Tariff threats pose risks and rewards for arts organizations

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This article was published 07/03/2025 (501 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Most people are familiar with the phrase “bread and circuses,” which Roman satirist Juvenal used to mock commoners’ taste for creature comforts and entertainment over civic duty.

But as tensions with our southern neighbours continue to rise, for many Manitobans, patronizing one’s local bakery and proverbial circus has become a matter of patriotic obligation.

It’s yet to be seen if this Buy Canadian sentiment will last and if it will help boost a local performing arts sector still recovering from the pandemic and now facing the complex consequences of a possible tariff war.

“I find the bombast (from U.S. President Donald Trump) just horrific. I have to go read a book or watch a concert because that lifts your spirit,” says Sarah Yates-Howorth.

The 79-year-old author says she regularly attends the Manitoba Chamber Orchestra, Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre and Winnipeg Art Gallery with her husband and daughter and doesn’t intend to stop.

“I feel more than ever we must because we have to keep positive. We have to go to the arts. We must continue to be a patron to the best of our ability,” she says.

Some of the threats posed to the local performing arts sector by the tariff war are obvious.

Tariffs bring inflation and inflation eats into people’s discretionary incomes — the money they might spend on things such as entertainment and dining out.

After Canadians finally reined in the historically high inflation of 2021-23, such rumbles of a new wave of inflation — which could be particularly destructive to the buying power of retirees on fixed incomes who frequent the performing arts — feel like déjà vu.

However, leaders from the local arts sector highlight reasons to be optimistic.

“Theatre is live, so in that way, it’s hyper-local. It’s hyper-‘here, now,’ with people looking you in the eye and going, ‘We are here now in this place, on this land, together, telling a story,” says Shakespeare in the Ruins’ artistic director Rodrigo Beilfuss.

While local actors, musicians and other performers may be the sector’s key production “inputs,” there are materials and equipment that the city’s performing arts groups use that are often sourced from the U.S.

Canada’s proposed retaliatory tariffs against the States in the cultural sector, which could come into effect in a few weeks depending on Trump’s changing whims, apply to imported goods such as musical-instrument cases, theatrical spotlights, sheet music and pointe shoes.

Sean McManus, Manitoba Chamber Orchestra’s executive director, says he will join efforts to lobby the Canadian government to strike sheet music from this list, since copyright in many cases is controlled by American companies.

But, on the whole, it’s business as usual.

“I don’t think that the tariff threat is changing our planning in terms of the concerts that we’re producing in the next little while or planning for next season,” he says.

“And thankfully, it’s not something that directly affects services or creative talent crossing the border.”

McManus also highlights that of the four shows in the MCO’s Spring Series — which begins March 13 with a concert at Crescent Arts Centre that casts a special spotlight on Winnipeg saxophonist Allen Harrington, widely considered one of the country’s best — all feature Canadian guest artists.

“There’s an international element to some of the programming that we do, but the Canadian element is actually really strong. And maybe that’s an aspect that we should be, in this moment, talking about,” he says.

The Brazilian-born Beilfuss believes that regardless of whether the tariffs come into effect, Trump’s anti-Canadian rhetoric is already inspiring a fiercer regionalism in the country’s culture.

“It’s a lapse of trust. It’s about more than inflation or fear of economic meltdown. What it’s really making us feel in Canada is heartbreak, and that has made us reassess our priorities,” he says.

“I think the arts will be, I really hope, one of the things where we go, ‘No, we have to value that.’”

This wouldn’t be the first time a strong sense of regionalism gripped Canadian culture at the expense of American influences. George Grant’s 1965 Lament for a Nation: The Defeat of Canadian Nationalism bemoaned the fatal damage to Canadian sovereignty and culture by our domineering southern neighbours.

Prime minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau’s first term from 1968 to ‘79 also saw scores of new arts and cultural organizations pop up across the country, thanks in no small part to an influx of government funding. (Between 1972 and 1974, Prairie Theatre Exchange, the Plug In Institute of Contemporary Art, the Winnipeg Folk Festival, the Winnipeg Film Group and the Manitoba Chamber Orchestra were established, although not necessarily all through government funding.)

But while many of Grant’s followers promoted a more or less conservative nationalist agenda, sometimes tied to nostalgia for the British Empire, today’s milieu feels different.

For one thing, “diversity, equity and inclusion” discourse — with its heavy emphasis in Canada on the values of reconciliation and decolonization — remains a strong force within a sector that, broadly speaking, often resists too much flag-waving.

“When we think about the efforts of Canadian nation-building that went into establishing the CBC and Canada Council for the Arts, if we were to do that work again now, we wouldn’t be seeing things the way it was then then,” says McManus.

“At the same time, it could be pretty interesting if this newfound patriotism actually contributed to the conversation on reconciliation.

“Our journey in Canada is different than in America. You know, Canadians who may not be naturally patriotic, have said, ‘Yeah, we’re actually proud of the work that we’re doing. There’s a lot of work still to be done, it’s not perfect, but we’re proud of it.’”

conrad.sweatman@freepress.mb.ca