Art and Politics. Sarah Jennings
and, on the theatre group’s advice, he interviewed Sabourin and hired him. The Quebec director joined the NAC staff in October 1967. Soon after he left for France for several months, at the centre’s expense, to study the new French methods and to plan his new theatre company and his first season.
Prime Minister Lester Pearson, with communications officer Philippe Paquet and Hamilton Southam, seemed to be thanking the gods as the NAC building neared completion. Photo © John Evans.
Meanwhile, Prime Minister Pearson was keeping a close eye on proceedings at the National Arts Centre, and in December he met again with Freiman and Southam. He seemed interested in the creation of the resident companies and indicated that he agreed with the long-term financial plans that had been submitted, although he cautioned that the organization would have to live within its proposed budget, especially for Year One.23 This stricture would soon present problems in the ongoing negotiations with the Stratford Festival. The two companies had different perceptions of the plan they were discussing: the Arts Centre expected Stratford to form its English theatre company with a nucleus of its actors, but Stratford wanted to keep its whole company of forty-five actors intact during the winter. The centre had approved $600,000 for English theatre and $400,000 for French theatre, but Stratford’s plans alone carried a price tag of $1.5 million. The horse-trading continued between the two organizations throughout the spring of 1968. One new distraction had appeared on the scene: theatre director Mavor Moore had begun to lobby to have some Stratford productions in his winter season at the St. Lawrence Centre in Toronto, where he was now director.
The date of the opening of the National Arts Centre was still unsettled, but non-stop budget discussions continued among management, the board, and the government. It was becoming evident that the government would grant only $2.5 million for the 1969–70 opening year, so Bruce Corder advised that they delay taking over responsibility for the building for as long as possible to save money on its running costs. Most worrying of all, nothing had been said about the additional million dollars intended for the annual Summer Festival, and Southam urged the trustees not to forget to ask for it. Freiman wanted to nail down the funds for the Arts Centre’s basic requirements before asking for more, so he resisted Southam’s plan. The friction between the two men only increased when Freiman insisted on managing the issue on his own with the politicians.
Despite these pesky frustrations, Southam moved ahead enthusiastically with his Festival plans. His vision called for a celebration of both Anglo-Saxon and French culture in North America, so he issued invitations to theatre and opera companies in France and in England and put his friends Lord Harewood and Albert Sarfati on the payroll as consultants. It was to be a grand festival indeed. Among the tentative invitees were the Comédie Française and the Orchestre de Paris, Great Britain’s National Theatre, ballet companies from Sadler’s Wells and Covent Garden, and several other national companies from both France and England. Harewood’s contract called for up to $7,000 in consulting fees plus his expenses, and both men were due to arrive in Ottawa in May to firm up the Festival schedule. Meanwhile, Southam continued to pursue his government contacts, calling on Treasury Board president Edgar Benson, who was “sympathetic,” to champion the matter in Cabinet “within a few weeks.”24 But no money for the Festival would be forthcoming and, in August, the board at last insisted that Southam postpone the event until the 1972 or even the 1973 summer season. Write-off fees were discussed for the two high-priced foreign consultants, but there is no record of any payment being made. In the end, Sarfati would have seven years of valuable work with the NAC, supplying it with European companies and performers through his agency, and, in return, he would import some of the NAC productions to Europe. Harewood would later be paid by the Canada Council to prepare a report on Canadian opera.
With the opening now barely a year away, the pace of work quickened at the Arts Centre. The talented programmer David Haber had arrived from Montreal. In Haber, Southam had found a gem, and the intense bespectacled young man soon covered the walls of his small office with vast charts of the future schedule that would present artists of all types in the coming seasons—from the world’s favourite pop singers to the most esoteric cutting-edge dance troupes. Haber’s incomparable contacts ensured that much of “the best of the best” would be seen at the Arts Centre in the next few years.
The dedicated genius of David Haber, the programming director as the NAC got under way, kept all three halls filled with exciting and innovative work. Photo © Studio Graetz.
*Later, the truck was lent out to some other provincial ventures before it was mothballed.
*Harewood became a close friend, serving as godfather to Southam’s daughter from his second marriage—to Gro Southam.
When Lester Pearson left office in April 1968 and Pierre Elliott Trudeau succeeded him as prime minister, Judy LaMarsh handed over the secretary of state’s job to the former Montreal journalist Gérard Pelletier—a shy, somewhat diffident Quebec intellectual. He had been born in Victoriaville, Quebec, the son of a hardworking railway station-manager and a mother who worked occasionally as a seamstress. Thanks to his good education and his activities in Catholic youth movements in the province, he had travelled to South America and postwar Europe, where he developed an intense interest in cultural matters and social change. He became a journalist, working first in trade union journals, then as a public affairs reporter and commentator for Radio Canada, and was eventually hired as the editor of the powerful Montreal newspaper La Presse. He resigned in 1965 to go into politics with his two close friends Jean Marchand, a prominent union leader, and Pierre Trudeau, a lawyer, essayist, and sometime dilettante.
Pierre Trudeau’s secretary of state, Gérard Pelletier, brought ideas to Ottawa that clashed with Hamilton Southam’s view of the world but which would have long-term effects on the practice of arts and culture in Canada.
Dubbed the “Three Wise Men,” Marchand, Pelletier, and Trudeau had been recruited by Pearson’s Liberals to run in Quebec in the upcoming federal election. Pelletier had been in the forefront of the fight against the “Great Darkness” of the Duplessis era in Quebec (although some political opponents alleged that this iconic term was nothing but Liberal propaganda).1 He had strong ideas about the role of culture in national life and, once appointed to a position of authority in the Cabinet, he would lose no time in putting them into effect. In the meantime, his opening gambit so far as the Arts Centre was concerned was to declare that it better not be “too snobbish.”2 He and Southam came from two different worlds—and they would cross like ships in the night, with only de rigueur formal contact and little understanding of each other. Pelletier was one of the few neither enticed nor persuaded by Southam’s celebrated social skills.
While the political regime changed in Ottawa, the struggle continued between the NAC and the Stratford Festival over their agreement. In March 1969 they organized a window-dressing signing ceremony in the unfinished foyer of the Arts Centre which briefly turned the theatre company into the “Stratford National Theatre Company of Canada.” The biggest stumbling block was money, but the agreement would soon start to unravel in other ways as well. Stratford had set its “irreducible” budget to come to Ottawa at $1,062 million, but David Haber confirmed that the NAC English theatre budget could not rise above $875,000 at “the absolute maximum.”3