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I never asked for travel grant, says Gwynne Dyer

There’s a new twist on the saga of the Conservatives axing the Department of Foreign Affairs’ arts travel grants. The leaked document advocating the cuts singled out, among others, author Gwynne Dyer, who got $3,000 to give a series of lectures at a conference in Cuba. Dyer is a “left-leaning columnist and author who has plenty of money to travel on his own,” wrote the anonymous Tory insider.

The Globe and Mail would seem to agree: in an editorial that was generally critical of the cuts, the paper conceded that the Tories had some valid concerns, saying Dyer’s grant “never should have been approved, and the criteria should be tightened to prevent such abuses.”

That prompted a letter to the editor from the author, who understandably objects to being viewed as a “freeloader”:

But, in fact, I was asked to go to Cuba in early 2007 by the Department of Foreign Affairs. Some embassies in Havana were bringing in experts to talk to groups of influential Cubans about how things work in free societies. Fidel Castro was on the way out, and the embassies were being creatively subversive. I talked about the media to young journalists, and about civil-military ties in a democracy to senior military people.

I didn’t get paid for the work, but the Canadian embassy gave me $3,000 in cash to cover my travel costs. I never applied for a grant, and I never heard of PromArt until last week, but obviously some wily accountant at Foreign Affairs took the money for the Cuban project out of the wrong pocket. Stephen Harper’s ministers just can’t keep control of their departments.

The Globe, to its credit, did a follow-up news piece on the twist, and also delved a bit more into the political strategy at work:

Conservatives say the Prime Minister’s Office, not the Foreign Affairs Department, leaked the axing of PromArt, in an effort to seize the initiative before the news got out. The Conservatives focus much of their election message on the less affluent middle-class, and like to portray themselves as favouring NASCAR and curling over cocktails and galleries.

This time, the party highlighted a handful of projects that might raise public ire for funding lefty, artsy or controversial projects, and steered clear of the far larger sums that go to bringing foreign buyers to Canadian film festivals, for example, or Quebec-based dance troupes or theatre production companies. And they focused their message mostly on news outlets in the West.

A cabinet committee had already secretly decided to cut the programs under a process called strategic review, aimed at finding money to create other programs.