A Parliamentary Farce in Three Acts

ACT ONE: The curtain rises and a trim, well-dressed finance minister James Flaherty appears on stage and reads out a budget.

He announces a Canada Prize for the Arts and Creativity – a $25 million affair featuring four annual prizes of $200,000 each for the best of the world’s young artists in dance, visual arts, music and theatre, with most of the money going to foreigners.

Off-stage there’s a great hue and cry from struggling Canadian artists as they realize what has happened to the $44,5 million in grants Harper took away from them last summer.

Out comes King Stephen’s jester, James Moore to explain this thing is going to be fantastic -- the cultural equivalent of the Nobel Prize. It will put Canada on the map.

Nothing like this has ever been done before. Conservatives “Think Big” as Preston Manning used to say. Especially with somebody else’s money.

It will take place in Toronto, featuring several weeks of artistic presentations, attracting people from everywhere. Directors, producers, agents, Hollywood, New York, they’ll all be there.

The Canada Prize was dreamed up by two Toronto businessmen, David Pecaut and Tony Gagliano, organizers of the successful Toronto Luminato Festival. They sold the idea to Harper.

It comes with a political message: Harper cares about Toronto, not just about Montreal and Quebec.

So who needs Montreal and the ‘Just for Laughs’ or a Grand Prix that disappeared into thin air? Who needs Quebec period? Conservative votes will be in Toronto come the election later this year.

There's ideology too: Whatever the Canada Council can do, private enterprise can do better.

Moore knows his lines by heart, but they aren’t going over. The audience doesn’t buy it.

The boys in Toronto told Moore they had lined up support from all the big names in the arts – the Grands Ballets Canadiens, the Cirque du Soleil, the Ballets Jazz de Montréal, the École Nationale du Cirque, the Montreal Museum of Modern Art, the Stratford Festival.

Trouble was David Pecaut only made a couple of telephone calls sounding them out, and nothing was official. Harper, or somebody around him, ran with it, dumping it into the budget and lining up $25 million as if it was a done deal.

ACT TWO: Pecaut, a decent guy who loves the arts, comes on stage and publicly apologizes for letting his dreams take over.

Then Moore comes on stage and tries to explain what the botched award plan is doing in the budget.

Moore tries to pick up the pieces: “Er, um, ah. . .” The audience is roaring with laughter.

As usual Gilles Duceppe and the Bloc Québécois see it as a Conservative conspiracy to favour Toronto at the expense of Montreal.

Finally there’s a leak and the real story comes out: it was part of an elaborate plan to make Harper a star on the world’s stage in 2010. Take that Ben Mulroney.

The plan called for Harper to preside over the super event at the 2010 Olympic Games in Vancouver and present the awards himself before a cheering crowd of 100,000 spectators and tens of millions more watching on television around the world to find which of their own had won.

Just think of it: Harper gets the biggest audience of any Canadian prime minister in history. Take that Pierre Trudeau.

ACT THREE: The plan having gone awry, Moore is forced to come out on stage and announce that the government will consider other ideas as well for culture and the arts. In Ottawa talk that means the Canada Prize is dead. CURTAIN DROPS ( Opposition laughter is heard off-stage)