Traditionally, flowers are a perfect gesture of appreciation or sympathy in good times and bad, but it seems as though more than three million tulips cannot save suffering finances.
The Canadian Tulip Festival is pleading with the city for $75,000 to let the event survive another spring in the capital. The festival group claims it is running a balanced budget and this emergency funding will help cover the cost of deposits.
With the festival scheduled to begin in less than a month, it’s probably a little late to be begging for dollars. This is probably what makes the needed funding such an emergency.
The group just paid off a one-time $300,000 emergency loan that the city made three years ago — so why should council be reopening its generous arms?
Festivals are economic generators for the city, but if these events are constantly putting their hands out for more funding, the economic benefit is looking grim.
The provincial government recently handed $50,000 over to the Franco-Ontarien Festival, which has been running for 30 years but has been struggling recently. If these annual events cannot successfully run each year, why should taxpayer dollars be saving them?
Last week, a city committee made some sense of the issue through its recommendation that festivals become self-sustaining.
It’s not to say that arts and culture are not an extremely valuable part of society — arts funding is an ongoing problem that should not be ignored. However, in these circumstances, funding is more suited to go towards festivals that are just beginning and attempting to carve out a niche. After all, they’re starting from scratch in hopes of achieving the success to warrant it as a yearly occasion.
If an annual event cannot seem to generate the funding to run for another year, then maybe the problem lies not with its finances, but more with its popularity.
The tulip festival has been running since 1953, featuring various events including arts and crafts, concerts and tons of tulips. More than 50 years is enough time for it to have grown, established a following and making it self-sustainable.
The festival group touts the event as the largest tulip festival in the world — but what exactly is it that makes the event so important and worthy of the price of admission?
And if the festival is so important to the region, why aren’t Ottawa residents and sponsors more willing to help, by buying tickets and donating money?
Festivals and establishments alike cannot always turn to various levels of government to bail them out of their own financial prisons. If the events are entertaining and well organized, the audience (and revenue) will come.
No matter how much money the city or province pours into a festival, it won’t necessarily make the attendance numbers skyrocket — it’ll just keep the event on life-support for another year. If the tulip festival is such a big and important attraction, it should be paying its own bills out of its success.
—Tara McCarthy