QUILLBLOG

Margaret Atwood’s Bloc Party

Rushing in where angels fear to tread (as is her wont), novelist Margaret Atwood has declared her allegiance … to Gilles Duceppe and the Bloc Québécois.

Atwood attended a luncheon in Toronto last Friday to hear the Bloc leader speak. Her rationale for appearing is that he is a staunch defender of the arts, and has slammed recent cuts to arts funding made under the aegis of Stephen Harper’s minority Conservative government. According to the CBC:

“I’m here because Mr. Duceppe understands the contribution that culture makes to our economy,” she told CBC News at Toronto’s Economic Club.

Asked whether she would vote for the Bloc if she lived in Quebec, Atwood gave a resounding: “Yes, absolutely. What is the alternative?”

While the Bloc runs candidates in all 75 ridings in Quebec, the sovereigntist party has never sought electoral support outside the province.

This is not the first time that Atwood has attacked the Harper government’s cuts to Canadian arts funding during the 2008 election campaign. In a Sept. 24 article for The Globe and Mail, she criticized the prime minister’s comment that ordinary people don’t care about the arts in Canada, saying that it is precisely these “ordinary” people who keep the engine of culture running:

I suggest that considering the huge amount of energy we spend on creative activity, to be creative is “ordinary.” It is an age-long and normal human characteristic: All children are born creative. It’s the lack of any appreciation of these activities that is not ordinary. Mr. Harper has demonstrated that he has no knowledge of, or respect for, the capacities and interests of “ordinary people.” He’s the “niche interest.” Not us.

While it is absolutely true that Harper’s contempt for the arts and artists is dismaying, this Quillbloger would like to suggest that perhaps the solution to this problem is not to cozy up to the leader of a party that has arts support as one plank in its platform, alongside that other, larger plank — you know, the one about breaking up the country?