Several ‘culture is critical’ rallies planned in N.S. on Wednesday

CITYnews halifax / By Steve Gow

Hundreds are expected to rally for a rollback of the province’s latest budget cuts to the arts and heritage sector on Wednesday as organizers want to ensure that the Nova Scotia government knows that “culture is critical.”

Ever since the province cut $130 million in grants as part of last week’s deficit budget, anger has been mounting.

According to the arts sector, the cuts will directly impact some 22,000 jobs and reduce provincial revenues from an industry that generates $2.6 billion in GDP.

Nearly 10 rallies are set to take place across Nova Scotia to protest the Houston government’s recent sweeping cuts.

Kat McCormack will be at the rally planned at Province House in Halifax at noon on Wednesday. As executive director of Dartmouth’s Eastern Front Theatre (EFT), she says the budget changes will directly impact her organization.

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“Very realistically, we will be cutting programming,” she says. “So that means there are going to be artists without work, there’s going to be people without an output (and) at EFT, we’re mandated to tell Atlantic-Canadian stories, so suddenly we’re going to be losing a whole generation to tell our stories.”

She says it isn’t just the arts sector that will feel the pain either, as the cuts ripple out to the broader community in other ways.

“I don’t really see any of this helping us down the road,” McCormack says. “Certainly with arts, culture and heritage, we are bringing money back to the community so even for Eastern Front Theatre, every dollar that comes towards EFT goes back to a local artist, so that goes back into our local communities, so I really think people are going to be feeling this no matter what community they’re from.”

Therese Cruz would certainly agree with McCormack’s assessment.

As executive director of the Visual Arts Nova Scotia and a councillor for the Town of Shelburne, she will be speaking at the rally in Yarmouth on Wednesday, where she hopes to express how important arts, culture and heritage are to rural communities across the province.

“Arts, culture and heritage are so strong in this community,” says Cruz, noting many artists move to rural regions just to practice their work.

“Without government support, I think it will just die away, and what is really important, like I mentioned earlier, (art and culture) is such a core element of being human that without it, it doesn’t make any sense.”