Northern Light
Superstar
The ailing Harbourfront Centre is getting $10 million over two years in the federal budget.
Harbourfront and TIFF get funding boosts, plus 5 more ways the federal budget helps Toronto
Harbourfront Centre is getting badly needed funding to help the arts hub make critical capital repairs.www.thestar.com
Another stop-gap measure.
Lets recall that original federal promise, almost 3 generations ago, was an endowment to support Habourfront in perpetuity.
If, for argument's sake, we thought they only needed 5M beyond their routine grants each year, and that was what we wanted to fund through an endowment, a one-time grant of 125M would do the trick.
They were running on about 12M per year in 2022; so if we added that to the need, and said we need an endowment that will spin off 17M per year, we need 425M.
To me this is just such an easy fix, provide the endowment and walk away. No more annual transfers and Habourfront can spend their money as they see fit (within a statutory mandate) and not file endless reports and grant applications with Ottawa.
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I like this solution, by the way, for other major arts facilities. If we agreed to match private philanthropic donations for endowments at 1 to 1, but for the next 5 years only to annual cap of 1B in Federal expenditures, we should be able to set up 10B in new arts endowments that would offset annual expenditures of 400M per year.
That wouldn't fix everyone's needs, or allow a wholesale elimination of federal grants, but it could really improve programming capacity, financial stability and streamline grant related processes.
If you wanted to exit transfers to major institutions entirely*, you could probably do that with a 10-year program and a 2B annual cap. (* excludes direct federal agencies/corps such as CBC and Telefilm)
That would spin off 1.6B per year.
Total department spending authority (Federal Heritage) was 2.4B in 2022-2023.
