For Southam all of the proceedings were a natural progression. Opera was the “sum of everything,” he believed, and “you couldn’t have a National Arts Centre without it.”7 He had persuaded the government to build the second finest opera house in North America after the Metropolitan Opera House in New York, and he intended to have it used. After this first successful summer, he was more determined than ever to create a full-fledged Festival in Ottawa with opera at its core. The plan was to make Canada’s capital “Edinburgh-on-the-Rideau” and, to this end, Bruce Corder and several trustees travelled to the Scottish city before the next summer to pick up tips. Lord Harewood had been hired to prepare a report on opera in Canada, and, when it was published in 1972, it identified “Ottawa as key to opera in Canada.” The success of the first summer, especially in uncovering so many opera fans in Ottawa, allowed a happy Southam to exclaim to a Canadian reporter during a Paris interview in June 1972: “I felt like a prospector wandering over the Canadian Shield, taking a crack at a rock and uncovering gold.”8
There was more gold to come when the 1972 Summer Festival brought a repeat of Figaro, this time without live swans but sung in the original Italian, as well as a new production of Mozart’s Cosi fan tutte. This event marked the debut of the noted Canadian-born dancer and choreographer Brian Macdonald as an opera stage director. Bernardi envisioned the work as “very balletic. After all,” he said, “it’s about three pairs of people. I could see some kind of choreographic nexus there.”9 Macdonald was the right man for the task, although it took him time to work out each scene, as he had first to learn and then become immersed in the technicalities of the music as rehearsals moved forward. The result was good, and the Bernardi/Macdonald duo would team up often on other operatic and musical works in the years ahead, many of them at the Arts Centre. Again, Canadian artists dominated the cast, the public was delighted, and the reviews were good.
The rest of the Summer Festival month was like “Expo year in miniature”10— a performance by the Royal Winnipeg Ballet, four orchestral concerts (one of them conducted by the distinguished British composer Sir Michael Tippett), recitals by classical pianist Harvey Van Cliburn and jazz pianist Oscar Peterson, a French play from Montreal, and two English plays: Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew and Ben Jonson’s The Alchemist, brought from London by the Young Vic Company. Added to this was entertainment on the lighter side—performances as diverse as the Québécois boy-singer René Claude and, in the Studio, the new Canadian satirical group The Jest Society. For the first time, chansonniers were booked into the Café to entertain patrons after dinner. Yet, somehow, this second Summer Festival fare did not quite gel. Tickets sold spottily, with only about 20 percent going to visitors from outside the region. The opera sold well, however, and, while overall attendance was down from the first year, revenues for the July summer events were up by 20 percent.
Despite the interest in youth, “Young August” had proved a hard sell, even with its rich all-Canadian menu. It featured everything from Canadian comedian Rich Little (who did play to packed houses), to Jeunesses Musicales, Toronto Dance Theatre, and plays in both English and French by students of the National Theatre School. Overall capacity for August, despite much favourable comment, hit just 60 percent. In the eyes of some observers, “ideal festival programming for Ottawa was still elusive.”11 Nevertheless, NAC management came out of the summer with the view that the Festival was now well grounded, and Southam immediately began ambitious plans for the third Summer Festival.
Meanwhile on the government front, a great deal was happening as Secretary of State Gérard Pelletier began to set in motion the initiatives that would dramatically affect cultural funding in the country. At his side was an astute bureaucrat, André Fortier, who, as a more junior official, had been associated with the NAC’s beginnings and was now assistant undersecretary in the Secretary of State’s department and a confidant of Pelletier. Together they initiated a formal Federal Cultural Policy Review, to be overseen by Fortier. Already, Fortier had been assigned to chair an interdepartmental “Canada Month” committee that would work to focus attention on Canada’s capital during the summer. The NAC would have to manoeuvre skilfully to finesse its plans into this new broader picture being developed by the government.
Pelletier had strong views on the place of young people in society and had articulated a notion that “youth” was “an independent universal class, culturally and socially distinct.”12 At the same time, the Quiet Revolution in Quebec was becoming considerably less quiet, driven in large measure by youthful disaffected voices and sometimes reaching explosive proportions, as seen in the tragic events of the October Crisis. One of the federal government’s responses was to launch the Opportunities for Youth program in 1970, followed the next year by the Local Initiatives Program. These plans not only enabled the government to get money more directly out to constituents but also tied in with Pelletier’s objectives to “democratize and decentralize” culture. Many of the projects that received funding under these programs were in the artistic and cultural sector. The hugely successful Cirque du Soleil, for example, began with an Opportunities for Youth grant to two street buskers working in the lower Gaspésie.
These programs also had the effect of circumnavigating some of the grant-giving powers of the traditional funding agencies, such as the Canada Council and, more recently, the National Arts Centre, whose support was directed exclusively to professional artists. Both Southam and Louis Applebaum wrote to Pelletier expressing their concerns over the effect of these new granting programs and stressing their opinion that “federal support should be aimed at the professional level … and … support of semi-professional or amateur activities should be left to the regional or municipal levels of government.”
Pelletier’s department began to slash what were known as “B” budgets in these cultural agencies’ financing, in part to underwrite, but also to have more control over, the new programs. “A” budgets were designed to establish the base operating budgets for the established cultural organizations, and “B” budgets were the additional wish list of items they would like to do if the Treasury Board granted them extra funds. These discretionary funds were not just left to bureaucrats to administer but could be the subject of some heavy discussion and horse-trading around the Cabinet table. Pelletier and his close colleagues now intended to use some of this money and these tools to effect social change—and to a significant extent they would succeed.
Pelletier also wanted a single unifying cultural policy for the country, to be set and run by the government. Until now, each of Canada’s cultural agencies had a general mandate, and they had generally been left to operate as they saw fit. Starting with Pelletier, they would come under greater departmental control. The minister travelled to a UNESCO conference in Venice in 1970 where the concept of a national cultural policy was adopted by a majority of member countries, even though some doubters expressed fears that “cultural expression would be stifled under the weight of bureaucracy.”13 At a second conference in Helsinki in 1972, Canada drew closer to the European/French model of a Ministry of Culture, with its state (as opposed to “arm’s-length”) control of public funds for cultural affairs. In part, the goal of this change was to build a better bulwark against the cultural power of the United States, which was flooding Canada and other parts of the world largely through American television programs and film. Canada’s more proactive stance in cultural activities abroad was intended to reinforce its differences from the United States.
Soon after, Pelletier instituted certain measures that broke with the tradition that Canada’s arm’s-length cultural