Arts are losers as du Maurier about to butt out

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 30/08/2003 (8361 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

THE smoke has yet to clear, but it appears the battle is over.

Imperial Tobacco has lost its war to be allowed to promote its wares through the sponsorship of sports and cultural events.

The company has scheduled a press conference for next Thursday when it is expected to pull the plug on its du Maurier Arts Council program, which hands out $2 million a year to Canadian arts groups.

The winner, of course, is the federal government, which passed a law a few years ago phasing out any sort of tobacco company advertising, even the relatively benign form of a cigarette brand’s name and colours adorning a racing competition or jazz festival poster.

The biggest losers are the recipients of the advertising largesse, groups like the Jazz Winnipeg Festival and the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra, the latter used to get more than $100,000 a year from du Maurier for its annual New Music Festival.

Du Maurier is still challenging the decision in the Quebec courts. But it does make you wonder. Despite a largely admirable federal health policy of discouraging tobacco use, have we decided to throw out the baby with the bath water?

Smoking is bad for you. Nobody seriously questions that. The cost to our health-care system of dealing with heart disease, emphysema and cancer, all smoking-related diseases, outweighs the tax dollars collected on the sale of cigarettes.

Mind you, from a utilitarian point of view, the issue isn’t a slam dunk. Some people have argued it makes economic sense to keep the population addicted to nicotine.

Who needs us baby boomers to live to 95? Who’ll pay for our old-age pensions for 30 years while we lie around and attend poorly funded jazz concerts and dance festivals?

If we kicked off earlier, victims of tobacco company propaganda, we’d save Generation X a pile of dough.

This is a disingenuous argument, to be sure. But so much about the tobacco sponsorship conundrum has been rife with hypocrisy.

The manufacturers continue to lie that tobacco promotion dollars do not encourage people to take up smoking. Really what it is about, they say, is giving back to the community or, at worst, trying to woo the competition brand’s customers.

Sure thing.

The government, meanwhile, tells arts groups they have to rely less on public dollars and more on corporation fund-raisers. Then they kneecap one of the few companies that supports the arts and offer nothing in compensation.

The arts groups aren’t up front, either. They pretend they’re not taking money from the devil. Art may be about truth and beauty, but when it comes to moolah, a cash-strapped executive director will kiss anyone’s mouth, no matter how yellow their teeth or stinky their breath.

One of the arts’ most telling gatherings each year has been du Maurier’s annual dog and pony show when company flacks came to town to seek publicity for their Manitoba contributions.

The total figure in recent years amounted to $90,000, divvied among a dozen groups. Nobody lives or dies from this grant. But du Maurier would rent a local bar for a lunch press conference, stock the tables with wine and canapés (though not cigarettes) and get every significant player in town to drop by to kiss their hem.

The cost of the lunch was probably as much as some of the grants. Ugh.

Yet without du Maurier’s sponsorship, this country’s cultural landscape would be poorer. Nobody can question that, either.

As well, smoking is legal. Why should advertising a legal product be banned? Many other products, indisputably bad for us, continue to be advertised.

Turn on Canadian Idol or any teen-oriented television show. The commercials are for salt- and fat-laden junk foods, soft drinks and sugar-laced candies.

At a time when obesity among youth has become a health issue in itself, maybe this stuff shouldn’t be advertised, either.

The war against tobacco might be over. But a new front could be opened up against pizza joints. If the WSO could afford to hire a composer, he or she could write a stirring battle hymn for the cause.

morley.walker@freepress.mb.ca