promart

From an email received this afternoon:

As readers of yesterday’s Inkless comment thread already know, once ITQ got over our initial horror at the cancellation of the Canadian Memory Fund (thus destroying any faint remaining hope that we will one day be able to search every edition of Hansard since Confederation), we turned to the ostensible reason behind the decision to slash nearly $40 million from the arts budget. What intrigued us most was the explanation offered to the Globe and Mail by the now ubiquitous Kory Teneycke – who, incidentally, has managed in just a few short weeks to make himself the official Voice of PMO,  and as such, the government as a whole.

Must-reads: Rosie DiManno and Colby Cosh on Olympic politics; Janet Bagnall on PromArt; Marcus Gee on Georgia; Don Martin on that fall election you’re all dying to vote in.

Al Jazeera English TV’s Avi Lewis is the latest PromArt recipient to crawl out from under the PMO’s Panderbus and explain himself: he got some money to promote a Canadian independent film in Australia and New Zealand, and helped get it a distribution deal. “It was a no-brainer,” he writes in the Toronto Star. “The proceeds of the sale went straight to the National Film Board, defraying the public money that had helped to make the film in the first place.”

Must-reads: Marcus Gee and George Jonas on the Georgia situation.

The National Post‘s Kelly McParland believes Tal Bachman “has a pretty successful career going, and can’t possibly need Ottawa to pay his air fare.” But he wasn’t too busy, famous or rich to set the record straight on his blog about his turn at the PromArt trough, expanding on and clarifying a few points he and Eye‘s Marc Weisblott discussed yesterday. The basic story—musician asked to play guitar for South African orphans; Canada’s New Government appalled—hasn’t changed, but he makes his political leanings quite clear.

Another triumph for the government pandermeisters! (See vol. I, Tal Bachman.) It seems Gwynne Dyer, the pundit deemed too left-wing and too wealthy to receive funding to promulgate Canadian values in Cuba (a) asked for no funding, (b) had never heard of PromArt until his name cropped up in the government’s talking panderpoints and (c) was asked to go to Cuba, in 2007, by the Department of Foreign Affairs!

Tal Bachman, singled out by the government as one of the “wealthy rock stars” unworthy of public funding to take their acts abroad, says he never applied for any funding and explains to Eye‘s Marc Weisblott just how the trip went down:

Over the last four days, the Conservatives have pledged to:

After what happened last weekend in Surrey, it’s not hard to see why the Conservatives would want to retreat to less perilous pandering grounds: taxpayer dollars and naughty words. A classic combination – all this story needs is a gloatbyte from Charles McVety, and it’s C-10 all over again: