Cultural Policy

Origins, Evolution, and Implementation in Canada's Provinces and Territories

Jean-Paul Baillargeon, Nicole Barrieau, Alison Beale, Daniel Bourgeois, Donna Gannon, Joy Cohnstaedt, Patrice A. Dutil, Fernand Harvey, M. Sharon Jeanotte, Jan Marontate, Catherine Murray, Ronald Rompkey, Dick Stanley, Karen Wall, David Whitson, Diane St-Pierre, Monica Gattinger, Monica Gattinger, Diane St-Pierre

• Publisher: University of Ottawa Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780776628974
• Topic: Sciences sociales
• Subtopic: Anthropologie culturelle et sociale

How do Canadian provincial and territorial governments intervene in the cultural and artistic lives of their citizens? What changes and influences shaped the origin of these policies and their implementation? On what foundations were policies based, and on what foundations are they based today? How have governments defined the concepts of culture and of cultural policy over time? What are the objectives and outcomes of their policies, and what instruments do they use to pursue them?

Answers to these questions are multiple and complex, partly as a result of the unique historical context of each province and territory, and partly because of the various objectives of successive governments, and the values and identities of their citizens.

Cultural Policy: Origins, Evolution, and Implementation in Canada's Provinces and Territories offers a comprehensive history of subnational cultural policies, including the institutionalization and instrumentalization of culture by provincial and territorial governments; government cultural objectives and outcomes; the role of departments, Crown corporations, other government organizations, and major public institutions in the cultural domain; and the development, dissemination, and impact of subnational cultural policy interventions.

Published in English.

CHAPTER ONE

Newfoundland and Labrador: Cultural Policy for a Post-Colonial Society

Ronald Rompkey¹

Abstract

This chapter argues that the province of Newfoundland and Labrador presents special circumstances for cultural analysis. A colony of Great Britain for several centuries, it became a province of Canada in 1949 and passed through a process of identity formation as it has struggled to let go of imperial models and construct what might be called a post-colonial society. This process is not unlike the one sometimes experienced by countries adjusting to independence. After sketching the province’s lengthy history as a site for the international cod fishery, the chapter takes the reader through a succession of cultural initiatives advanced by successive provincial governments. Each in turn has sought to preserve an essentialist idea of the provincial culture while at the same time presenting a hospitable environment for artists and cultural workers.

Résumé

Ce chapitre soutient que la province de Terre-Neuve-et-Labrador offre une situation exceptionnelle pour les études culturelles. En tant que colonie de la Grande-Bretagne pendant des siècles, elle est devenue province du Canada en 1949 et, par conséquent, a connu une période où elle façonnait sa propre identité, tout en abandonnant les modèles impériaux et en construisant ce que l’on pourrait qualifier de société postcoloniale. Ce processus est similaire à celui qu’ont rencontré d’autres pays nouvellement indépendants. Après avoir esquissé la longue histoire de la province, site international de la pêche à la morue, le chapitre fait état des initiatives culturelles proposées par les gouvernements provinciaux successifs et accompagne ainsi le lecteur dans une aventure de découvertes. Comme nous le verrons, ces gouvernements ont cherché à conserver, chacun à sa façon, une idée essentialiste de la culture de Terre-Neuve-et-Labrador, tout en offrant un milieu accueillant aux artistes et aux travailleurs du secteur culturel.

The province of Newfoundland and Labrador is divided both geographically and culturally into two distinct territories: the island of Newfoundland, consisting of 111,390 square kilometres, and a portion of the Labrador Peninsula, consisting of 294,330 square kilometres—the two, taken together, are more than three times the size of the Maritime provinces. These two territories were perhaps the first parts of the New World to be explored by Europeans, for archaeological evidence shows that the Norse reached Newfoundland as early as 1000 CE. John Cabot arrived in 1497, and throughout the sixteenth century, migratory fishermen from England, Portugal, France, and Spain harvested cod off the coast. In Labrador, which was ceded to Newfoundland as recently as 1927, Basque whalers carried out a seasonal fishery in the 1540s, but the first permanent Labrador settlers of European descent (livyers) were trappers of the Hudson’s Bay Company or migratory Newfoundland fishermen who had intermarried with Indigenous women.

The bulk of the 2016 provincial population of 519,716 is to be found in Newfoundland with only 27,197 in Labrador.² Approximately half of inhabitants now reside in what used to be coastal fishing villages, the remainder in cities and small municipalities, the largest of which is the provincial capital, St. John’s, with a population of 108,860 (205,955 in the broader metropolitan area). For the most part, they trace their origins to the southwest of England or the south and southeast of Ireland as a result of migrations lasting from the mid-eighteenth century to the mid-nineteenth century and linked to the fishery. The rest consist of three Indigenous groups—Innu (formerly known as the Montagnais-Naskapi), Inuit, and Mi’kmaq—and a small French-speaking community found mostly on the west coast of the island and in Western Labrador. Recent immigration has altered the ethnic and cultural diversity of the province, but unlike other parts of North America, Newfoundland and Labrador remains overwhelmingly limited to the original settler groups. According to 2016 census data, 96.9 percent report English as their mother tongue, 0.5 percent report French, and 2.3 percent a non-official language. Thus, in terms of its cultural identity, the province remains predominantly English and Irish, Canadian only since 1949.

From the earliest days, Newfoundland’s raison d’être has been the cod fishery. However, since the late nineteenth century, with the building of the railway and the development of the pulp and paper, mining and hydroelectric industries, the economy of Newfoundland and Labrador has diversified. After opening the Hibernia oil field 315 kilometres from St. John’s in 1997, the province gradually developed its offshore petroleum resources. Originally designed to produce 150,000 barrels a day, this resource changed the provincial economy fundamentally, such that by 2003 it was producing goods and services valued at over $18 billion. The province’s GDP expanded at the same time, averaging 6.5 percent growth per year, exports being the chief contributor. For 2016, Statistics Canada, the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC), and the Economic and Project Analysis Division, Department of Finance (March 2018) estimate the GDP at $31.5 billion.

Goods and services exported from the province were valued at $4.5 billion in 1997, over $11 billion in 2003, and over $15 billion in 2012. Goods accounted for well over 80 percent of exports in 2003, and over 90 percent in 2012. Most of these were exported beyond Canada’s borders, particularly to the United States.

Crude and refined oil, fish products, newsprint, iron ore, and electricity accounted for most of the commodities. However, offshore oil now contributes the greatest share of export value (75 percent in 2014) and stands as the leading contributor to export growth. Although services represent a relatively small portion of exports, their value has also risen because of the growth of tourism, communications, and business and computer services.³

Since joining Canadian Confederation in 1949, the province has been governed by a succession of alternating Liberal and Progressive Conservative governments. The New Democratic Party normally holds no more than three seats in the provincial legislature, which in 2006 consisted of forty-eight members, reduced to forty in 2015.⁴ In the early 1970s, the New Labrador Party flourished briefly as an expression of Labrador regionalism, a phenomenon that persists to the present day. Having existed as a dominion with responsible government until 1934 and with a Commission of Government until 1949,⁵ Newfoundland and Labrador shares with other post-colonial societies—as opposed to the other Canadian provinces—the challenge of finding its own voice and reflecting its own culture through artistic expression and government intervention.

In post-colonial societies, ethnicity and geography, custom and tradition, dialect and humour, go a long way toward defining a people. Yet culture remains an abstraction. Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger have shown convincingly in The Invention of Tradition (1983) that nations are imaginary constructs that depend on an apparatus of cultural fictions, especially through the novel, for a sense of identity. Similarly, since joining Confederation, Newfoundland and Labrador has not only been finding its feet economically, but finding its voice, and successive provincial governments have embraced the idea of a distinctive provincial culture in a variety of ways. What these policies have sometimes ignored is the phenomenon of mobility, of exile, in the modern world, a world where culture is no longer simply a local affair. Newfoundlanders and Labradorians leave their province not simply to labour, but to write, dance, sing, and make films. Conversely, the province is fortunate to have received a variety of artists and cultural workers from all over North America and beyond, individuals who have made the province their home. These now constitute part of the collective post-colonial voice.

History

Newfoundland began to develop as a settled society toward the end of the eighteenth century. By the Treaty of Paris (1763), the wintering European population is said to have risen to around 12,000, one-eighth of the population of Canada (Head 1976, 141), and thus from as early as 1794 there are references to its distinguishing features. The term Newfoundlander had by then entered the lexicon (Williams 1765, 9), so that by the end of the nineteenth century, Newfoundlanders had emerged as an identifiable group.

Visitors would focus on defining traits that were contradictory: sometimes hardiness and sometimes medical deficiency, sometimes ignorance and sometimes shrewdness (O’Flaherty 1979, 87). And yet, despite these contradictions, there was a growing acknowledgement of an emerging people with peculiarities of pronunciation and idiom, of song, proverb, and folk tale. Such peculiarities were regarded at times as adaptations of existing English and Irish practices but at other times as reflections of the struggle against climate and terrain. While the attribution of national character is always a risky and arbitrary business, the identification of Newfoundlanders according to their presumed ethnic traits prevailed. The population, thought the writers Joseph Hatton and Moses Harvey in 1883, was derived from “Saxon and Celtic stocks,” the same blend of endurance and imaginativeness but forged from the struggle with physical difficulty. If Newfoundlanders lacked the privilege of education, they noted, they did not lack the aptitude for it. “Indeed,” they wrote, “anyone who comes in contact with the people will be struck with their mental quickness and intellectual aptitude” (Hatton and Harvey 1883, 223).

The acknowledgement of certain defining traits entered the discourse of tourism in the 1920s, much of it produced by the Newfoundland Tourist Commission. In presenting Newfoundland as a hospitable destination, the commission advised prospective visitors, “Hardy descendants of British, Scotch, and Irish pioneers, the Newfoundlanders have become moulded into a distinct type” (Newfoundland 1928). Later, we learn that “Inheriting the sterling traits of their English, Irish and Scotch ancestors, Newfoundlanders still exemplify their pioneering spirit, which is amply borne out by the hardships they are called upon to endure in search of their livelihood in reaping the harvest of the sea” (Newfoundland 1929, 4). But still, wrestling a livelihood from the sea was not an activity conducive to the cultivation of the arts. Life in Newfoundland required adaptability and independence. It took creativity to build houses and boats, to produce furniture and fishing equipment from basic materials, but not much more.

Indeed, Newfoundlanders did not lack creative power. What they lacked was an authoritative, self-conscious voice with...

Table of contents

• Cover
• HalfTitle Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• List of Annexes
• Foreword: The Complexity of Provincial and Territorial Cultural Policies
• Preface
• Introduction Provincial and Territorial Cultural Policy in Canada: Project Overview and Preliminary Observations
• Chapter One Newfoundland and Labrador: Cultural Policy for a Post-Colonial Society
• Chapter Two New Brunswick: Cultural and Institutional Duality
• Chapter Three Nova Scotia: Clientelism, Advocacy, and Provincial Support for the Arts and Founding Cultures
• Chapter Four Prince Edward Island: A Popular and Community-Based Cultural Policy
• Chapter Five Québec and Its Cultural Policies: The Affirmation of a National Identity, a Distinct Culture, Creative and Open to the World
• Chapter Six Ontario: From Reactive to Proactive Cultural Policy?
• Chapter Seven Centres and Hinterlands: The Conflicted Heart of Cultural Policy in Manitoba
• Chapter Eight Saskatchewan’s Cultural “GDP”: Geography, Demographics, and Politics and the Shaping of Cultural Policy
• Chapter Nine Alberta: From Rags to Riches to Roulette
• Chapter Ten British Columbia’s Place-Based Approach: Policy Devolution and Cultural Self-Determination (1952–2009)
• Chapter Eleven Cementing Nordicities: The Cultural Policy of the Northern Territories
• Chapter Twelve Canadian Cultural Statistics: Overview and Critique
• Conclusion Provincial and Territorial Cultural Policy in Canada: A Framework for Comparative Analysis
• Contributor Biographies
• Politics and Public Policy
• Backcover