With Prime Minister Paul Martin expected to announce his new cabinet this week, the country's culture vultures have been speculating as to who will assume the Department of Canadian Heritage portfolio occupied, until her electoral defeat on June 28, by Quebec MP Hélène Scherrer.
First elected to the House of Commons in 2000 under Jean Chrétien's tutelage, Scherrer was named Heritage Minister last December by Martin. A social worker by profession with only a modicum of experience in cultural affairs, she was generally regarded as a lacklustre minister who was only starting to find her feet when the voters of Louis-Hébert, near Quebec City, bid her au revoir.
The hope is that this time around, Martin will, in the words of the Canadian Conference of the Arts, “appoint a minister ... with knowledge of, and experience in the arts and cultural sector.” As Arthur Lewis, head of the Our Public Airwaves lobby group, noted in a letter this week to Martin, that called for a minister who is “a strong advocate for Canadian arts and broadcasting,” Heritage is a “complex and important portfolio.” It takes in seemingly everything — multiculturalism, international trade, sports, broadcasting, publishing, museums and galleries, federal parks, film policy, the visual arts — and in recent years, the portfolio and its myriad agencies have received annual parliamentary appropriations of more than $4-billion.
There seems to be a consensus that the Prime Minister probably is trying to decide between two candidates. One is Liza Frulla, who won her Montreal riding of Jeanne-Le Ber last month by only 35 votes, the other is Toronto-based Sarmite (Sam) Bulte, who was re-elected for her third stint as the representative of Parkdale-High Park.
As with anything in Canadian politics, regional issues sometimes matter more than a candidate's raw ability to do a job. So it is with culture. Do you give the portfolio to an urban Ontarian to both thank the province for keeping faith with the Liberals and let city dwellers know the PM's new urban agenda will become a reality? Or do you go to someone from Quebec to say, in effect, “We hear you; we're going to rebuild our relationship with you and one of the ways we're going to do that is by strengthening our commitment to culture”? Or do you pick someone from Atlantic Canada or British Columbia as a way of signalling that the farthest reaches of the country have a place in the centre of power?
Marcus Handman, executive director of the Directors Guild of Canada, thinks Bulte, 50, would be “a brilliant choice.”
A lawyer by training, she was named parliamentary secretary to then-heritage minister Sheila Copps in 2000, has a variety of multicultural connections and served on the Commons standing committee on Canadian Heritage, and Liberal caucus committees on the CBC and the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission.
“She is very much up to speed on the culture file,” Handman reasons, “and [her appointment] could be an olive branch from Martin to Copps-Chrétien loyalists.”
However, the head of another cultural organization, speaking on condition of anonymity, said he didn't think Bulte “would be perceived by Martin to have the ‘gravitas' for a cabinet position, quite apart from her visible support of Copps.”
Moreover, he didn't think Bulte was that effective as Copps's parliamentary secretary.
This culture maven expects Liza Frulla, 55, will be appointed next week “because of her credibility.” Handman, too, said he'd be “happy with her” if she got the call.
There's no doubt she's got the credentials: She was Quebec's minister of culture from 1990 to 1994; she hosted her own eponymous show for Radio-Canada and served as the vice-president of a private radio station; she was active on the standing committee on Heritage and also has cabinet experience, having been named Minister of Social Development by Martin last year.
Other names that have been bandied about in recent days include Andy Scott, the 49-year-old bilingual MP from Fredericton who's developed a solid interest in cultural issues during his 11 years in the Commons; Mauril Bélanger, 49, another former parliamentary secretary to Sheila Copps, an Ottawa MP for the last nine years and a member of the government's task force on urban issues; and Francis Scarpaleggia, the rookie MP for Lac-Saint-Louis, a largely English-speaking Montreal-area riding, who served as the executive assistant to Clifford Lincoln, veteran chair of the standing committee on Canadian Heritage.
A potpourri of others have gotten mentions — John Godfrey, MP for the affluent Toronto riding of Don Valley West and Martin's parliamentary secretary for urban issues last term, and Scott Simms, a broadcaster and journalist who's the MP for Bonavista-Exploits in Newfoundland, among them — but, as Kevin Desjardins, manager of communications for the Canadian Conference of the Arts, noted this week: “If it's not either Bulte or Frulla, it'll be a bit of a surprise.”
