Viewpoint: Magnetic North festival closes due to debt amid 150 celebrations

By Nate Dove

It’s been a busy year for Ottawa in 2017. It was, of course, the 150th anniversary of the country and the capital did particularly well, hosting the official celebration on July 1 as well as various other attractions over the course of the year, such as La Machine.

There was a lot of money going around, and the federal government spent half a billion dollars to ensure that Canada 150 was a success. Yet despite all of the funding and all of the tourism and attention that Ottawa received, one arts festival has failed. The Magnetic North Theatre Festival, after 15 years, appeared to have shut down for good in March, citing insurmountable financial difficulties.

Then, almost as soon as the festival’s figurative doors were closed, there was talk of bringing it back to life. As recently as Oct. 30 the festival released a statement announcing new board members and how they have seen the potential for the addressing the deficit and restarting operations.

The planned resurrection of the festival is a bad idea. Besides the considerable debt of $224,000 that Magnetic North amassed before last spring’s cancellation of the June 2017 schedule of events (down from more than $460,000 in 2010 and 2011), it’s particularly worrisome that the festival collapsed in this city in this year, of all years.

It seems that despite the vast amount of government funding that was available to the Canadian arts scene leading up to 2017, the Magnetic North festival essentially went out of business.

Magnetic North has been dedicated to showcasing Canadian theatre across the country. To that end, it alternated between hosting performances in Ottawa and in another Canadian city from year to year. Moving cities every year couldn’t have made building a dedicated audience, and thus a sufficient revenue stream, any easier.

The arts are incredibly important, and fostering cultural creativity is vital to our understanding of ourselves and our country. But not every festival is a good idea. Even the fringiest of arts festivals needs to be able to foster an audience and generate a sustainable income, if only to demonstrate to those who would subsidize or sponsor it that it is worth preserving.

So here you have an arts festival that was born in Ottawa and which was slated to take place in Ottawa in a year when there was an incredible amount of money being spent on the arts.

Yet this festival couldn’t survive. The prescribed action would seem obvious — let it fail.

Instead of having a festival with a heavy debt vacate its home theatre and travel to a new city every other year, perhaps a better way to foster Canadian theatre would have been granting subsidies to regional theatre organizations, or funding more scholarships for the arts or tapping provincial and territorial funds to sponsor cross-country tours for theatre groups.

The arts are important, but so is clear thinking about how we foster them. We don’t need to be ruthlessly Darwinian in determining which arts festivals should live or die. After all, the talents and ideas necessary for artistic expression require special training and development and the free market isn’t great at long-term cultural planning.

But free-market thinking and its knack for identifying the most worthy survivors should influence how we foster the arts. It’s not that artists should be exposed to undue hardship, it’s that festivals — which ultimately must reckon with the laws of economics and competition, too — should not be insulated from the sometimes harsh realities of the cultural marketplace.

The Magnetic North Arts Festival showcased some of the best of Canadian theatre around the country for 15 years. Now it is time to look at news ways to carry out that mission, to learn from what Magnetic North hasn’t done well and to look for fresh solutions.