Now if Premier Christy Clark would only stop bullying the teachers:
http://focusonline.ca/?q=node/690

“Be a Buddy, Not a Bully” is a song on YouTube that can help teach children about kindness and tolerance.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Or7WPUtUnRo

I love the VOA. They are a fantastic organization, and I and my family have all had season tickets at one time or another, and attend at least one production every year. That said...

Gordon Campbell announced BC's first Anti-Bullying Day in 2008-- “I want to thank CKNW and Christy Clark for being a leader in helping promote Anti-Bullying Day in B.C.,” said Premier Campbell. “We can all play a role in making British Columbia a safer place to live.” Pink Shirt Day had been Ms. Clark's calculated move to insert herself back into public life, and it worked. It worked because she was performing a real public service for once in her life, and it propelled her eventually to the premiership.

This opera is adapted from the verse novel of the same name. But the composer was only selected on January 9, 2014. The author has never written an opera before. His VANOC Opening Ceremonies hit was adapted from a commission he executed for the Canadian Tourism Association. There is little doubt his work will please the authorities, it always has -- but will it be decent opera? Doesn't that really depends on the composer? The composer was chosen January 9, 2014. It may turn out to be great opera and an effective social awareness tool. But it's a gamble, of course it is. So the premier announced her half a million gamble on that on Pink Shirt Day, committing that funding now, so the opera will be touring and provide a source of good news amidst tar sands pipeline, Prosperity mine, LNG, fracking, Site C. ...

What it important about this extraordinary grant is the use of arts funding to an issue so critically linked to the leader of the province. There is something Stalinist about it, I think, something close to the cult of personality. A grant like this represents a new level of political involvement the arts.

BC embarked on this course way back in the mid 80s. With the choice of and Arts and Business centre (the Alliance) over a new home for City Stage, the Quenvill and Audley reports that founded "Hollywood North", among other things.

Industrialism, corporatism, crony capitalism, 90% arts cuts, VANOC loyalty oaths, regional theatre throat-slitting, and the general alignment of the performing arts with the agenda of the political and business elite. Now this extraordinary grant, it's topic tied directly to the key turning-point in the Premier's career.

Michael P. . Thank your for a brilliant letter which supplies the needed historical memory and political analysis this media-scene is so bereft of. I was in the audience last night for Don Gianacarlo when the Minister of Community and Culture stood alongside James Wright for his introductory comments. Big Smiles all around. But I too was struck by the spectacle of a calculated public relations exercise unfolding. To find the same PR release copied here in the GS (and undoubtedly in other MSM) is no surprise.

@Forest-- Yes, as you say, "...a calculated public relations exercise unfolding."

But only tangentially for the VOA. The VOA can transcend this political meddling through sheer artistry. I think VOA is Vancouver's best nuturer of young Canadian talent, not just in quantity but quality of support. Every VOA event I attend delights me, because each manages to combine pomp and communitas, from tuxedos to t-shirts.

But the way art is funded in BC remains broken. Fundamentally. Because of political meddling. BC pays 35% of the labour costs for every film shot here with refundable labour tax credits. Under that formula, the Arts Club would receive 5 times its current provincial grant. Some labour is more equal than others, because of political meddling. Such examples abound.

By all means tour Stickboy I'm all for it. Yet, I think that the transcendent message the bully and the bullied both need to hear in person comes not from the "message" but from the singer. The human instrument. A true voice, up close, is profoundly scary, to the inauthentic. It can scare a bully right out of his boots and into the arms of art. An opera singer performing Danny Boy live in a classroom of 35 in Ft. St. James will change 17 lives. Of that, I am sure.

But those moments are changes of heart, therapeutic shocks to the nervous system. An anti-bullying campaign, though, must find appropriate means to regulate behaviour. For that, something else is needed: an art built to foster social change.

If one is gonna (if one may use the Premier’s favourite word) invest precious public dollars to use art to promulgate social policy, then where is the mechanism to guarantee (sorry, another Premierism) “bang for the buck”? Well, B.C.s David Diamond is a world figure in community-building theatre. On my list, he’s right up there with Augusto Boal and Eugenio Barba.

Given the amazing history of community-building events produced by Headlines/Theatre for Living, one could make a very, very good argument that half-a-million spent by David would promulgate more social policy change than any tour of any performing arts company in BC.

But there was no mechanism by which to make that "bang for the buck" argument, it seems. If art is going to be used to promugate public policy, that's not good enough.

This is fantastic. Good to read this. Way to go government, hurray arts&culture!