Art and Politics. Sarah Jennings
Time, America’s most popular news magazine and the sponsor of the night’s live CBC English-network television broadcast, declared: “Not since Expo 67’s shimmering debut has an opening night stirred such an exhilarating sense of grand occasion.” A First Nights Committee had struggled for months to cut back the guest list of nearly three thousand names of Ottawa’s “notables” to fit the 2,100-seat capacity of the Opera hall. A third of the audience was to be government officials; another third, “artistic people”; and the rest, members of the general public. With the possible exception of the governor general, everybody was supposedly paying for their own tickets, yet tout Ottawa wanted to be part of this evening.
There were no speeches. The organizers had decided that, in each of the centre’s three beautiful new halls, the curtain rising on the first performance would mark its opening. The formalities had taken place two days before at a ceremony filled with politicians and dignitaries. Standing before the tall, embossed bronze doors of the Salon, with a children’s choir serenading the proceedings, newly minted Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau had handed over control of the site to NAC chairman Lawrence Freiman. All through that sunny Saturday musical groups ranging from bagpipers to rock bands, stationed on the building’s multi-levelled outside terraces, had entertained the forty thousand citizens who had poured into downtown Ottawa to scramble around the brand-new building. Its final cost, a cool $46.1 million, had titillated, outraged, and bemused politicians and the public alike for more than six years.
At the outset, in 1963, the price tag had been set at $9 million, but that first estimate had spiralled rapidly upwards to what was now, to many, an astronomical sum. Throughout construction, and in the face of devastating attacks from political opponents and the press, Pearson had resolutely backed the Arts Centre. On this opening day there was no doubt, at least in the minds of its organizers and builders, that “the Canadian public had got a first-class building at a bargain price.”1
Trudeau’s new minister for cultural affairs, Secretary of State Gérard Pelletier, did not agree. Shortly after his appointment, he had made it clear that if he had been in office at the time the NAC was proposed, he “wouldn’t have built it … at least not at the cost.” He had also added that he did not want the place to be “snobbish.”2 Pelletier’s remark had little effect on Southam, who ensured that the opening night was a grand social occasion. The handsome and sophisticated scion of a blue-blooded Ottawa family, he favoured full-blown elegance when the event called for it—and this triumphant evening was one of those occasions. As the rain poured down, chauffeurdriven cars rolled up to the main entrance to deposit their distinguished passengers—the men striking in white tie and tails; the women gowned and bejewelled with a glamour rare in Ottawa.
Nothing stirred more excitement than the arrival of Pierre Trudeau and his entourage, which included Pelletier and his beautiful and cultured wife, Alex. Trudeau looked resplendent in white tie, the usual rose in his lapel, and on his arm Madeleine Gobeil, by day a lecturer in French literature at Carleton University but tonight dazzling in a lime-green lace minidress and tumbling blond tresses. Their photo would dominate the country’s front pages the following day. Gobeil, a long-time Trudeau friend, had already been appointed a member of the first NAC Board of Trustees.
Though not yet detectable, a pivotal moment was occurring in Canadian cultural affairs. The old lèse-majesté way of doing things was about to give way to a more proactive, practical use of the arts in the country’s political and cultural struggles, especially in Quebec. The concepts of “democratization and decentralization” in cultural policy that Pelletier was about to introduce would be different from the traditional kind of government support which had led to the building of “arm’s-length” cultural institutions and organizations such as the NAC, the Canada Council, and the CBC. Over the long term, the new policies would change irrevocably the place of the arts in national life in Canada and the way that national institutions operated.
The arrival of the “French fact” in Ottawa also ensured that a new set of “notables” would take over, changing the established practices of the generally anglophone (though often bilingual) elites that had run cultural affairs to that point. The old guard, many of whom had been educated abroad and had travelled widely, generally held an international perspective on the arts. The new voices coming on the scene would focus more intensely on Canada’s own experiences and history and insist that the broader world view should be secondary.
The civil and outward-looking perspective of the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism, with its proposals for a bilingual, bicultural Canadian society, was about to be overtaken and changed by the narrow nationalism surging in Quebec and the struggle within the Quebec family between Quebec federalists and separatists. Arts and culture would become just another tool in the long dispute between these opposing views. While the NAC had been forged and created in the older context, the environment would quickly change as decentralized interests took power away from the centre of the country. In the years to come the Arts Centre would have to fight to justify its existence and, by the early nineties, would reach almost total collapse. Only by recasting itself, particularly in terms of its financial model, has it recently begun to regain a place at the centre of Canada’s national artistic life.
G. Hamilton Southam, founding director general of the National Arts Centre. Photo © Yousuf Karsh.
On November 8, 1963, G. Hamilton Southam, president of Ottawa’s National Capital Arts Alliance, drafted a careful letter to Prime Minister Lester B. Pearson. It contained a formal request written in the most concise terms: “For consideration by the government … the idea of the creation of a performing arts centre in Ottawa … and complementary to it … a festival of the arts in Ottawa each year.”1
The genesis of this idea in Ottawa went back decades—indeed, it was partially rooted in the dreams of Southam’s own family. His father and uncle had initiated plans for a similar centre in the 1920s and had even paid to have blueprints drawn to sketch out a proposal. But although major orchestras and theatre troupes continued to tour through Ottawa during the thirties and the war years, no further concrete action on the idea of building a performance hall had occurred until now.
In 1952 Vincent Massey, the first Canadian governor general and a great patron of the arts, gave cultural matters in the city a significant push. In a Canadian Club luncheon speech to Ottawans at the Château Laurier Hotel, he urged “an eminent festival”2 for the capital along the lines of the newly created Edinburgh Festival. The idea of artistic festivals was flourishing everywhere in the postwar period, but in Ottawa it was clear that any such festival would need a place in which to perform, and Ottawa still lacked a significant facility. Many prominent citizens at that lunch took note. Now, ten years later and barely a year since Southam had agreed to head a civic committee in search of a performing arts centre, a plan was ready.
His carefully worded letter to Pearson, an old Southam family friend, was a prelude to a formal meeting later that afternoon. His proposal to the prime minister was that the construction of a performing arts centre be Ottawa’s project to mark Canada’s Centennial.3 Pearson was actively looking for something special for the capital, and the idea came at just the right moment. Within days of the meeting, he wrote back to Southam’s group fully embracing the idea and advising them that he had instructed his officials to prepare a memorandum for cabinet approval. It was the culmination of a whirlwind eight months of research and preparation. For Southam personally, it was the first step in what would turn out to be his central focus for the rest of his professional career: a life in, and for, the arts. It was also the prelude to an enterprise that would shift and elevate the performing arts in Canada in a way that would alter its artistic landscape permanently.