Guess which province got $1 million for a balloon festival?

Of course, it was Quebec.

This rather distressing fact was revealed near the end of Charles Campbell’s interesting piece on the Tyee site about the reaction of James Moore, the federal Minister of Canadian Heritage and Official Languages, to the BC Government’s recent bizarre attack on arts funding. You know you’re in strange, lonely territory when the Reform – I mean – Conservative Party indicates that your policy may be a little extreme.

I was pleased to see Moore make the economic case for the arts so clearly but Campbell really left the best stuff for last. Moore was in town to announce that the Vancouver International Film Festival (VIFF) was receiving over $460,000 from something called the Marquee Tourism Events Program (who names these things?). This, apparently, was the program that dropped all that cash on the PNE last month. It would seem that VIFF learned of the grant just a few weeks before the Festival was due to start and it has to be spent, um, NOW. That's okay but the money is apparently designed to help organizations attract tourists to their events– especially the, you know, foreign kind. How VIFF is supposed to spend half a mil in two weeks to attract international travellers is rather curious, to say the least.

Don’t you love living in a country run by such visionaries?

Campbell further reports that VIFF had used its $70,000 Gaming grant (which was of course taken away) for outreach to schools, multicultural groups and the underprivileged. So, yes, one level of government seems to have taken away a source of useful funding while another level of government trots along with a shed-load of money that is for a virtually useless activity.

Now, both the BC Liberals and the Federal Tories love to preach the discipline of the marketplace and the cult of business-efficiencies, which is fine, I suppose. However, if Gordon Campbell or Stephen Harper had ever had to fight their way in the world of real business with these sorts of loopy beliefs, they would have risen no higher than sorting mail in the basement.

Oh, and if you’re curious, as I was, VIFF is the fourth BC event to receive money from the Marquee Tourism fund: the others are the Cloverdale Rodeo ($345,900), Vancouver International Jazz Festival ($712,500) and the good old, PNE ($1.38 million).

In addition to the International Balloon Festival in some place called St.-Jean-sur-Richelieu, we learn that for some reason the Toronto Film Festival received six times the grant VIFF received for a festival, if I understand correctly, that while much more famous, actually screens the same number of films to the same number of people.