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Lorna Mills and Sally McKay
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François Lachapelle of the Canada Council has posted an open letter to Instant Coffee's email listings that responds to protest against the C.C.'s proposed changes. This quote jumps out: "The Council has lost its capacity to be generous and is therefore less able to support the 'development of the practice', the purpose of the current program as stated 40 years ago." (I've reposted the whole letter in comments below)
To over simplifiy, the Canada Council was the result of two things: the Massey Report in 1951, and six years later the deus-ex-machina-type appearance of a $53 million endowment from the Killam and Dunn estates. A great source for this history (besides [plug!] Andrew Paterson's thorough timeline in Money Value Art) is George Woodcock's Strange Bedfellows, The State and the Arts in Canada, published in 1985 by Douglas and MacIntyre. Below are some quotes from Woodcock that provide context for the issue at hand.
When the Massey Commission began its enquiries in the spring of 1946, there was no world of Canadian arts and letters of the kind that existed in European Countries and the United States, or, for that matter, of the kind that has since developed in Canada. [...] The situation was partly due to the lack of interest on the part of most Canadians , still barely out of the pioneer age, in art. But even more it was due to the lack of the kind of infrastructure which transforms a scattering of people working in virtual isolation into a really functioning artistic and literary world that reaches out to audiences both urban and rural and in all regions. (p. 46-47)
In 1949 the average budget which the National Gallery could devote to purchases of all kinds, of which the work of living Canadian artists was only a part, was a mere $32,000, and other public galleries were faced by similar limitations of scope. At the same time there existed only a rudimentary network of private galleries, and by no means did all of these attempt to sell the works of living painters. (p. 49)
[The Massey Report] showed genuine wisdom in its assessment of the great cultural lacks of Canada in the late 1940s, and the scanty resources that existed to meet them. What impressed me perhaps more than anything else was the way the commission created its own bow wave of interest, not only looking into the needs, but making people think of them, so that by the time of the report's publication the idea that the community had a responsibility towards its arts and artists was accepted without serious opposition. (p. 50)
I have often heard it said that Vincent Massey was an elitist, and that the report was an elitist document. And so, if you think in such barren terms, it probably was. But in the cultural desert of Canada at that time a group of men and women was needed who could act the elitist role and decide what seemed to be good for the arts and suggest what was good for the arts was good for the country. (p. 51)
The upsurge in the arts that characterized the later 1950s was already beginning to stir, and it ran parallel to a postwar economic resurgence which made Canadians look more confidently and more adventurously on the future than they had done at any time since the 1880s, when the building of the Canadian Pacific Railway symbolized the emergence of a pan-Canadian economy which, then also, was accompanied by modest but genuine upsurges in poetry and the visual arts [...] There is no doubt that the success of the Arts Council in Britain encouraged not only the artists but also the politicians, who saw a lively artistic community as a national ornament...(p. 54)
In the speech to the throne on 8 January 1957, the establishment of the Canada Council was first proposed to Parliament, and shortly afterward St. Laurent himself introduced the bill establishing it, and in doing so laid down a principle that, despite the manoeuvres of later Liberal politicians, has mainly guided the council's actions, though lately with dwindling confidence. "Government should, I feel, support the cultural development of the nation, but not attemp to control it." [...] The council, formalized when royal assent was given to the Canada Council Act on 28 March, 1957, was established to "foster and promote the study and enjoyment of, and the production of works in the arts, humanities, and social sciences," and a measure of independence was guaranteed. The council was to set its own policies and make its own decisions within the terms of the act, reporting to Parliament through an appropriate minister... (p. 56)
The history of the Canada Council has been one of finding its way through a changing artistic situation, which has involved over the decades a moving away from imperial models, and a need to cope with the kinds of pressures, often indirectly applied but not for that reason any less irksome, that emerge when politicians confuse art with politics and talk of the democratization of culture, or when bureaucrats attempt to impose on the arts the attitudes of the marketplace and to treat the arts as "cultural industries." (p. 57)