a freedom to play and to wander as Brian did, and, at the same time, of the certainty of their ultimate safety. Those less privileged far too often slaved away their childhoods on the farms, or had already had trampled out of them the ability to see the magic on the land that surrounded them. Maybe W.O.’s success in describing that child’s world with such warmth, humour and wonder came not only out of his inborn artistry but out of his childhood’s very security and freedom. For many readers and writers who grew up on the prairie in those more difficult times, Who Has Seen the Wind returned to them, or helped them to see for the first time, the magic that was always there and that was theirs too.

You sit, silent, radiating awe. Then, later, and for all your life, you dream of writing such a book yourself.

Who, of all our many writers now, has written so beautiful a description as this:

“Shadows lengthen; the sunlight fades from cloud to cloud, kindling their torn edges as it dies from softness to softness down the prairie sky. A lone farmhouse window briefly blazes; the prairie bathes in mellower, yellower light, and the sinking sun becomes a low and golden glowing, splendid on the prairie’s edge.”

Although this is the most often quoted passage to illustrate his lyricism, in fact the entire text is sprinkled with phrases and clauses of intense beauty, the language chosen with a poet’s precision and originality. The book lifts us into myth and, with heartbreaking intensity, uses the prairie to illustrate the human struggle—in this case incarnate in a small child—between the knowledge gained through the senses and that of his soul, that comes from where he doesn’t know, but that begs for answers, or cries to touch something that might be God. I, a long-time writer, remain stunned by Mitchell’s achievement.

I am struck too by his literary inventiveness, even daring, in finding ways to solve the problems all we writers wrestle with: the death scene, two lovers parting, a young boy’s reaction to his father’s death, the many funny yet non-trivial dialogues.

For instance, this reading, my third or fourth, was the first time that I paid close attention to Mitchell’s “old-lady-near-death” scene, in which his character both speaks aloud and thinks, she herself no longer knowing a difference:

“–when the sound of the grinding is low.” The curtains flapped and were sucked from the room as though the window had drawn its breath. “–or even the silver cord be loosed.” The curved sides of the chamber-pot caught and held the afternoon light in pearly gleams. “– or the golden bowl be broken –” The gilt framed picture of John MacMurray stared unseeing from the wall. “–shall the dust return –” “Ticket-a-roo – ticket-a-roo,” said the pigeon under the window.

I hadn’t read two lines before I heard echoes of James Joyce or Virginia Woolf: the mixture of quotes from Ecclesiastes, the author’s voice, the voice of the natural world. Throughout this novel that seems, deceptively, the simplest of books, you’ll find evidence as well of Mitchell’s considerable scholarship.

As is too often the case with the best books, the ones that last, like Who Has Seen the Wind, the juries of major literary prizes did not honour this book when it first came out (other than the IODE prize), but the rest of the country gradually saw its worth and continues to do so: Mitchell was awarded the Order of Canada in 1973; in 1992 he became an Honourable Member of the Privy Council, the highest of civilian honours, for his contribution to our national story and national art; our universities gave him, I think, nine honourary degrees. Most extraordinary of all is that when he died in 1998, across the country the Canadian flag was flown at half-mast.

Finally, tonight I get to say to him, wherever he is, what I could not say that endless, mortifying afternoon many years ago. I am still struggling, though, to find those words, which would then have been, and to this day remain, about how he wrote, how he found the place inside himself, so deep, so profound, and that he then put on the page as the story of a child on the prairie, and what the prairie taught him, and how it formed him. I found it so true a book that it required no comment: truth blown on the wind for prairie children to hear, the prairie’s capacity to drive the vulnerable mad, and the biggest truth of all: death, and how it comes to all things, from archbishops to gophers, and even—defying understanding—to a boy’s beloved father.

Do you comment on the weather, or the afternoon’s turnout Do you kiss his hand, or kneel at his feet No. You sit in silence, radiating awe. And then, later, and for all your writing life, you dream of writing such a book yourself.

To prepare for tonight, I read the novel again. If this time I started out my reading as a dubious old woman, I finished it in that state that with the best books all readers reach—of an inner hush, not recognizing where I sat—and when I rose and gazed out at the muted glitter of the snow falling, cone-shaped, under the streetlights, for a moment, in the achievement all novelists dream of creating with their work, Who Has Seen the Wind had reawakened me and I saw the world with new eyes.

Sharon Butala is the author of 21 books of fiction and nonfiction, numerous essays and articles, some poetry and five plays.

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The post A Tribute to W.O. Mitchell appeared first on Alberta Views.

Owais Lightwala says yes

Professor, producer and arts entrepreneur

Imagine, for a second, a world without music or stories or dancing. Would you want to live in such a world Art is a basic human need, and thankfully, in Canada, we recognize this and have a long history of publicly funding it.

The origins of public arts funding can be traced to the 1951 Massey Commission, which called for a strong public funding system to protect Canada’s settler cultures from rising US dominance of our radios, screens and stages. While this vision succeeded, it failed to respect the sovereignty of Indigenous cultures or anticipate today’s multicultural mosaic. Still, the commission’s core concern remains vital: how to cultivate a distinct Canadian cultural identity in the face of US influence.

We already know how to support Canadian industry. We spend $1.6-billion annually to help Canadian farmers stay in business. Without these supports, Canadian agriculture would likely collapse against cheaper imports, making us forever dependent on others for food. Similarly, according to an OECD estimate, we spend some $4.5-billion annually in subsidies to oil and gas industries. Alberta alone contributes more than $1.6-billion annually to oil and gas, and this is for a sector that posted record profits in 2022. This spending is considered necessary to sustain business investment in Canada and keep high-paying jobs here. Meanwhile, total government investment in culture is about $10-billion annually, but the sector accounts for some $57-billion in GDP and 672,000 direct jobs. Of that $10-billion, only 7 per cent is for the “arts” (visual, performing and literary)—the subsidy-backed arts sector is quite a bargain compared to the rest of the budget.

But we shouldn’t buy something just because it’s cheap; it has to add value. The arts are hugely popular with Canadians. We now spend twice as much on the performing arts ($1.4-billion) as we do on live sports ($650-million). Canadians value theatre as much as, if not more than, professional hockey. But just as it’s good that we spend public money on making sports accessible for everyone, it’s good to spend public money on artistic activities that many more people engage with. Total public investment from all levels of government makes up only 36 per cent of Canadian arts revenues. If arts organizations weren’t popular, how would they raise the remaining 64 per cent from tickets, donations and sponsorships?

Not only do we need to fund the arts publicly, we need to invest much more. While the arts have proven resilient, stagnant funding and rising costs mean companies must charge higher ticket prices. Public funding should prioritize subsidizing access for people on low incomes (youth, seniors, people with disabilities etc.). We should also prioritize those communities that are often neglected when it comes to culture, such as rural towns and First Nations. The current system of arts funding is far from perfect, but the way to improve it is to invest more so that more Canadians can enjoy the many benefits art gives us.

Colin Craig says no

President of think tank Second Street

Imagine being the convenience store worker you see every time you visit the store. Or perhaps you’re a low-income single mom or senior citizen on a fixed income. Now imagine you read a news story about a Canadian artist who received several thousand dollars from the federal government to put on a solo art show in Germany called “Whose Jizz is This?” The artist’s show features sculptures, prints, videos and several giant sex toys she calls “The Fleshies.”

How would you feel knowing your tax dollars were used to fund such a controversial purpose while you were struggling to make ends meet Suffice it to say, many Canadians would feel disappointed.

Is it right to force people to fund the arts through their taxes I argue no. To be sure, I like the arts as much as the next person, but the arts are not a core government service such as policing, road repair or healthcare. When many people are struggling just to scrape together money to fix their roof or repair their fridge, it’s hardly fair to force them to fund a sex-toy show in Germany.

Now more than ever household budgets are stretched. Inflation has hit a 40-year high and food banks across the country are overwhelmed. Many Canadians will tell you they have more pressing expenditures than art—food, their mortgage and home repairs, to name a few.

A more effective and fair approach to funding the arts would be for governments to leave more money in each taxpayer’s pocket. This way everyone can decide for themselves if spending their own money on art is a priority, and if so, what kinds of art they want to support.

Some readers might suggest the “Whose Jizz is This?” example is an outlier. But it’s not. Art by its very nature is subjective and often divisive. Many readers will remember the controversy caused by “Voice of Fire,” a large $1.8-million painting that the National Gallery of Canada purchased in 1989. The painting had just three simple lines—two vertical blue stripes with a red line up the middle. Another example is the band that Ottawa funded whose album depicted Jesus Christ as a piece of excrement. One doesn’t have to be a Christian to understand why this was controversial.

In Calgary, city hall has funded public art that offended local Indigenous people (“Bowfort Towers”), that literally burned a hole in an observer’s jacket (“Wishing Well”) and that had to be removed because it used images without permission (“Snapshots”). The city’s art program stumbled so many times that public pressure led to its being paused and reviewed.

When you—an individual—are left in charge of funding the arts, you can decide whether a piece is offensive or brilliant, great or mediocre, or if it’s a priority given fiscal constraints. And when you’re left to fund the arts, governments then have more time to focus on what they should be doing—core services.

Owais Lightwala responds to Colin Craig

My colleague gives the example of the art project “Whose Jizz is This?” as something that is too “controversial” to “force” “struggling” Canadians to fund with taxpayer dollars. Let’s unpack each of these last three words.

What exactly are the criteria for being “controversial?” Simply that the content references human sexuality, a topic that is literally the subject of most popular songs Or perhaps it’s the queer, feminist, questioning nature of the piece that makes it too risqué for the average Canadian to bear the existence of No one will argue that every Canadian must participate in or equally appreciate every piece of art, but it is a core value of our society to protect freedom of expression unless it incites hatred or violence. Also, we need to clarify how the creator of this piece, the musician Peaches, came to receive federal funding to present “Whose Jizz is This?” in Germany. The current system for public arts funding is a highly competitive process, with rigorous layers of evaluation, reporting and accountability. For example, the Canada Council for the Arts funds only 10 per cent of the applications it receives each year (6,000 out of some 60,000). In contrast, the top Ivy League universities in the US have an acceptance rate of around 7 per cent. The artists who do somehow make a living working exclusively in the arts (and most do not) are the very best of the best. We don’t fund hobbyists; we fund renowned experts who bring us acclaim and prestige on an international stage.

Then there is the issue of “forcing” “struggling” Canadians to pay for arts while they may have difficulty making ends meet. This argument does not hold much water, as a 2017 report by the Canadian Taxpayers Federation shows that Canadians who earn less than $50,000 only contribute 13 per cent of federal income tax revenues, while representing 68 per cent of all tax filers. In fact, one-third of Canadians, presumably with the lowest incomes, didn’t pay any taxes at all. So the convenience store worker, struggling single mom and senior citizen cited as examples are probably not contributing to the funds that pay for any public services, let alone for the arts. The group that’s arguably “forced” into supporting the arts is the wealthiest Canadians who pay the majority of taxes, a group for whom I am reluctant to shed tears.

Anyone committed to democracy has to be committed to democratizing means of expression and speech.

The larger argument put forth against public funding for the arts is that governments should focus on core services and let individuals decide the rest. I’ll challenge this in a couple of ways. First, as I already established, public funds are largely coming from wealthier people to begin with, so individual choice instead of public funding would really only lower taxes for the rich. Those wealthy individuals can now spend the surplus funds as they see fit, concentrating more power for censorship into the hands of fewer people.

In this country, thankfully, our government is elected democratically, and if we don’t like our representatives we get to fire them and hire new ones. By extension, public funding has to be accountable to the larger public or it will be subject to public outrage. The example of Calgary temporarily suspending funding for public art is given as a failure, but I’d say it’s actually a great example of public accountability in action. Conversely, if a handful of wealthy patrons decide privately what arts are good and bad, what is offensive and inoffensive, we return quickly to a medieval culture of aristocratic feudalism. Anyone who is committed to democracy has to be committed to democratizing means of expression and speech as well. One is impossible without the other. 

My main contention with this claim that governments should focus on “core services” is the definition of core services. The arts are absolutely a core service. Funding the arts is funding education, as the arts include arts education and training. The arts are where we build the increasingly valuable skills of communication, collaboration, creativity, innovation, conflict resolution, emotional intelligence; the list is endless. These are vital skills that our workforce is going to need as the economy continues to transition away from traditional low-skilled labour to high-skilled knowledge and service sector work. Funding the arts is also healthcare, as a slew of studies have demonstrated the strong relationship between participation in arts activity and better mental health and increased community belonging. Dancing is a much cheaper way of preventively addressing diabetes, hypertension, arthritis and heart disease than any drug currently on the market. What could be more “core” than ensuring Canadians live long and healthy lives The arts are at the core of our humanity, and robust participation in the arts has to be core to any thriving human society.

Colin Craig responds to Owais Lightwala

I agree with Owais Lightwala’s point that life would be pretty dull without the arts. A good tune, thought-provoking painting or captivating movie—these artistic endeavours enrich our lives. However, mankind has created art for millennia without government subsidies. Exceptional artists will thrive with or without state funding.

Lightwala argues subsidies are necessary because Canadian artists have to compete with the dominant cultural presence of the United States. So why is there such a long list of famous Canadian artists who have overcome that challenge without public funding

Readers will know the name Justin Bieber, one of Canada’s most popular musicians ever. It’s fairly well known that Bieber got his start after he and his mother began posting clips on YouTube of him singing. Through sheer talent and word of mouth, Bieber’s videos attracted 10 million views in no time. His performances eventually caught the attention of a recording executive, and the rest is history. No subsidies required.

Nickelback is a polarizing band—you either love them or hate them—but it’s not debatable that they’ve enjoyed success on the world stage. In an interview with loudwire.com, the band explained how guitarist Ryan Peake used his day job working in the cattle industry to borrow $30,000 from a local bank to get the band off the ground, while lead singer Chad Kroeger borrowed money from his father-in-law.

It’s not clear if Rush, one of Canada’s most successful rock bands of all time, ever accepted public funding, but as they started out as a libertarian-inspired band, it seems doubtful they would have asked the state for financial help to write lyrics denouncing the state.

Justin Bieber, Nickelback and U2 show that exceptional talent will rise to the top without subsidies.

Like Canada, Ireland also has a culturally dominant neighbour: the United Kingdom. So how did U2 break through and become the top grossing act in the entire world during the 2010s (pulling in more than $1-billion) Watch their performance of the song “Out of Control” at Slane Castle on YouTube and you’ll hear lead singer Bono explain that each band member asked a relative for a loan of 500 Irish pounds in the 1970s. U2 used that money to help pay for recording their first album, and that obviously turned out quite well.

These examples show that exceptional talent will rise to the top without subsidies.

Lightwala cites the 1951 Massey Commission report as the impetus for state funding of the arts in Canada. But even if you accept the argument that subsidies were needed in the 1950s, one can’t ignore how much the world has changed in the last 70 years. As Justin Bieber has shown, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram and TikTok allow artists to build a following directly with the public. Etsy, eBay, Bandcamp and other sites help artists sell their products around the world. Artists who want donations can always try Patreon, GoFundMe or Kickstarter. 

What about public art—surely it would fail without subsidies Not necessarily. Consider the “See Art Orlando” project in Florida. Unlike the City of Calgary’s scorned subsidized public art program, Orlando’s has received positive reviews and is paid for 100 per cent through donations and corporate sponsorship. While the City of Calgary has placed public art in inconvenient locations (including one piece behind a fence in a compound that’s inaccessible half the time), Orlando’s nine exhibits are located throughout the downtown and make for a nice two-mile stroll from exhibit to exhibit.

 Finally, Lightwala argues that there’s an economic benefit in favour of governments subsidizing various special interest groups, including more funding for the arts. Let’s ignore the fact there’s no money available—Ottawa’s debt is rising by $6 million per hour. The pro-subsidy claim is common: give a special interest group millions and get an even larger economic return. But is that true Readers should note that such claims are routinely put forward by recipients and their hired consultants. The conflict is obvious. Conversely, independent economists often come to the opposite conclusion. For example, while every professional sports team will tell you significant benefits come from subsidizing their facility, a 2005 survey of US economists found 86 per cent agreed or strongly agreed that subsidies for pro sports teams should be eliminated.

Lightwala cited how much Canadians are spending on the arts right now. A good question to ask is: Why aren’t people spending more There’s nothing stopping them… unless of course it’s just not a priority, considering their budget constraints and other choices available to them.

This brings me back to my first point: when governments leave more money in your pocket, you can decide for yourself if supporting the arts sector financially is a priority for your household and, equally important, which artists to support.

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