Canada Council taking heat for good intentions gone awry

The Globe and Mail ran a story Wednesday by Val Ross saying "33 million spent and no one's happy" about the Canada Council's Supplementary Operating Fund Initiative.

Ross even got some fundees on the record criticizing the process that the Council went through in distributing the one-time fund of $33 million it gave out to all disciplines. Among the issues raised by Ross were (and I'm paraphrasing):

• When was it decided that only $33 million of the announced $50 million over two years was to go to individual magazines, book publishers, dance companies and so on? When was it announced?
  
• When was it decided that the $33 million was to be distributed, not on the basis of peer review juries (though they were struck and went through the motions) but on something called "key" organizations -- in other words, with the CC staff weighing in on who got what?
  
• Why was the community -- and the juries -- not told that this unusual process was being put in place?
• Why would the council change the process in mid-stream and assume that posting some opaque language on its website was sufficient notice to the arts community?
  
• Why would the CC tell the applicants to "think big", then change the rules so that many of the applicants "got small"? (Established magazines, for instance, encouraged by the council, asked for $50,000 and got $10,000 or less.)
  

To its credit, the CC chief executive, Robert Sirman, stepped up to defend the council, acknowledging: "We had always made it clear that only organizations that had already proved their worth and had operating grant status would be considered," Sirman says. "But 'key' was not part of our language at the beginning." When did that change? And was it because they were overwhelmed by applications that they had encouraged?

It's a bit rich for the spokesperson for the council, Donna Balkan, to say with exasperation: "Read our website. It's all clear there."

We can understand that the council got three times the applications for which it had money. It found itself in a tight spot. But how lame is it to say to applicants -- and jurors (some of whom threatened to resign, says the Globe) -- that they should have known the rules were changed because it was posted on the website?

The whole affair has left a rather sour taste in the mouths of some who, for a little while, had high hopes. That may not be the case for all 36 magazines who shared 1.9% of the $33 million (an average of about $13,000). As far as we can see, the only magazine organization that got a "big" amount was the Canadian Art Foundation, which got $165,000.