For the first time in its 107-year history, the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra (VSO) saw its musicians go on strike.
All VSO musicians are part of the Vancouver Musicians’ Association — the union representing musicians throughout mainland BC — and work under a collective agreement, which expired in June of this year. Rebecca Whitling, who plays in the orchestra’s first violin section, started as the youngest in her section — she has now been part of the VSO for about 30 years. Whitling is the spokesperson for the committee that started negotiating new terms in April of this year. They wanted to get their employer, the Vancouver Symphony Society (VSS), to reassess their budget to prioritize musicians’ needs.
According to the union, VSO musicians are paid 30 per cent less than their counterparts at the Toronto Symphony Orchestra, Orchestre symphonique de Montréal and Ottawa’s National Arts Centre Orchestra. Whitling said that when she first joined the orchestra, musicians weren’t receiving increases as they were told that their board couldn’t afford it. However, Whitling said that an independent financial analysis of the Vancouver Symphony Society and Vancouver Symphony Foundation’s books showed this might not be entirely true.
“Based on that information, we were able to back up our arguments against their claims of poverty. We were able to show that they in fact had the money to significantly increase our salaries and bring [them] more in line with the salaries of musicians in Canada's other major orchestras,” Whitling said. “They used various arguments to say that they couldn't afford it.”
On July 17, the musicians were handed what was called a “final offer” by their management. When the terms of this offer were presented to the members of the orchestra’s bargaining unit, they were soundly rejected — 97.4 per cent voted in favour of a strike. The results of the vote weren’t released to the public right away, as the musicians thought the vote itself would be enough to spark change.
“In our case, we thought that it would be a strong signal to our management to know that all the musicians were so strongly behind our committee, and felt so strongly in our mandate [and] what we were asking for, that they were willing to go on strike to support it. We felt … that would be enough of a wake-up call to them, so we didn't go public with it. We let our management know, but they chose to do nothing based on that.”
Both parties met once at the start of the symphony’s winter season in September, where the musicians were presented with an offer that was “essentially, no different than the previous one,” according to Whitling. So, during the first two weeks of the season, the musicians gathered at the entrances to the Orpheum before their performances. Donning bright blue “VSO musicians” T-shirts, they handed out leaflets to concertgoers explaining how “management was refusing to recognize that we were so severely underpaid, and how we were, as always, basically at the table waiting for them to show up.”
The VSO musicians walked off the job on Sept. 25 after serving a 72-hour notice. During that 72 hours, Whitling was sure the VSS would come back to the table. That weekend was the opening of the “Movie Nights with the VSO” series — a “big money-making weekend” for them, she said. The first concert of the series was cancelled an hour before it was set to start.
“[The musicians] were all there, explaining to people what had happened. We were surprised at the incredible outpouring of support that we got from the audience who had shown up for the concert, who understood that we didn't want to be out there,” Whitling said. “We wanted to be inside playing. We'd already played the rehearsals for the shows.”
The picket line lasted for a week, during which Whitling said people sent around 500 letters to VSO President and CEO Angela Elster in support of the strike, alongside social media posts from several major North American orchestras expressing their solidarity.
On Oct. 4, the Vancouver Musicians’ Association and the Vancouver Symphony Society announced that after two days of “intense mediation,” they had come to an agreement. “It's not the transformative contract that we know that the musicians expect and deserve, and that we know that the symphony can afford, but there are good increases,” Whitling said. But the musicians are proud of the result, and are now “determined to make this just the first step toward getting the kind of transformative change that [they] need.”
The VSO strike, however, is just one example of a deeper issue affecting all types of creatives living and working in Vancouver. It’s always been difficult to make a living off of art, but there are signs that artists are currently being forced out of their studios — and the city as a whole — at an alarming rate, putting Vancouver’s cultural identity in a state of limbo.
In July of this year, Councillor Pete Fry brought a motion to Vancouver City Council on behalf of the Arts and Culture Advisory Committee calling for an urgent investment into Vancouver’s arts and culture infrastructure. It shines light on some of the funding and space-related issues that artists are facing and offers the city some areas they might want to tackle in order to make Vancouver a livable city for creatives. Councillor Sarah Kirby-Yung brought forward a reworded amendment to the motion with many of its original components removed — including the suggestion to increase the minimum for operating grants — which was passed by the ABC Vancouver majority.
Over 40 people signed up to speak at that meeting in support of the motion. All of the biggest names of the Vancouver arts world showed up, like Bard on the Beach’s Christopher Gaze, Arts Club’s Peter Cathie White, and the Vancouver Folk Music Festival’s Fiona Black. It seemed that no matter how big the organization was or what discipline they practised, all were in agreement: something needs to change now.
Duncan Watts-Grant was the third person who volunteered to speak in that meeting. News of the motion being brought to Council had happened to cross his inbox and he immediately signed up to share his thoughts. He was “gobsmacked” to see 47 of his colleagues do the same — there are never this many people interested in speaking on an arts and culture motion, he said.
“Off the bat, [that] speaks to two things: one is how rare it is that everyone agrees on something. No one spoke against it, which I think is amazing and never happens.” He joked that he once had a government representative tell him that arts and culture is “one of the worst industries for all getting on the same page” — there are so many different disciplines that all need different resources to succeed. “I think the scale of having that many people come out … to me, [that’s] an indication of the precarity of the situation right now for arts organizations and for artists in our city.”
For around two-and-a-half years now, Watts-Grant has been the Vancouver Fringe’s executive director. He just wrapped up his third festival last month. The Fringe is an acquired taste — its lineup of shows is completely uncurated, so it’s often quite strange — but Watts-Grant fell in love with the festival during his stage managing days. Although he trained as a singer and graduated from UBC’s opera program in 2016, he’s found his place in the technical and administrative sides of the performing arts. Before the Fringe, he was at the VSO for a number of years, working in community engagement and school operations.
Watts-Grant had a rocky start to his leadership role at the Fringe. Around the one-year anniversary of him taking on the job, he had to launch an emergency fundraising campaign to keep the festival afloat; they knew they would be able to run it in 2024, but the following years were up in the air. They set a goal of $80,000 over four months, and in the end, they raised $55,000 in three months, with the number of donors jumping from 165 in 2022 to over 700. The festival was also named in the federal budget to receive $300,000 over two years. This was a big moment for Watts-Grant, a self-proclaimed “political geek” who has that page of the budget printed out and framed on his wall.
That campaign stabilized the festival. However, Watts-Grant pointed out that in recent years, finances have been especially rough for the entire arts and culture industry as the number of people giving to arts initiatives has gone down across the country. “Sponsorship has really dried up. It doesn't exist in the way it existed before the pandemic,” he said. While Watts-Grant is grateful for the exponential increase in donors accumulated over the course of their funding campaign, he is sure there will continue to be financial challenges at the Fringe going forward.
There’s a traditional model of arts funding that many Canadian organizations have relied on at some point: one-third of their money is from government, one-third is from private giving, and the last third is from revenue. But as expenses and income have fluctuated over the years, Watts-Grant has found it difficult to rely on this model for any sense of stability.
When Watts-Grant took over the festival in 2023, he described there being a “hangover,” funding-wise. They were still receiving emergency money from the government as a result of the pandemic, so around 65 per cent of funding was coming from the government. “You don’t need to walk into that organization to know, ‘Oh, no, this is not sustainable whatsoever. We are not going to have this money in a year or two,’” he said. “And it was true.” Most governments cut back their emergency funding the following year, but Watts-Grant said the province has maintained different forms of funding in some way, which has been a huge help.
Of the Fringe’s approximately $1.2 million budget, Watts-Grant said government funding currently makes up about 40 per cent. This can be broken down to three per cent from the City of Vancouver; 14 per cent from the province; and 22 per cent from the federal government, which includes the Arts Presentation Fund, the Cultural Human Resources Council, and Employment and Social Development Canada. These contributions are very static, however; Watts-Grant noted the amount they receive from the city hasn't changed since the Olympics took place in Vancouver 15 years ago — so this funding, when calculated against inflation, has gone down by 47 per cent.
The last funding chunk consists of earned revenue, but that doesn’t really work for the Fringe. “As an organization, we have a really strange business model, because we give all [box office profits back to the artists],” said Watts-Grant. It’s a different beast altogether.
The Vancouver Fringe, like most iterations of the festival run in other cities, uses a lottery system to decide who gets the chance to participate. Anyone from experienced playwrights and comedians to people who have never staged a show in their lives could end up on a Fringe stage. Artists who are drawn in the lottery get to have a show in the festival with about 80 per cent of their production costs covered. According to Watts-Grant, each artist only paid $750–$850 to participate this year — it costs the Fringe an average of $4,000–$5,000 to cover the venue and production costs for one show. The festival tacks $5 onto every ticket sold, which only end up costing between $15–$20 in total. The small fee is put toward paying box office staff and supporting theatre improvements, while the rest of the ticket cost goes toward the artist, which is mandated for all Canadian Fringes by the Canadian Association of Fringe Festivals.
What the Fringe offers artists is an almost unbelievable opportunity, allowing them to take (very expensive) risks in front of a real audience. Watts-Grant’s mission is to find a way to give artists everything they want, but of course, there are constraints to that.
“I don't think it's happenstance that k.d. lang gave her first major concert at the Edmonton Fringe or Kim's Convenience started at the Toronto Fringe. There is a real history of artists getting their start at these festivals,” Watts-Grant said. “But at the same time, from a funding perspective, it makes for a very challenging balance sheet when you're returning that revenue back to artists. We wouldn't want to operate any other way, but … it's a different way [of] operating.”
The festival’s ticketing model, in a way, is under constant threat. But at the end of the day, Watts-Grant doesn’t see it changing any time soon; there’s an “alchemy” in making Fringe special and possible, and he doesn’t really know what the festival would be if it ever strayed from its model. In fact, keeping ticket costs low is crucial in a time when artists are fighting for people’s attention. The Fringe’s biggest competitor isn’t another theatre company — it’s streaming services. “Our competitor is Netflix,” Watts-Grant said. “Our challenge is convincing people to leave their houses and come and see something.”
There’s no arts organization that isn’t going to have some version of this funding problem — Watts-Grant joked that festivals like Fringe are run on “duct tape and dreams.” Most organizations find ways to make it work, but at a certain point, they will have used up every trick in the book and have no other option than to close their doors. The Vancouver Mural Festival (VMF) is one of the more notable examples of this happening. Over the course of nine years, the festival gave lesser-known visual artists an opportunity to cover Vancouver in over 400 murals, but it was forced to shut down at the beginning of 2025 due to financial hardship.
Pacific Theatre announced earlier this year that the company would be going on a hiatus starting in January of next year. The company operates out of the Chalmers Heritage Building, now owned by Holy Trinity Anglican Church. Built in 1912, the site has become unsafe for long-term use and will need major structural upgrades adding up to $500,000. Pacific Theatre’s scaled-back fall programming will end with a performance on Dec. 23, after which they will have to leave the space for an indeterminate period of time to reassess the direction of the company’s future.
The Concord Pacific Dragon Boat Festival was also cancelled due to the FIFA World Cup being partially hosted in Vancouver next year. FIFA does not allow cultural and sporting events in the city to take place within a certain radius of the stadium, effective from the beginning of June to the end of July, despite there only being matches scheduled June 11–19. Watts-Grant pointed out that the 2025 Council motion had a suggestion to explore small taxes or surcharges on things like liquor, sales, empty buildings and hotels — which would be especially important at a time like this, had it been passed.
“Are we losing a piece of unique cultural identity to Vancouver because of the major event?” Watts-Grant asked. “I want major events to come to the city. I want cruise ships to come to the city. I want tourists to come to this city. We run our festival [in] one of the top four tourist destinations in Vancouver, and I love that we bring tourists to our festival at the same time. I really want to see that investment into local arts and culture because I think we have a vibrant story to tell … It's just not represented at a city or a provincial level.”
Even though people might not be travelling to a city for its arts and culture events, they’re an asset to have once tourists are here and searching for something to do — but it’s hard to preserve that identity unless we invest in it. Vancouver’s underground music and visual arts scene is where a lot of our local talent gets their first chance to showcase their work. It’s the first stepping-stone into the creative world, shaping what Vancouver’s art looks like and who gets a chance to participate in creating it.
Ana Rose Carrico is the executive director and co-founder of the Red Gate Arts Society, which has been around for decades, she said, in a few different forms. Before the organization found its way to its current location, the Red Gate was an ad hoc collection of artists and musicians working out of a three-story building in the Downtown Eastside. The top floor was the recording studio JC/DC — which hosted the New Pornographers, among other big names — the second floor was artist live-work spaces, and the bottom floor was a gallery and performance venue.
Things “really took off” when they got an eviction notice because the building was being condemned. She said they had tried to behave pretty cautiously before then, but when they got the notice, they figured it was time to do everything they had been scared to do because they didn’t want the landlord’s attention.
After leaving that first building, they realized that they needed to make some structural changes in order to properly advocate for themselves, so they became an official non-profit organization. Their mandate is to provide a studio space for emerging artists that’s as affordable as possible, as well as access to performance and gallery spaces. Red Gate’s current home is now a one-story building along Main Street that holds artist studios, a performance space, a tattoo shop, a screen printing shop, and a gallery. It isn’t a forever home, Carrico said, but at the very least, it’s a long-term lease. She also mentioned how they managed to get grant funding for the first time — she feels it’s “bizarre” that they’ve got to a point where they’re getting money from the government. “It seems like a miracle, almost,” she said. “We're constantly struggling, and yet much more stable than a lot of other places.”
Red Gate is one of the city’s more established DIY venues. Other underground performance spaces haven’t been so lucky — keeping track of DIY venues in Vancouver is like playing a game of whack-a-mole, Carrico said. But it used to be that for every venue that shut down, another would pop up. Now she’s noticed it seems like only one opens for every two that are forced to call it quits. Smilin’ Buddha Cabaret shut down a few years ago; Grey Lab saw its last show this August; and 648 Kingsway closed down briefly last year after announcing they would be facing a 40 per cent rent increase, before reopening under a different team.
When a new venue appears, Carrico emphasized that she doesn’t see them as competition — they’re community. More venues means more bands, and more bands means a whole new pool of potential audience members, so a venue being booked solid isn’t always a good sign. That’s why she works closely with organizations who are in a similar position, like Green Auto and the Birdhouse. “Generally, if I have some kind of human resources [or] grant, I just reach out to them,” she said. “The more we communicate, the less we have to experiment individually.”
Carrico used to be the station manager at CiTR and has some experience navigating the intricacies of arts organization bureaucracies, which she’s noticed a lot of artists seem to struggle with. She sees herself as a translator, of sorts, between the people on the creative and business sides of the arts and culture industry. “[Bureaucracy is] kind of its own language. That is really intimidating,” she said. “It feels really opaque, almost intentionally so.” People like her are essential to preserving the essence of DIY spaces, because when a space closes down, Carrico has too often seen it return feeling a bit too “corporate,” taken over by people with more resources and a better understanding of how to effectively communicate with various institutions.
“The smaller things are artist-run. There has to be accommodations made for that. We need translators, and ideally it would be representatives of the city who are coming from that sector,” she said. “[People] who are understanding, who know what kind of support artists need.”
Brent Constantine is the executive director of Little Mountain Gallery, a comedy club in the heart of Gastown. He has a background in arts infrastructure planning; he graduated from the University of Alberta with a master’s in urban planning and previously worked for the non-profit organization Arts Habitat, where he worked on redeveloping spaces for artist use.
Constantine didn’t start Little Mountain Gallery. As he put it, he’s “just the most recent person to inherit the curse of running it.” It was founded in 2006 as an artist collective by Ehren Salazar and taken over by comedian Ryan Beil in 2013, who then transformed it into a comedy-only venue once it became a non-profit in 2016. Little Mountain Gallery used to operate out of a 1930s automotive garage off Main Street. It was riddled with safety hazards and became the subject of many noise complaints, which almost got the venue shut down in 2010 — their zoning permit didn’t quite allow them to host live music performances, but luckily, Salazar was able to strike a deal with the city that allowed them to continue most of their regular programming.
Since he had been doing shows at the venue and had heard Beil was losing time and interest in running it, Constantine stepped in as director. However, they were forced to leave the building at the beginning of 2022 due to redevelopment. “We just ran the space as best we could,” he said. “We knew that we were going to lose the space, which is very common in the city … Artists reuse space. It's never designed for the artists inside and the shows that are happening, so you kind of make do with the space that you have.”
This struggle to find spaces that can actually host artists and their work is what prevented Little Mountain Gallery from being able to reopen until the spring of 2024 in their Gastown location. It took around three years of searching for what they needed in terms of square footage, affordability and location, which Constantine said was difficult with the budget they had. Much like the garage, their new building wasn’t designed to be a theatre either; it now hosts two stages where they can run shows simultaneously, but took quite a bit of remodelling to get to this point.
With minimal budgets, organizations like Little Mountain Gallery can’t access buildings that are actually intended for the work that they do. “Purpose-built space is quite rare, especially for smaller [organizations]. It doesn't exist,” Constantine said. The main factor in whether a building could work is the price tag, and functionality almost always has to become an afterthought. Even in older spaces — and regardless of the area — there aren’t caps on commercial rents the way there are on residential properties, and the triple-net-lease means that occupants are paying property taxes on top of their rent. Artists may think they can afford a space without truly understanding all of the factors that go into it.
“A lot of artists are not experts in space. They're not experts in lease creation or legal aspects or city zoning, and they shouldn't be. You shouldn't have to have that,” Constantine said. “A lot of people, me included, get into running these spaces because you don't want to see them disappear, or you want to continue to work on your art in a space that works. You don't get into it to do administrative tasks or negotiate insurance premiums and things like that. These are things that accidentally happen to you as you go along.”
Property taxes have been one of the worst challenges Carrico has had to deal with at Red Gate. BC employs the “highest and best use” principle, in which the amount doesn’t reflect what the building is currently used for, but its highest potential. Red Gate is zoned for a brand-new six-story building, so they’re currently being taxed as that, rather than as the older one-story building they actually are. Around a third of their monthly rental fee goes toward property taxes — Carrico said she’s been trying to work with the city to get exemptions for cultural spaces.
In January 2020, Red Gate was facing a drastic increase in property taxes that destabilized their future in their current space. The organization published an open letter explaining how their potential developed value had quadrupled in just four years due to this “highest and best use” principle. They had already been paying $30,000 annually in property taxes, and this increase would add another $18,000 on top of that; they made an agreement with the landlord to defer charges until the end of January, at which point they would be forced to pay over $9,000.
“Even though we are a non-profit cultural organization in an old low-rise building, we are being taxed at the same rate as the adjacent for-profit corporate megaliths,” Red Gate organizers wrote at the time. Shortly after this, the city granted Red Gate $27,000 in one-time funding as part of a new initiative to save affordable spaces for artists.
Finding spaces to operate can also be a headache, thanks to Vancouver’s zoning requirements. These are regulations around land use, including restrictions on which businesses can operate in a given location. Constantine explained that artists are often moving into repurposed spaces, many of which used to be commercial spaces, like a hair salon or a restaurant. To use it for creating or performing, occupants must request to flip the business from commercial use to a different purpose.
People he knows have gone through this rezoning situation — they signed leases and began operating, but because they did not have the current zoning permit, they couldn’t receive a proper business license. “So the city comes to you and says, ‘Well, what you're doing is illegal.’ Is it? I mean, technically, I guess it is. You don't have a business license because you can't get a business license because the restrictions on your use of this space are so onerous.”
The City of Vancouver’s cultural services are doing what they can, from Constantine’s perspective. But the reality is that there is still so much unmet need in the city when it comes to renovation and development projects. “Even when there's a lot of interest and there's a lot of momentum to put something together, those timelines that the city puts in place — from applying for a development permit to getting it approved — can sometimes kill a project,” Constantine said. It took a long time to get Little Mountain Gallery’s new space off the ground because of all the back-and-forth between the city, the architect and himself, since it took weeks — and additional expenses — to make minor changes to floor plans and then get them approved. A space just down the street from Little Mountain Gallery is going through the same thing now, Constantine said; people have been trying to turn it into a dance studio, but they’ve been sitting on the space for about four years, paying to keep it open as the city reviews their plans.
Constantine interacts with a lot of other organizations about their space-related issues through his role with the Arts and Culture Advisory Committee, which he’s been doing for the past two years. He was part of the team that put together the recent motion with Councillor Pete Fry, and worked with former Councillor Christine Boyle on an earlier arts and culture motion that went to Council last year.
The 2024 motion passed unanimously. It called on the City of Vancouver to make progress on the action items outlined in Making Space for Arts and Culture: Vancouver Cultural Infrastructure Plan, which was approved in 2019 and outlines the city’s long-term vision to address space-related challenges faced by artists. Making Space was later incorporated into Culture|Shift, the city’s 2020–2029 strategic direction for arts and culture-related issues, which the 2025 motion drew on for its recommendations.
In writing the 2025 motion, Constantine said that they were aiming for it to be fairly open-ended. They weren’t necessarily saying that certain things had to happen or had to be done in a specific way; the phrasing leaned more toward drawing attention to obstacles arts organizations are facing, and asking for further research to be pursued to determine the feasibility of these initiatives. It was also oriented toward action led by the city — there was only one point about liaising with the province — while the amendment written by Kirby-Yung focuses on redirecting issues to other levels of government.
Constantine was disappointed to see ideas within the scope of the city’s responsibilities not make the cut, like the creation of an Arts, Culture & Creative City Navigator to reduce artists’ barriers to accessing city services. He pointed out that the city already has solid plans, like Culture|Shift, that they’ve agreed upon, but he has yet to see any real progress on those goals. “I think a lot of cities have these plans, and they sit, sometimes, without any action behind them, or a lot of time, they don't have any specific metrics for measurement,” he said. “We have a motion from last year that the whole council supported. Nothing has come out of that.”
There are still aspects of the amended motion that could be productive changes for the arts and culture industry, as long as these initiatives are seriously pursued. “Here's what Councillors can do,” Constantine said. “You have a motion from last year, and you have this motion now. So push [for] these aspects that you voted for, [that] Council voted for.”
“All we can hope for is that by showing that level of support to Council … nothing will be cut in 2026. We tried to get some stuff added, but maybe that amount of support will just not have anything changed for the worse. I don't think that's going to happen either, though.”
One part of this year’s motion that Constantine specifically highlighted was the Cultural Land Trust. He’s sat on some grant adjudication committees, and pointed out that they don’t typically invest in spaces that the artist will lose after a year or so — even a long-term lease might not be worth it if it takes hundreds of thousands of dollars just to get the space to a functional condition, only to get kicked out shortly after. In order for art spaces to be sustainable, there needs to be a path to ownership, and a land trust may be the best way to go about that.
The Cultural Land Trust (CLT), led by Vancouver-based non-profit 221A, was one of the initiatives on the motion that the ACAC suggested gathering more data on; there are hopes that one day, the city might consider investing $20 million in seed funding for the project.
Since 2018, 221A has been acting as a fiscal sponsor of the preliminary research stages of the CLT, which they eventually hope will be an independent entity, separate from 221A. Miriam Berndt, a cultural space planner at 221A, hears from some organizations who are facing eviction, and some who are ready to grow their organizations but can’t because the market is too competitive. The CLT was largely inspired by a 2019 report that came out of the Eastside Culture Crawl Society, which found that over the course of a decade, 400,000 square feet of studio space had been lost to redevelopment, while studio rental rates also increased by 65 per cent. Artists and cultural workers are being pushed out of the city, and the CLT would try to solve this by purchasing and managing land for artist use, giving them opportunities for long-term leases and paths to ownership — kind of like how a condo works. “And then, what's baked into the CLT is that if they were to sell their unit, it can only be sold to another non-profit entity,” Berndt said. “I think another reason why [the CLT is] important is because its mandate keeps that land out of the speculative market. It forever will stay non-profit, and the key is to make a governance system where the leaders are accountable to the communities who use those spaces.”
The concept of a land trust isn’t new. “It kind of emerged as a model of ownership or land stewardship during the mid-century when disenfranchised Black Americans came together to create a village and to gain a security of tenureship,” Berndt said. An arts-specific land trust is also something that’s already proven to be successful in cities like London, Seattle and San Francisco, among others. In a land trust, she explained, the non-profit itself becomes the owner of the land, giving its membership a say in how it is managed. “[It] becomes a place that's stewarded and developed through the interests of its membership,” Berndt said. “It decentralizes power.”
Berndt likes that the land trust is not a rigid formula — there are lots of different applications and potential business or governance models. Her research for 221A primarily investigates how, at different points of purchase, the land trust can honour the sovereignty of the Indigenous nations whose lands it's on. One of 221A’s priorities with this project is to meaningfully engage with marginalized communities and create a model that serves them. “The voices that are sometimes not heard can be heard through this model, and then it directly becomes actualized in the way the land is stewarded directly, instead of having to go through levels of bureaucracy and lobbying,” Berndt said.
Larger affordability and cost of living concerns don’t just negatively impact studio spaces — they’re pushing artists out of the city altogether.
When asked about their thoughts on the future of arts and culture in Vancouver, every single artist I spoke to brought up being concerned about a ‘brain drain.’ This refers to how the cost of living is pushing more and more artists out of Vancouver. If artists can't afford to live in this city, they aren't going to be able to participate in festivals or play in local shows, and someday, any semblance of cultural identity that Vancouver has will vanish.
When Carrico and others from Red Gate got evicted from their first building, they went down to CRAB Park to burn a bunch of paintings (why they were doing this in the first place is a long story, she told me, related to the intricacies of the world of fine art). Looking back at a photo from that day, Carrico realized that out of the nine people in it, only three of them still live in Vancouver. The rest of them made their way to Toronto, Berlin, Montréal, New York — any place that prioritizes arts and culture more than Vancouver seems to.
“Vancouver [gets] this terrible reputation as a ‘No-Fun City.’ It's not something I agree with, but we run this risk of not having artists who want to create art, and at the same time, arts organizations who can't afford to create art or can't operate in the space that they're operating in,” Watts-Grant said. This is a phrase that came up a lot during the speeches in that July Council meeting: ‘No-Fun City.’ Carrico sees this as a self-fulfilling prophecy — people refuse to believe in the city because it’s perceived as being boring, so they leave the city and then it truly does become lifeless. “We're just not going to have a cultural ecosystem here if that happens,” she said. “I refuse to let my hometown become a post-cultural wasteland, but it really is bashing your head against a brick wall in a lot of ways.”
This growing sentiment that Vancouver doesn’t have a voice to contribute to the artistic world means creatives don’t always take it seriously as a place to grow their craft. “The Vancouver artistic community [is] sort of self-loathing,” Carrico said. “You haven't really made it until you make it somewhere else. It doesn't matter how big you are in Vancouver, because it's just Vancouver.” Artists don’t even really need to travel internationally, Watts-Grant said; many are moving to places within Canada, like Alberta and Manitoba, where the cost of living is lower and the arts scene is better supported by the government. This isn’t a good sign for the Vancouver Fringe, which relies on young, new artists who are just starting to find their way in the arts and can barely support themselves.
“The loss of venues [and] organizations bleed[s] immediately into artist experience, because if they don't have a place to work, you feel the immediate effects of artists not being able to afford to stay in the city,” said Watts-Grant. “If artists aren't able to continue to produce work here, are they losing the opportunity to train and get better? Do we lose cultural relevancy as a country?”
While Vancouver may have large arenas and stadiums, these venues are inaccessible for most artists. Carrico sees this as having a particularly bad impact on youth engagement in the arts, since a musician playing a big concert at Rogers Arena doesn’t have the same relatability factor as a musician just a couple years older than them playing at a small venue. “Nothing works like that,” Carrico said. “No natural cultural growth works like that. You can't just package everything and hand it to them from this unattainable place.”
But at the end of the day, Constantine believes there will always be someone who will dedicate their life to turning a dank hole into a theatre. Art will find a way, but it’s a shame to think about how many less voices might be heard, or how much richness of the viewing or listening experience is lost, when you don’t have the proper environment for creativity to flourish to its full potential.
“We need more activity. We need more things for people to do. We need more places for people to experiment. There's no compromising on that. In my opinion, it's absolutely essential,” Carrico explained. “You can see that in any culture in the world, they have music, they have art. This is obviously something that we desperately need as human beings … It just shouldn't be an afterthought, and it feels very much like it is right now.”
First online
Share this article
Submit a complaint Report a correction
