Presentation to Annual Public Meeting, Canada Council for the Arts
Robert Sirman, Director and CEO
Tuesday, January 28, 2014
Good afternoon,
Because this is my last Annual Public Meeting I would like to take the opportunity right off the top to thank the Chair and Vice-Chair and other members of the Board for the exceptional contribution they have made to Council during my time here. As Vice-Chair, Simon Brault has been a Rock of Gibraltar for a full ten years, and is the last man standing from the selection committee that forwarded my nomination to Government eight years ago. During all this time Simon has been extraordinarily supportive to me and to the work of the Council, and I wish to publicly acknowledge what a difference he has made to Council's ability to move forward.
Mr. Rotman has been Board Chair for three-quarters of my time here at Council, and he and the other Board members have ensured a standard of excellence in the governance of this organization second to none. There is a reason why the name Joseph Rotman has become a brand of its own here in Canada, and under his leadership the Board has excelled. To all of you, my sincerest thanks.
Two weeks ago I attended five days of meetings with counterparts from arts councils and ministries of culture from around the world. It was the Sixth World Summit on Arts and Culture held in Santiago, Chile. For those who don't know, these World Summits have very special significance for those of us at the Canada Council, as the first World Summit was held here in Ottawa in December 2000 under the leadership of one of my predecessors, Shirley Thomson, and the Minister of the day, Sheila Copps.
Because of this history the Summit participants are accustomed to seeing Canada as a leader, but at this year's Summit I was particularly struck by the positive feedback I received to the Council's most recent developments. In a session entitled New Challenges for Supporting Arts and Culture, I presented a high-level summary of five major themes:
- A dramatic expansion in what is considered art;
- The ascendance of Aboriginal arts practice in a broad range of disciplines;
- A change in the “access” discussion from the need for more product to the public's capacity to engage with that product;
- A movement toward more systems-based, ecological decision-making; and
- A change in the value proposition from serving artists to benefiting society as a whole.
The session at the World Summit was standing-room only, and at the conclusion I was swamped with invitations to continue the conversation in more depth with arts funders from Europe, Africa, Asia, Australia and the Americas.
What this told me is that the Canada Council's work of the last few years in implementing the change agenda I talked about at last year's Annual Public Meeting is taking hold. The Council's efforts to stay relevant in a rapidly changing social, economic and technological environment is not only succeeding here in Canada, but is making its mark globally as well.
In addition, an overview of the Council's recent accomplishments is summarized in the Annual Report for 2012-13 released last October and also posted on our website. Here you can read about how Council invested roughly $150 million in grants and payments to artists and arts organizations across the country, how we leveraged partnerships with other players in the field, and how we advanced on priorities like international market access and the public engagement in the arts conversation that Simon Brault just summarized so eloquently. Detailed information is also available in a companion publication that analyzes Council's investment both geographically and by art form, and this information is also posted on the website.
What's harder to describe is the amount of work that goes on behind the scenes, the thousands of person-hours invested in meeting with stakeholders, reviewing and redesigning programs, evaluating impact, strengthening communications, updating policies, and upgrading systems of all kinds. Occasionally our achievements on this front are publicly celebrated – as in last year's Governance Award for Stakeholder Relations and an international design award for our new website – but generally speaking this work is pretty much invisible to all but insiders.
A major exception is the Council's recent move to new offices. We see the move as a major step forward for the organization, and because it is more tangible than many of the other changes we are undergoing I hope you will excuse me if I describe it in a little more detail.
Those of you who are physically present today will know that the main entrance to our new offices at 150 Elgin Street is framed by two designated heritage buildings, a Second Empire residence built in 1875 by former Member of Parliament James Alexander Grant and a Gothic Revival church built by Ottawa's First Baptist Church in 1878. From the very first approach, the combination of heritage buildings and new architecture reinforces the underlying dynamic of all arts practice, respecting the past while addressing the future. Above the entrance to the new building is the Canada Council's logo, and as you advance you are drawn into an interactive art work by internationally renowned artist Rafael Lozano-Hemmer on an enormous video wall that dominates a three-storey Winter Garden. Next, you enter a 3,000 square foot exhibition space where a curved staircase leads directly to the Council's second floor meeting rooms.
The second floor is where this Annual Public Meeting is taking place, the first public event in our new space, but venture further and you will discover two-and-a-half more floors of bright and airy collaborative work space, animated throughout with contemporary Canadian art from the 17,000-piece collection of the Canada Council Art Bank.
Thank heavens for our Chair. When I met with him to explain the counter-intuitive nature of what we were experiencing, his reaction was immediate.
“There's nothing counter-intuitive about this,” he told me. “This is how development works. The owner – in this case, Morguard – has an asset that has no real value until it can be made productive. For this to happen, they need partners, and a crucial partner in the launch of any property development is the anchor tenant. In this instance the Canada Council is the anchor tenant, and it is no surprise that both parties feel they have something to gain from the partnership.”
The Chair's explanation couldn't be closer to my experience. Morguard was an excellent partner to work with, from their willingness to accommodate a long list of requirements on our part to their adoption of many of Council's values in positioning the project – their sensitive restoration of Grant House, branding the development Performance Court, installing the latest technology in the 30-foot video wall, offering Council ground-floor exhibition space at no additional cost, agreeing to install a hand-crafted birch bark canoe in a public lobby to reflect the building's presence on traditional Algonquin land – the list goes on and on.
More importantly for me, though, the exchange became a metaphor for something much bigger to which the Canada Council aspires. That is to help broker a partnership between the arts sector and the nation itself. Canada is like any other developer. It is sitting on an asset – the Canadian people – that it wishes to leverage for a higher purpose. But in order to do this it needs partners, and that's where the arts sector comes in. The arts sector is perfectly positioned to play the role of anchor tenant for the nation. Yes, there are many other partners needed, but the arts are at the centre of the kind of creative enterprise and citizen engagement that every other sector seeks. We are the ones who can help brand the bigger enterprise, release new energies, and move a national agenda forward.
As I prepare to leave the Canada Council after eight years as Director and CEO, this is the vision I hold out for the future. Every generation of leadership is confronted with its own challenges. During my time here we have increased Council's Parliamentary appropriation by 20%, demonstrated the organization's value through Special Examinations and Strategic Reviews, and maintained funding levels during difficult financial times. We have strengthened internal capacity and external relations, and set the stage for what I believe will be the next big leap forward.
It took three years for the Canada Council to negotiate and implement the partnership embodied in these new offices. Three years from now is 2017, the sesquicentennial of Canada and the 60th anniversary of the Canada Council. Taking a cue from the Chair, my deepest wish is that we begin now to position the arts sector as the anchor tenant for developing the asset called Canada.
