State of the arts Manitoba’s cultural sector is struggling… and thriving By: Conrad Sweatman Posted: 5:38 PM CST Friday, Dec. 5, 2025

Manitoba runs against stereotype: a largely rural “have not” province that punches above its weight culturally.

A recent Hill Strategies Research report presented at the annual Manitobans for the Arts summit in October supports this image.

It found that Manitoba’s cultural sector produces $1,010 worth of cultural goods and services per person, one of the highest per-capita levels in Canada. Manitoba trails only British Columbia, Ontario and Quebec.

The data are a reminder the arts aren’t just decorative. They’re an important part of Manitoban economic infrastructure.

But amid the optimistic news came more sobering facts and reflections.

The report also shows the impact of Manitoba’s cultural industries on the province’s GDP has declined by 12 per cent between 2019 and 2023 — the second biggest drop among all Canadian provinces — and by 20 per cent between 2010 and 2023, adjusted for inflation.

The reasons for this steady decline are difficult to pinpoint.

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Canada’s cultural sector is suffering from a sort of long COVID.

Live audiences all but disappeared during the pandemic’s heights and have been slow to return for many organizations. The problem is particularly acute for groups with a strong focus on local and more traditional performing arts, such as live theatre, dance and classical music.

For instance, Orchestras Canada reported that attendance levels for Canadian orchestras in 2023-24 were down 25 per cent from 2018-19.

Winnipeg’s fine and performing arts institutions have seen a rash of deficits and the closure of mainstay local presenters in recent years, such as Sarasvàti Productions (2023) and Virtuosi Concerts (2025).

Many pop-friendly organizations are feeling the squeeze. In 2024, Winnipeg’s Good Will Social Club, a staple of the city’s indie music scene, closed. Owners blamed inflation and a reduced appetite for attending local shows (though a smaller venue, Public Domain, has since opened up next door and appears to be thriving).

Earlier this week, the West End Cultural Centre announced it needs to raise $50,000 by the end of the calendar year to stay up and running. The non-profit venue credited similar factors for its tight spot.

While it’s striking to see some of Manitoba’s local venues stagger or fall, it’s not the full picture.

Walk by the Park Theatre in South Osborne on any given night, and it’s often packed with audiences for concerts, movie nights and standup shows. Last month it hosted bigger Canadian acts, including Julian Taylor, Econoline Crush and Elliott Brood.

Meanwhile, the Winnipeg Folk Festival keeps breaking attendance records summer after summer.

“I think the word ‘community’ can be thrown around in kind of empty ways, but I feel like for folk fest, there really is a sense of folk fest community,” says Valerie Shantz, the organization’s executive director.

While she says the summer festival still has work to do to diversify its audiences, part of its success comes from its intergenerational appeal. Parents and grandparents bring younger kids, teenagers apprentice in their volunteer program and programming runs the gamut from local to international, gen Z to Boomer: Leith Ross, Fleet Foxes, Bruce Cockburn.

“We are a Canadian arts organization, so we never forget that,” Shantz says. “You’re always going to see a really healthy component of Canadian and Manitoba-based artists. Do we have an exact ratio? No, but it is absolutely something that we monitor.”

Popular international acts usually draw a bigger crowd, so it makes sense for programmers to feature them alongside the local and less mainstream. But Winnipeg is also a remote city, making it an awkward stop on an international tour.

For a “flyover” city, it also has a highfalutin art scene, with its “royal” ballet and theatre companies, high volume of art galleries and Mennonite, Anglican and Ukrainian classical choirs. These mostly non-profits, with more European and “high” cultural associations, have typically relied vitally on government patronage for their well-being.

And while many are struggling to drum up audiences, they’re also contending with diminished government spending (down nine per cent, adjusted for inflation, in Manitoba from 2008-09 to 2023-24). Where is the lost revenue supposed to be made up?

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Attendees at October’s arts summit, many of them representing non-profits, struggle with this question every day.

“(Manitoba’s) massive decrease in cultural production, I’m having trouble pinning that to some specific thing,” one attendee said in the summit’s question period. “I’m curious if you have other thoughts about what that represents?”

In response, Hill Strategies’ principal Kelly Hill, a leading analyst of Canada’s cultural sector, says such questions are hard to answer. His report is based on Statistics Canada data he says lacks the relevant granularity.

It was a question attendees continued to ponder in their break-out sessions.

Theories were floated about rising inflation, perceived as an especially strong obstacle, according to Hill’s report, within Prairie provinces’ cultural sectors. Others complained about diminished donations and reduced government spending.

“(This decrease) is not the whole story. It’s not that it’s not true — it’s just that it’s one stat and there’s more behind that number,” Hill told the audience. “But ‘why’ questions are just hard for me to answer. I think they’re bang-on, but I just usually can’t answer them.”

Manitoba arts administrators have every reason to dig into causes: their jobs depend on it.

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In the past six months or so, at least six prominent Manitoba cultural organizations have seen changeover among their executive directors. While the reasons differ case to case, burnout is common in the sector.

“I’m towards the end of my career and I think it’s a great time to attract brilliant young talent to this incredibly brilliant organization,” Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra executive director Angela Birdsell told the Free Press in August after announcing she would not be renewing her contract.

“But let me talk about the exhaustion in the (arts and cultural) field. The jobs are too damn hard.”

Few organizations analyze Canada’s arts and cultural sector with Hill Strategies Research’s level of rigour, making answers to the “why” questions anecdotal at best.

Dominic Lloyd, the Winnipeg Arts Council’s executive director, agrees that local arts organizations are still recovering from the pandemic nearly six years since it hit Canada.

“The pandemic really changed everybody’s habits, whether it was how they buy tickets or whether they choose to volunteer — organizations really have to deal with that,” he says, using pandemic-era lingo like “the new normal” to describe the uncertainties arts groups are still navigating.

“There have been organizations that have shut down or people leaving the sector. I mean, again, that comes back to that question of static funding or static revenues and increased costs. The wages in the art sector are lower than national averages,” he adds.

“The pandemic really changed everybody’s habits… organizations really have to deal with that.”

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The Hill Strategies’ report notes that Manitoba has proportionally more Indigenous artists than any other province.

While this diversity is cause for celebration, it runs into a disquieting fact: in 2021, median personal income for Indigenous artists was $24,600 and compared to $27,200 for non-Indigenous artists — and $41,600 for Indigenous cultural workers and $44,000 for non-Indigenous cultural workers.

The report found similar differences between male and female professionals in the sector.

Manitoba artists’ median earnings are already below the living wage and diversity, equity and inclusion policies are still far from closing wage and opportunity gaps.

Canada’s arts councils consistently tack on DEI requirements for both hiring and programming as a condition of grant funding, aiming to push institutions toward more diverse representation.

Yet while the Manitoba Arts Council’s budget has grown modestly — with a $1-million budgetary increase last year from the Province of Manitoba after two decades of static funding — Canada Council for the Arts’ funding is on the decline after it peaked during the pandemic.

For all Prime Minister Mark Carney’s focus on protectionism and “nation-building” initiatives, the cultural sector is sometimes perceived as an afterthought in his nationalist strategies.

In November, his federal government announced its Budget 2025. While it dispelled worst fears about austerity, it’s not seen exactly as a call-to-arms for Canadian culture.

“Prime Minister Mark Carney campaigned on an ‘elbows up’ approach to assert Canadian identity and resist American imperialism. For the museums and the broader cultural sector, this brought hope of meaningful investment,” says Ryan Hunt, CEO of the Museum of Vancouver. “The federal budget shows that this hope was misplaced.”

In a recent interview with the Free Press, Céline Peterson, daughter of legendary Canadian jazz pianist Oscar Peterson, also raised the alarm.

“With no disrespect to Prime Minister Carney, I think so often about prime minister (Jean) Chrétien and his love and appreciation and respect for the arts, politics aside,” she said. “We really need to have the government open up some more support, or it’s going to be catastrophic.”

“We really need to have the government open up some more support, or it’s going to be catastrophic.”

Budget 2025 opens the doors to cultural organizations to potentially access Canada’s $2.8-billion general infrastructure program.

There’s no shortage of character Canadian theatres and venues that need more than a facelift, but arts groups require steady operational budgets to pay staff, artists, technicians and the like. This is historically where the government arts councils have smoothed things over.

And for now, the Canada Council — the best funded of these lifelines — is having to cut back, sustaining incremental annual cuts that began in 2024-25.

Carney’s commitment to so-called “cultural sovereignty” may seem weak compared to prime minister Justin Trudeau, whose first budget in 2016 contained $1.9 billion over five years specifically to arts and culture.

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Other arts administrators in Manitoba worry about the artistic dilemmas that dwindling government funding, corporate support and ticket revenue create.

“Winnipeg had, at one point, this richer sense of optimism about being something and the arts flourished,” says Spencer Duncanson, executive director for Winnipeg’s Little Opera Company. “Today you might have a hit on your hands. But, you know, you’re gambling — the money you have in your pot is getting smaller and smaller and smaller. And you’re wondering how much risk you can incur.”

Duncanson says performing arts groups must take risks on new works that expand Manitoba’s repertoire and aim to attract younger, more eclectic audiences.

Commissioning works that explore post-colonial and multicultural themes and feature diverse artists is also a way for arts organizations to put DEI into practice, he says.

Yet it takes time for audiences to embrace the “new.” And there’s always the risk of alienating traditional core patrons — subscribers and well-to-do donors — before new or old audiences are fully engaged.

Duncanson says the arts are healthiest when they get to do both: traditional and contemporary.

“I’m a person of colour and I take great pride in that, but … I still want to see my Aida. I still want to hear Puccini, you know,” he says. “(Whether) it’s contemporary or a war horse, today I want quality.”

In traditional performing arts like theatre and opera, old-school works from the European canon often have more of a “pop” aura than the new works.

Rodrigo Beilfuss, executive director of Shakespeare in the Ruins, knows this well.

He’s proud of his organization’s efforts to present diverse talent and new works beyond the organization’s core commitment to its namesake Bard.

But he says arts funders sometimes come with an agenda that’s misaligned with an organization’s interests — putting pressure on them to make choices that alienate audiences.

“Funders operate from fear… It’s fear that somebody’s gonna yell at you, fear that you’re gonna go and be accused of elevating this and not that. It’s just fear. And that’s not conducive to creative work,” he says.

“Audiences smell it.”

Beilfuss says the company, which this summer battled wildfires and thunderstorms at its outdoor location in the Trappist Ruins, has entered a golden era by sticking to its guns and putting audiences first — which means programming choices that honour the canon while striving for freshness and carefully planned new works.

“The audiences at SiR have only grown, and we cannot meet demand since returning from the pandemic,” he says.

“You can be rude and you can be anarchic and you can be fun and subversive. But if there is no sense of respect for the audience or for the form… chances are nobody’s gonna listen to you. You know, it will just die a very lonely death.”

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