The B.C. minister for community, sport, and cultural development has defended her position that comparing arts funding between provinces is not a useful way of determining support for the cultural sector.

“When I’ve looked at the numbers and pulled out the tables and looked at them in detail, I’m not comfortable that we’re comparing apples to apples across the country,” Stephanie Cadieux said. “I’m not suggesting they’re not one way of looking at things. They are.”¦I acknowledge that we’re probably somewhere in the lower end of the scale across the provinces, but what are we accomplishing with the dollars we’re spending? What are others accomplishing with the dollars they’re spending?.”¦That’s really important to me, not so much comparing what we’re spending to Ontario.”

On January 21, Cadieux drew the ire of the arts sector when she told the Straight she was “not comfortable with dollar-to-dollar comparisons that are made between provinces”.

NDP arts critic Spencer Chandra Herbert slammed her comments, stating: “The bizarre notion that we shouldn’t talk about per capita investment in arts when just a few months earlier she was touting the highest per capita investment in buses Canada-wide—it’s okay for buses but not for arts? What’s going on here?”

Alliance for Arts and Culture executive director Amir Ali Alibhai echoed Chandra Herbert. “Governments are constantly making comparisons in order to make good decisions,” he said. “I think it’s pretty ironic for a government that, for instance, wants standardized testing so they can make comparisons between different schools to not want to make comparisons around other activities and measures of performance.”

According to the Alliance for Arts and Culture, calculations derived from Statistics Canada put B.C.’s per capita arts spending last, at $6.54, against a national average of $26. In rankings of per capita spending from all levels of government, B.C. still comes in at the bottom, at $197, compared with the national average of $361, according to 2007-08 Statistics Canada figures.