Kate Marland: The Canadian right must have a vision for the arts

Rebuilding national pride is a project that cannot be undertaken without conscious cultural creation.

(The Toronto Symphony Orchestra, Roy Thomson Hall.)

Earlier this year, shortly after President Trump’s inauguration, he announced that he would be naming himself chairman of the Kennedy Center Board of Trustees, terminating many existing members whom he claimed did not share his “Vision for a Golden Age in Arts and Culture”.

From my vantage point up here in Canada, I looked down in surprise, you can just do that?

I grew up in a conservative household in downtown Ottawa during the Harper years. I led a sort of double-life, reading Ayn Rand on the bus to my orchestra rehearsals, cheering Harper’s cuts to arts funding while my music teachers and conductors despaired. As the only (open) conservative amongst my peers throughout my years studying viola at McGill’s Schulich School of Music, I happily voted for Stephen Harper in 2015. I was fully on board with the concept that if we simply lowered taxes enough, private citizens would jump into spontaneous order to get off their wallets and support the performing arts.

I have long struggled with the tension between my libertarian, small-government impulses and my deep appreciation for the highbrow culture that has played a critical role in my life and is the keystone of the civilisation that I so strongly enjoy.

So hearing a different sort of rhetoric coming from the current U.S. president caught me off guard. Should we on the right strongly support a conservative government in recapturing our cultural institutions from those who seek to destroy them? I am increasingly convinced that the Canadian right’s “leave it alone” approach is not going to solve our cultural woes.

In President John F. Kennedy’s 1963 State of the Union Address, he stated that “Tax reduction alone is not enough to strengthen our society… The quality of American life must keep pace with the quantity of American goods. This country cannot afford to be materially rich and spiritually poor.”

That final sentence is carved into the walls of the Kennedy Center. On a separate wall, Kennedy’s words are again replicated, this time from an address to Amherst College, “I look forward to an America which will not be afraid of grace and beauty”.

In contrast, in the Conservative Party of Canada’s 2025 election platform, culture is relegated to one measly phrase: “A new Conservative government will… promote Canadian culture and history”. The arts are not mentioned a single time. There is zero discussion of what this Canadian culture may entail, or what would become of the numerous Crown corporations that exist to administer Canada’s cultural outputs.

We have ceded control of our Canadian cultural institutions to those who disdain the concept of objectively measuring greatness, who actively aim to elevate that which is the antithesis of grace and beauty. And there is no question that we find ourselves faced with a society that is spiritually poor.

As stated so succinctly by Geoff Russ, “The outsourcing of culture to rivals who despise you has to end… take back the institutions, or lose the civilisation that built them”.

We have tasked tired, unimaginative bureaucrats with the management of some of this country’s finest institutions. Those who we trust to supposedly steward our spiritual fulfilment end up primarily focused on adhering to an ever-growing list of diversity requirements or thinking up ways to make a symphony more climate-friendly.

Take, for example, the President and CEO of Canada’s National Arts Centre, Christopher Deacon. In the NAC’s 2023-2026 strategic plan he makes it clear that the goal is to “build a performing arts sector… that is equitable, diverse, accessible… that advances environmental sustainability and reconciliation with Indigenous nations”.

The Canada Council for the Arts funds any number of politicised propaganda pieces, including the Storytelling with Drag Queens Foundation, which “seeks to provide a diverse set of queer role models in a fun and inclusive environment that promotes reading and comprehension through queer and inclusive literature”.

Orchestras Canada’s “Environmental Sustainability Charter” is also supported by the CCA, which encourages orchestras to embrace the following mantra: “we commit to embedding eco-sustainability within our orchestra”.

The solution for the Canadian right cannot be simply to defund these institutions. There are certainly conversations to be had about how spending is allocated, and I am certain inefficiencies can be identified. But it’s time to demand more of our conservative movement in Canada than just waving the white flag on culture.

In a country that has a deep history of cultural excellence, this is something the right needs to start spending time and energy on recapturing. We need to get into the arena and commit to ushering in our own Golden Age of culture.

Rebuilding national pride is a project that cannot be undertaken without conscious cultural creation and we owe it to Glenn Gould, Angela Hewitt, and Tom Thomson to bring us back to a Canada that is not afraid of grace and beauty.

Kate Marland is a contributing editor at Without Diminishment. She formerly oversaw the Montreal Economic Institute’s Liberty and Leadership program, and presently runs youth outreach for the Canada Strong and Free Network. Prior to this, she also worked as a commercial litigator in Ottawa.