We're having a provincial election.

Not one that anyone asked for, except Premier Eby.

After the premier asked the Lieutenant Governor to dissolve the 43rd parliament and call an election, he spoke with reporters. In that speech, he invoked BC history and referenced Sir James Douglas, Governor of the Colonies of Vancouver Island and British Columbia. Eby tried to paint a picture of a man who held back the hordes of invading American miners during the 1858 gold rush. It seemed that Eby hoped we would all see him as Douglas, our bulwark against Trump and his dreams of manifest destiny.

A premier invoking BC history when his own policies are actively hostile to the telling of that history? I had to laugh or else I would cry.

Organizing Arts & Culture

It's hard for your rival political parties to organize a campaign with a moment's notice and that's precisely why this election was called. It's also difficult for advocacy organizations, too.

The BC Coalition of Arts, Culture, and Heritage formed in 2023 to try and get our issues on the radar of the political parties in time for the 2024 election. Getting a coalition like this together is no small task, and it was a vital first step. But in the 2024 election, only the BC Greens promised to increase funding to the BC Arts Council to $55 million annually, the main ask from the coalition.

In 2017, the BC NDP promised to double the BC Arts Council budget to $48 million annually. They never kept that promise, and the BC Greens did not form government.

So where are arts and culture issues in the 2026 election?

Nowhere.

Ryan Hunt, Director of the Museum of Vancouver, recently assessed the situation in a post on LinkedIn:

In the published platforms of the three largest political parties in our province (the BC NDP, Conservatives, and Green Party), the word “heritage” appears 0 times, and the words “arts” and “culture” appear only once. By contrast, the BC NDP has devoted a section of their platform to keeping US alcohol off shelves in BC, noting that this policy costs the US economy $525 million- a fraction of the economic impact the arts bring to our province. The BC Conservatives have a policy on supporting wineries, breweries and distilleries and the 20,000 local jobs this industry creates. More than 7.5 times as many British Columbians make their living through arts, culture, and heritage as those who work in wineries, breweries, and distilleries, yet the impact and influence of this critical industry is ignored.

The evidence of return on investment for arts and culture funding is overwhelming. It's simply good economic policy to invest in arts and culture — especially at time when another country thinks your culture is insignificant enough to be taken over and subsumed into theirs.

The data, however convincing, has done little to move the needle. This short election campaign has made it clear that no matter who forms government we are looking at the continued erosion of arts and culture in BC. Under the BC NDP we've seen heritage sites and museums close, provincial heritage buildings crumble, university programs shuttered, and library funding remain stagnant.

Successive BC governments have viewed arts and culture as less important than seven soccer games, booze sales, or liquified natural gas projects.

This Boat is Going Nowhere

In 2022, I gave a presentation to the BC Historical Federation titled Access to Memory: Reflections on Government Support for Public History. In short, I talked about how museum and heritage organizations were mostly silent when critique of the government was warranted, waiting and hoping that silence would be met with policies that favoured the sector.

That never really happened. Over the last thirty years, the silence bred support for the status-quo. And when the cost of living and providing services keeps going up, the status quo is a killer.

With few exceptions (such as the Museum of Vancouver's Austerity Tours, or the aforementioned work by the BC Coalition of Arts, Culture and Heritage), I see the same thing happening again. The major advocacy organizations seem to have little to say in this election. From one organization I received an email reminding me to vote (for what?!), from others, silence.

With few willing to take a stand, things certainly look bleak. That could be said for any number of issues, not just arts and culture. However, it's difficult to see organizations dedicated to advocacy sit and watch the boat sink, presumably stricken with fear that the person sinking it might add another hole.

Do they not realize they're on the boat, too?