Dozens of protesters took over a section of Bloor Street on Friday afternoon to rally against arts sector cuts handed down by the federal Conservatives’ in their 2012 budget.
With movie lovers enjoying another successful edition of the Hot Docs festival at theatres around the corner, roughly 40 members of the filmmaking community and their supporters gathered outside the ROM to call attention to the Harper government’s decision to slash subsidies to the CBC and National Film Board.
Both agencies are set to lose 10 per cent of their budgets over the next three years.
Waving signs and chanting “Cuts to the arts hurt us all!”, demonstrators said the clawbacks will ravage the nation’s culture sector, in particular its internationally-renowned documentary industry.
“We’re supposed to be celebrating documentaries, it’s Hot Docs,” said Katie McKenna, a documentary producer who helped organize the protest. “At the same time the industry is just on life support right now.”
Producer Sarah Spring, another protest organizer, argued that the arts sector’s contribution to the economy is underappreciated and that investment in the arts is delivers benefits for the rest of Canadian society.
“It’s all creating jobs. We can’t just make films on no money,” she said. “We’re supporting the economy.”
According to the Documentary Organization of Canada, the industry has shed the equivalent of 1,500 full time jobs in the past two years, and a press release for the event said nationwide production of non-fiction films has declined 30 per cent since 2008.
Along with the 10 per cent cuts to the NFB and CBC outlined in the 2012 budget, Telefilm’s theatrical documentary unit is being cut by 50 per cent. Toronto’s NFB Mediatheque is also slated for closure.
