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Chapter 11 | Diane Saint-Pierre (continued) The last part of this presentation is meant to echo one of the elements of the 1992 cultural policy, which was intended to establish a new partnership with the municipalities in Québec. It is also meant to be an echo of a recent reform, because during the last two years, the Québec government has made known its intention to reorganize municipalities (L.R.Q., 2000) and to modify certain pieces of legislation (idem, 2001). We already know that this municipal reorganization will have important repercussions on the cultural and artistic development of cities in Québec. If the municipalities of Québec, saw their responsibilities in the domain of culture confined to public libraries and sometimes to heritage in the 1960s and early 1970s, it can be said that this realm has been significantly broadened since then. At the same time, the “cultural decentralization,” which began in Québec in the 1970s with the first regional bureaus of the Ministry of Cultural Affairs and the first Regional Councils on Culture, was accelerated in the 1980s, and was soon reinforced with a new way of managing local “cultural affairs.” It must be said that during the 1980s and the beginning of the 1990s, as mentioned earlier, discussions about culture changed in nature, caught up in a new game that can be called: the new ideology of the liberal state. Based on a serious questioning of the capabilities and responsibilities of the state, the economic realities and social demands of the public, that ideology relies on a foundation which is free of government control: globalization of the economy, free markets, and the advent of new technologies. During the same period, it is interesting to observe that several Western countries sought to overcome their fears of cultural globalization by re-discovering local and regional cultures, which had been greatly neglected and even forgotten. What seemed then to characterize the phenomenon of globalization, implying the handing down of national cultures, was a change of scale: a move toward the cultural realities of a “smaller society.” In fact, the more one thinks globally, the more different governments, either national, local or municipal become conscious they have to act locally (Saint-Pierre, 2001b). This phenomenon can be found not just in “smaller societies.” Even France, the world leader among Francophone countries, has taken steps in that direction. Through the implementation of municipal cultural policies since the beginning of the 1990s, the government of Québec seems to have placed itself in a “new” stream, whose purpose is to make the municipal partnership a privileged level of development and, of course, of the handing down of culture. In the context of shared responsibilities, the municipality establishes a cultural policy, chooses its priorities and makes clear the kinds of services it intends to offer its citizens, with the help of an action plan for ensuring cultural development. Among several objectives, municipal cultural policies aim at defining more clearly the cultural identities of the residents of local and regional communities, but also at becoming more aware of the expectations and needs of their populations, their artists and their cultural institutions. To sum up, during the last decade, Québec’s municipalities have gradually taken over fields formerly the responsibility of the Ministry of Culture; it remains to be seen what sorts of fruit such initiatives will bear. During the last ten years, several Québec municipalities have created their own cultural policies whose aims, generally speaking, are to strengthen and develop the domains of arts and letters, heritage, museology and popular events (Dalphond, 2000). In February 2001, according to data gathered by the Ministry of Culture and Communications of Québec, 73 municipalities and 12 regional county municipalities had adopted cultural policies. ... To conclude this presentation, I am going to place the emphasis on two particular suggestions. In the first place, I believe it is now time to consider and analyze the different kinds of cultural policies one finds in Canada. The Council of Europe has done similar studies, as part of a vast programme of cooperation.2 In my opinion the same thing has to be done here, since culture has traditionally been shared among the three levels of government. This sharing of jurisdiction is a reality which for decades has shaped government interventions, federal as well as those of Québec. |
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