Companies, like Procter and Gamble (P&G), use this time of year to push cause marketing: a for-profit business using a not-for-profit’s cause to market their product. So even though cyclopentasiloxane—an ingredient shown to cause cancerous tumours in test animals—is the first ingredient in P&G’s Secret Scent Expressions deodorant, people can feel good buying their products because they have plans to donate US$100,000 to the American Cancer Society. This is pinkwashing, where companies mask the bad (sometimes cancerous) parts of their products by exploiting women’s vulnerability to breast cancer.

“Raising money has become the priority,” says Dr. Samantha King in Pink Ribbons, Inc. “Regardless of the consequences.” Distributed by the National Film Board, and directed by Lea Pool, the 2011 Canadian documentary is based off of King’s book of the same title. In it people such as Barbara Ehrenreich, a writer and breast cancer survivor, talk about how the capitalism of breast cancer awareness is serving as a distraction from how the movement originally started, with a sisterhood critically looking at the health care system.

“To expect you to add social purpose to your business just because it’s a good thing to do, is foolish,” writes Olivia Khalili of Cause Capitalism.  “You have a bottom-line and other obligations to meet.  You don’t have extra resources to allocate to ‘doing good.’”

Obviously businesses have a bottom line that doesn’t include helping others for the goodness of it. But where is this money really going? Walks and parties are fun—I’ve done fundraising for cancer research efforts myself—but after the high of solidarity wears off, and the hype dies down, we must ask: what progress health care wise has been made?

A former This intern, Hillary Di Menna is in her first year of the gender and women’s studies program at York University. She also maintains an online feminist resource directory, FIRE- Feminist Internet Resource Exchange.

Looking for answers: Alex Colville, "To Prince Edward Island" (1965). Copyright National Gallery of Canada.

Their jobs sound like an oxymoron in Canada’s present political climate; arts professionals earn about half the average national income per year, a large chunk of which comes from grants. That public funding is in danger since Stephen Harper made it perfectly clear he doesn’t consider the arts a priority. Given that the main agenda of his Conservative majority is to balance the budget, the Canada Council Canadian Conference of the Arts recently predicted cuts of “at least $175 million” to arts, culture and heritage. And two weeks ago, adding insult to the threat of injury, Sun TV attacked interpretive dancer Margie Gillis by distorting grant tallies in a ham-fisted effort to devalue the arts. In this state of worry and frustration, what can bring some sanity back to Canadian arts policy?

Jeff Melanson, currently co-CEO the National Ballet School, and soon to be president of The Banff Centre, made a provocative suggestion at a talk in late May hosted by the Literary Review of Canada: a new Massey Commission.

Canada’s “Magna Carta of arts and culture,” as the commission’s report was nicknamed, was released in 1951. The detailed document gave advice on the state of Canada’s arts, sciences, humanities, and media based on three premises:

1. Canadians should know as much as possible about their country’s culture, history and traditions
2. We have a national interest to encourage institutions that add to the richness of Canadian life
3. Federal agencies that promote these ends should be supported

With then University of Toronto Chancellor Vincent Massey at the reins, the commissioners were poised to spur government spending in the arts. But before I let you in on their recommendations, let’s set the stage with some juicy historical context.

History of the Massey Commission

Rewind 67 years. Canada was nearing the end of the Second World War, a key part of which was fought using propaganda. Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia needed to keep their populations confused and complacent; the U.S. and Canada wanted their citizens to buy liberty bonds and join the army. Information and creative expression were deployed against the masses.

Before the war, Canada’s government had no real investment in the arts. The turning point came when arts groups began calling on their government to support culture as a way of protecting democracy.

As a negative argument, stifling creativity is censorship’s equal. As a positive argument, the arts play a role in driving democracy through freedom of thought, belief, opinion and expression. (Thank you section 2(b) of the Charter.) Citizens who think critically and express their ideas creatively are a basic part of any healthy democracy — they hold government accountable.

After the war was over, Canada’s government created the Royal Commission on National Development in the Arts. Two years later, the commission produced a body of research and advice that blossomed into an independent institution by 1957. To this day, many artists still fiercely protect the Canada Council for the Arts as if their lives depended on it—which for some is pretty close to the truth.

The report’s key recommendation

Please direct your gaze to section 15 (XV) of the Massey report: “The Artist and The Writer.” Here you will find a time capsule detailing the state of such creative endeavors as music, theatre, ballet, painting, architecture, literature, and Aboriginal arts. It is, I think, a must-read for all artists — and any naysayers. It will remind them that Canada indeed has written policy that places high value in artistic work.

This section begins with the suggestion that the extent to which a nation supports its artists is a measure of how civilized it is. Just how civilized was Canada back then? The report quotes the Arts Council:

“No novelist, poet, short story writer, historian, biographer, or other writer of non-technical books can make even a modestly comfortable living by selling his [or her] work in Canada. No composer of music can live at all on what Canada pays him[/her] for his[/her] compositions. Apart from radio drama, no playwright, and only a few actors and producers, can live by working in the theatre in Canada. Few painters and sculptors, outside the fields of commercial art and teaching, can live by sale of their work in Canada.”

This raised a vital question for the commissioners: if artists were so undervalued that they could barely sustain themselves, how could they gain funding? It only made sense for taxpayers to chip in — to protect Canada’s democracy and “civilize” our apparent philistinism.

The commission urged the resurrection of the Canada Council as an arms-length body. It would boost not-for-profits, promote artists abroad, and dish out scholarships. The independence of this body was key. As Margie Gillis calmly pointed out in the midst of Sun TV’s sensationalism, the government does not fund Canadian artists directly; instead it endows funds to the Canada Council. The Council consists of no more than 11 respected artists and educators who hold their positions for no more than four years each. Grant recipients are selected through a fair and open process.

A new commission on the arts

Today many of the report’s recommendations are dated. For example, Massey’s posse tagged radio as a “new technology.” While it remains an important medium, radio has been swallowed alive by the web and social media. Artists have harnessed these newer mediums for creative projects, including this fabulous example.

But technology is far from the report’s only concern. As Tom Perlmutter, chair of the National Film Board of Canada, told the Toronto Star:

“What we need now is not one particular policy patchwork fix but the new Massey-Levesque for the 21st century. We need to rethink the fundamental conceptual framework that can give rise to the cultural policies that will serve us for the next 60 years.”

Whether it is updated or started again from scratch, this not-yet-conceived report should be the brainchild of Canadian artists. They should review those ever-important premises about promoting the historical and cultural richness of our country. They should reassess how creative minds are using technology. They should research how Canada’s cultural policies compare to those abroad. And, most importantly, they must underline the fundamental reason that Canadians support the arts financially: the health and vibrancy of our democracy.

The NFB is, in my opinion, one of the most successful government-supported cultural institutions in this country, consistently producing an extraordinary breadth and depth of artistic work, and it’s also recently become one of the most innovative, finding new ways to send that work back out to its supporters — i.e., every Canadian citizen — in a wide variety of ways, including, as of this week, the iPhone. This kind of free programming is part of that mission, and I think it’s important to acknowledge the high calibre of work that the NFB does. Maybe see you at a screening this week.

Documentaries about drug use and life on the street can easily become depressing cautionary tales. The NFB’s website Playing It Safe avoids this type of tired cliche by offering at-risk youth a chance to make their own films. The project paired at-risk youth and peer filmmakers from Vancouver and Edmonton. As Vancouver prepares for the 2010 Olympic Games, these aren’t the  kinds of stories the city wants to the world to hear.

Being at once the filmmaker and the subject of the documentary, the people in these films tell honest, thoughtful stories. They talk about the different paths that led them to the streets, and speak openly about both the positive and negative aspects of their lifestyles. Some want to keep using drugs and living on the street, others are going to school and working with other at-risk youth.

Many of the films don’t offer a happy ending, and can’t try to sum-up difficult issues in a simple package. The goal isn’t to scare at-risk youth straight, but to reflect their lives and remind them that they’re not invisible.

There are currently eight films on the site, and more are posted each week.

• Véronique Marino (INIS)
• Geraldine Cahill (The Real News Network)
• David Beers (The Tyee)
• Laurent Mauriac (Rue 89)

The second panel of speakers, above, featured three speakers presenting case studies of some groundbreaking media projects:

• Paulina Abarca-Cantin & Stéphanie Lagueux : Studio XX
• Wayne MacPhail : Rabble.ca
• Reisa Levine & Véronique Maléfant  : CitizenShift/ Parole citoyenne

Before my son Louis could walk, he could surf. He took to the internet like an aquatic creature, swimming easily and confidently. It was cute to see him perched at the computer, his big baby head topped off by a pair of giant headphones. But his avidity made me uneasy, a disquiet that lingers still, when I hover over his shoulder trying to see what he’s watching, making, understanding.

Generations see screens differently. Illustration by Dave Donald

I come from a generation of watchers — of movies, of TV — but Lou belongs to a generation of makers. Even though he’s only seven years old, already he’s leaving me behind, moving from consumer to creator, making and posting videos of his Lego men, swimming in a vast sea of video clips, remixes, parodies. To him, culture isn’t a static thing to be passively imbibed, but something to act upon; not an inviolate product, but simply material. As much as I admire the next generation’s digital fluidity, I miss the bigger picture — something that isn’t cut up, sliced into bits and pieces. More importantly, I worry that Lou will miss it also.

The break between the emerging culture of the empowered creator and the old-fashioned passive consumer is the subject of Brett Gaylor’s award-winning documentary RiP: A Remix Manifesto. RiP picked up the 2008 Dioraphte Audience Award at the International Documentary Festival Amsterdam and is being released this spring online and in theatres. The subject of the film is how current intellectual property laws affect the culture being made by a new generation. The copyright debate is something of a Wild West show at the moment, and no one embodies that spirit more fully than a musician named Gregg Gillis, who records and releases under the name Girl Talk. Gillis combines hundreds of samples from other artists’ songs into mashups, and in so doing, risks lawsuits, prison time, and massive fines. The film uses Girl Talk as a test case for current copyright laws, but also poses fundamental questions about how new forms of culture always need to build, borrow, or outright steal from the past.

In one of the film’s more thought-provoking segments, Lawrence Lessig, the Stanford law professor and founder of Creative Commons, argues that overreaching copyright laws have strangled creativity and eaten away at the public domain in the name of money and control. Despite lawsuits and penalties, people continue to rip, remix, and sample with gusto. After all, Lessig argues, the desire to play along is a natural form of creativity. And to punish or outlaw such a manifestation is tantamount to creating a generation with no respect for the law. (Lessig’s talk, included in the film, is available online at ted.com.)

I think Lessig is right about the importance of sharing ideas, but my misgivings linger — not just about how material is used, but how it’s perceived. It’s not because I’m afraid Louis will get sued one day. It’s because when films are simply something to be cut up, reworked, made into goofy commentary, and viewed ironically, I think something is lost. The ability to follow a sustained narrative has been fundamental to human nature, but it’s been so fractured, so chopped into small pieces, that it sometimes seems in danger of disappearing.

Louis informed me the other day that YouTube was better than TV and movies because you could watch whatever you wanted, and no one made you watch something (like ads) that you didn’t want to see. Here I am in danger of dating myself terribly, but this makes me think about how the medium carries the meaning. I am reminded of what it once was to listen to records. The A- and B-sides, the sequential tracks, formed a journey — and to interrupt this process was to miss the larger impact. You were meant to move in a linear fashion, from beginning to end.

That straight-line mentality has been disrupted, and not simply because there is often no top or bottom, no beginning or end, on the internet. When the larger arc is missing, the fundamental nature of story can change, becoming smaller and less affecting.

But the loss of the experience of sitting quietly in a darkened theatre to watch a movie — something I still love, but can’t truly share with my son — makes me sad. My experience has been shared by countless parents, who watch their children launch into some new world we can only fleetingly grasp. All we can do is wave goodbye from the shore, as they swim away.