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Chapter 10 | Clarence S. Bayne (continued) In Canada the strategy for supporting the high arts creates a professional class of arts creators whose role it is to entertain, delight and educate arts consumers. These arts creators are legitimized by their membership in formal or informal grouping of peers. This professional classification serves as a barrier to the entry of new ethnic communities of artists seeking access to funding. This exclusion is supported by the creation of academies or regional cultural institutions that have the power of monopolies managed by mainstream cultural leaders. These institutions have a guaranteed existence sustained by government subsidies, and mainstream corporate and family foundations grants. They are protected from pressures for cultural reform by a network of mainstream artists organized into unions, and by the principle of evaluation by peers that underpin the arm’s length funding agreement with various levels of governments. The arm’s length principle makes these institutions almost impervious to change as suggested and reflected in the commitments to multiculturalism set out in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, and formulated in the objectives of the Multicultural Bill. The notion of excellence as the critical factor in deciding who gets funded and who does not is determined by mainstream artists and cultural leaders whose aesthetic experiences and core cultural values and beliefs make them insensitive to forms of culture and aesthetics that are not grounded in European historical references. Excellence becomes an abstraction identifiable only in the eyes of the defenders of mainstream culture. Thus in every minority community there is an non-government funded cultural sub-economy resistant to this form of mainstream cultural colonialism and which shows a face of Canada that has little or no public presence. There is on the public cultural dimension a tear in the fabric of social cohesion that needs mending. note 1 The Heckscher-Ohlin trade model is a general equilibrium model based on the Edgeworth Box Diagram approach to describing different types of exchange economy. It is based on the assumption that perfect competition exists and is a desirable ideal. This type model has a wide range of applications from the pure exchange economy with two individuals having different proportionate shares of any two goods to a situation involving more than one economy, two or more goods and two or more factors. The defining assumptions of the simple model involving two or more regions are as follows:
By assuming constant returns to scale in both industries, the model eliminates the effect of economies of scale. Constant cost prevails. There is no incentive to be large. Also if we assume identity in knowledge and skills with respect to the two types of activities there is no advantage in the movement of factors between the two industries. Both factors are substitutable to the same degree in each of the two industries. The only differences are in the endowment of factors held by the two groups respectively; and the factor intensities required to produce one good vs the other. Let us assume a two goods economy. According to this theory productive resources must be allocated such that the ratio of the marginal productivities of any two factors (say, Labour and Capital) used to produce a particular good must be equal to the ratio of the marginal productivities of the same resources used to produce the second good. The assumptions of the model allows us to answer a number of questions by stripping away a number of confounding factors. One very useful thing it reveals is that exchange will take place (either on a regional basis; international basis or between groups) because of differences in the amount of productive resources owned by the two groups (countries, states, provinces, regions). |
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