by Max Wyman
CORMORANT BOOKS
2023/$19.95/200 pp.
Berlin’s three opera companies have a publicly funded budget roughly equal to the size of… the Canada Council for the Arts. When Max Wyman drops this bombshell, it’s just one in a long trail of proof points in favour of his call for Canadian arts and culture to have a more prominent role in our individual and collective lives.
The Compassionate Imagination: How the arts are central to a functioning democracy has an occasionally disorienting mashup of aims. It is a bold roadmap for an overhaul of Canada’s cultural institutions, including their governance and funding models; it’s a philosophical treatise on the value of the arts; and, perhaps most practically, it is a timely resource introducing readers to great Canadian artists and to international examples of alternative systems and initiatives expanding the influence of arts and culture.
Wyman started the book after a 2013 cancer diagnosis, which made him reflective. What had he learned as a long-time arts critic for the Vancouver Sun, president of the Canadian Commission for UNESCO, and as a Canada Council board member? The arts, he says, have gifted him a rich spiritual and moral tuning. He’s seen the arts call out “the best within us” and culture act as “the rebar framework” giving strength and durability to our lives. He builds the case for how the arts benefit society through a flurry of case and research studies: Yo-Yo Ma explored how Bach’s cello suites could facilitate conversations about the “solutions to our problems;” Quebec artists helped evolve a “national” Québécois character; and one Vancouver theatre company used drama to dive beyond media headlines.
The value of arts and culture spans individual and collective experiences, and Wyman explores both to build his case for his vision of a new “Canadian Culture Contract” with a Canadian Foundation of Culture at the heart of this work. This new organization would incorporate current cultural institutions such as the Canada Council, Library and Archives Canada and the CBC, while shifting out of the Ministry of Canadian Heritage to report directly to the federal cabinet. Wyman’s capacious vision sees this new entity advising on all policies to cabinet through an arts and culture lens. It would expand and democratize the funding of the arts by distributing “culture credits”—$1,000 per year—to every Canadian, while ensuring all museums and galleries were free. While reforming the Canadian Copyright Act and the CBC, it would support the growth of “STEAM,” which adds arts education—“A”—to schools’ current focus on science, technology, engineering and math (STEM).
Wyman outlines the urgency: over roughly the last 30 years Canadian publishing has lost 80 per cent of its market share in English-speaking Canada, while 2,000 bookstores distributing local stories have gone under. And that’s just the book industry. All areas of Canadian arts and culture have suffered from static budgets and, Wyman argues, from the low priority given to arts education in schools.
I quibble with some of the structure and style choices—why hold the detailed vision until the end? Why dip so briefly into case studies that could have told the story more effectively than the didactic approach? Why choose the path of scholar rather than storyteller? That said, I reached often for my phone to search for referenced artists and organizations. I particularly valued Wyman’s history and critique of our country’s arts and cultural institutions, and felt inspired by the possibilities, because I too have experienced how art “takes you by the hand and walks you through the spiritual maze of existence.” Art is a comfort amid the challenges of life, and in The Compassionate Imagination Wyman shows how art might save us from ourselves.
Carissa Halton is the author of Little Yellow House: Finding Community in a Changing Neighbourhood.
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