About Mischa Popoff

What do the arts and organic agriculture have in common? Both are at the forefront of culture. I’m all for buying art and natural food. Bravo to anyone in either of these businesses, as long as they are actually in business.

There are vocal minorities in both groups who want long-term government funding to steer culture their way. It’s what Lee Harding of the Canadian Taxpayers Federation coins “subsidized political correctness in the name of ‘the public good.’” The problem is the public has no say.

All levels of government are involved. Many cities now have “cultural directors” whose job is to spend your tax dollars to help artists apply for provincial and federal grants so they can get even more of your tax dollars. Provinces fund arts groups and organic activists like the Certified Organic Associations of BC here in my home province. These groups then use their funds to lobby for even more cash at provincial and federal levels to help the “right” artists and organic farmers get a leg up in the marketplace, all at your expense.

Stéphane Dion is trying to capitalize on this perpetually self-fulfilling arrangement by claiming grandiosely, and vaguely, that “The link between culture and the environment is the way of the future!” Meanwhile Stephen Harper’s Conservatives spent 19.7% more on the arts than did the Liberals during their last year in power, and they pumped a quarter of a million into the Canadian Organic Growers while the Liberals did squat for organics. And yet many in the media paint Conservatives as churlish boors, concerned only with getting more oil out of the ground.

The fact of the matter is that government funding for anything claiming to be avant-garde is as oxymoronic as a multi-millionaire with a private jet living in a mansion with a heated pool who claims to be fighting global warming. Art and organic farming can only hope to remain in the avant-garde as long as they’re genuine, a status guaranteed by having no tax money subsidizing them. Government funding of the avant-garde immediately renders it the old guard. It’s that simple.

Since when should government tell us, force us, to accept someone else’s version of culture? My wife and I own original Canadian art, we buy healthy, local food, and we promote both every day. Surely it’s not such a novel concept that we expect the artists and farmers we support to earn a living by serving their customers’ needs.

And no, this does not reduce art or organic food to a commodity of mass-consumption. It merely ensures that someone somewhere actually wants it before it’s produced.

When government throws money at a cause the result is lethargy, and the recipients become victims of their own inertia. That’s what happened to Jean Chrétien’s favorite “Canadian,” “private” company, Bombardier.

Like old curmudgeons who can’t laugh at the humour of younger generations, always assuming their “worldly” views trump everything, subsidized artists and organic farmers gradually quit listening, and invariably find new ways to spend even more of every dollar you and I earn. Subsidies breed more subsidies in a never-ending maelstrom of self-aggrandizement.

It’s a sad statement on the arts and organic agriculture that a choice few get what they want even if you don’t want what they’re hocking. Watch as they establish their minority vision all around you, and don’t dare criticize them because you’ll also be branded a churlish boor and you’ll still have to pay through the nose.

Most artists and organic farmers survive through the power of free enterprise. Why can’t all of them? It’s only select groups within these otherwise noble vocations who doggedly pursue the almighty lure of subsidies.

All artists should become devoted non-elitists just long enough in their careers to learn what it’s like to make an honest living. All organic farmers should have their crops tested so we know they’re really what they claim they are.

These are such simple recipes for success, and yet a few at the highest social levels play the game of appealing to the right bureaucrat instead of to the public. Their creativity and productivity suffers until one day they look in the mirror and realize they’ve become bureaucrats themselves, doddering old self-righteous fools every one.

Some will say it’s “right wing” in the extreme to force poor ol’ artists and organic farmers to survive by the same rules as the rest of us. But if surviving by the laws of supply and demand is “right wing,” then I guess left wing must mean, “Let this committee and this bureaucracy decide what’s right for you because they know better than you do.”

You don’t have to lean left or right to accept that the free market is the only way to ensure culture is genuine. As long as we all get to freely vote with our money it’s democratic, and what could be more genuine than that?

Let the people decide.

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Could you be an abortion-rights advocate provincially and an opponent of abortion federally? Never. Could you favour free trade federally and yet try to build trade barriers around your home province? It’s as inconceivable as a vegan Greenpeacer running a hunting lodge. And yet, conservatives in B.C. are being asked to do the political and moral equivalent.

Finally an issue has come to centre stage which gives Gordon Campbell’s provincial Liberal Party something fundamentally in common with Stéphane Dion’s federal Liberal Party besides just the name: it’s the carbon tax. B.C. conservatives now find themselves facing the bipolarized prospect of fighting Stéphane Dion’s carbon tax while holding their noses and voting for Campbell’s carbon tax.

A carbon tax forces you to pay in advance for a dream that might not come true. That dream is to stop global warming by getting you to quit relying on fossil fuels to heat your home, drive to work, and run the economy. Never mind there’s no proof burning fossil fuels is bad for the environment. Never mind that particulates cause pollution, not CO², and that particulates have been all but eliminated from the exhaust of fossil-fuel burning engines. Never mind trees need CO² to survive and that weather conditions in the last 20 years have been the most favourable for agriculture in 800 years.

Most importantly, never mind that whatever one’s beliefs, there’s no proof that taxing something reduces its consumption as evidenced by so many previous “sin” taxes on cigarettes, alcohol, gambling, and, lest we forget, fossil fuels. Canadians already pay hefty taxes on these “vices” and yet we use them as much or more than Americans who pay very little sin tax.

Yes, just never mind all those inconvenient facts; you’re being forced to pay a carbon tax in B.C. so you’ll be more willing to pay for an expensive and supposedly carbon-neutral alternative like an electric car, even though none is available. We’re paying for a dream. And, even if a viable electric car is developed, we’ll still rely heavily on fossil fuels to provide the majority of the electricity to charge its $10,000 batteries.

Now here’s the worst part. Campbell and Dion both say they’ll use carbon-tax revenue to subsidize the best plans to develop low or zero emission energy alternatives. Incidentally, Barack Obama says the same thing. But what makes politicians think they’re qualified to pick the “best plans”? Government subsidies lead to boondoggles like ethanol which has increased food prices and which, billions of dollars later, turns out to offer no advantage over fossil fuels. I don’t hear any politicians admitting error on that one.

The hardest part meanwhile for a conservative in B.C. is that we have for years supported this “sometimes conservative party” with a totally misleading name, the B.C. Liberals. It was referred to as a “big tent” party, providing political shelter for anyone opposed to the folly of socialism à la NDP. Conservatives and centre-right liberals coexisted for well over a decade; then along came the folly of Campbell’s carbon tax.

Suddenly years of grudging acceptance by conservatives came to a head. Suddenly the party with the Liberal name but which promised to shelter former Social Credit, Reform and Conservative supporters, no longer guaranteed a safe haven.

Sure, a few conservatives are still willing to bite their tongues and accept Campbell’s attempt to out-green the NDP by out-taxing every other province and state against which we compete. But for many Campbell’s carbon tax is the last straw.

I’ve long defended the B.C. Liberals, and in fact volunteered for them in their last campaign. When I subsequently ran for the federal Conservative Party, some party members asked me if I was a member of the B.C. Liberals. I said yes, and Conservatives accepted that at the time. But what would I say now? How could I support a federal party that’s 100% opposed to Dion’s carbon tax, and yet support a provincial party that’s 100% determined to impose one here?

Sure, conservatives in B.C. could support the revitalized B.C. Conservative Party. It promises to be the new “big tent” party for former Reformers and Social Crediters, and it’s 100% opposed to any carbon tax, even one which promises, on Campbell’s grandmother’s grave, to be “revenue neutral.” But B.C. Conservatives will be accused in some ridings of splitting the vote and letting the NDP win. Still, it’s a risk many tell me they’re willing to take.

Talk about a bitter political conundrum.

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