Jason C. McLean

I know how we can save arts funding in Canada! Last Friday, I opened up my mailbox today to find a flier with a picture of a syringe underneath a swing with a kid playing soccer in the background. The giant caption read: “safe? securitaire?” in big, black letters.

This piece of scaremongering came “courtesy” of someone named Maurice Vellacott, a Conservative MP from Saskatoon-Wanuskewin in Saskatchewan and was filled with US-style war-on-drugs rhetoric like “junkies and drug pushers don’t belong near children and families, they should be in rehab or behind bars.”

It had all the markings of a cheaply put together neo-con wannabe pamphlet, complete with a picture of someone dressed as a doctor and a smiling Mr. Harper.

So the Tories are trying to sell me on the idea that their thinly-veiled attack on pot is the only way to save kids from needles. Nothing new here. What is interesting is what this pamphlet is.

There’s no election on and my riding’s represented by the NDP, so this amounts to nothing more than junk mail. It’s also a huge waste of money.

True, parts of my riding may respond to the fire-and-brimstone rhetoric, but not the part I live in. Since there’s no way this campaign is unique to my neighbourhood, there are probably tens of thousands of people who threw that letter directly into the recycle box.

So the Harper crew will blow money on mail spam and at the same time cut arts funding. Maybe they’re afraid some artists with something critical to say will have a louder voice, or maybe they just don’t care about Canadian culture. As lapdogs to the Bush administration, it makes sense that they would prefer us fully adopt American culture rather than export our own.

Now it looks like they’re putting some of their new loot into the 2010 Vancouver Olympics and in particular the torch relay. So they also don’t care about land being appropriated from the poor and Native peoples, either. They just want a chance to show off to the rest of the G7 how well they can play the game.

If they really cared about athletes, they would invest in community recreation for all, not just those with a chance of doing well in a multi-million dollar international scam like the Olympics.

If they really cared about Canada, they would support artists with something to say, even if that something was critical of the government or corporate influence in the arts. After all, those are the ones that need funding ’cause they won’t get it from corporate sources.

But all hope is not lost. There’s a do-not-call list going into effect on September 30th, complete with hefty fines for those who violate it. Let’s get that extended to the mail and to political parties when there’s no election on.

Then, we can nail Harper on his junk mail campaign and spend the money on critical artists with something to say, so that their voice can be heard and so that they can inspire us and the rest of the world with a new way of doing things.