State-Funded Politics of Resentment
How Canada’s Art Grant System Turns Artists Into Bitter Wards Of The State
The Canadian art grant system has achieved something truly spectacular—an ecosystem where “independent” artists are entirely dependent on government handouts while maintaining, with a straight face, the pretence of artistic freedom. Grants replace audiences, bureaucrats replace patrons, and failure is subsidized under the guise of cultural enrichment. And yet, these same artists claim to be revolutionaries. The irony would be amusing if it weren’t so expensive.
The Bureaucratic Patronage Racket: Where Art Dies and Grievance Thrives
Consider, if you will, the economic comedy at play. Every dollar in the grant system funnelled into the art world is first extracted from the taxpayers—those unwashed mechanics, electricians, and, heaven forbid, commercial artists who commit the unforgivable sin of creating something people actually want. The bureaucratic priesthood then performs its sacred ritual, laundering these funds into “cultural initiatives” while helpfully skimming off more and more of it for “administrative costs.” Truly, efficiency at its finest!
And what do we get in return for this grand act of wealth redistribution? Art books about “decolonization,” taxpayer-funded theatre pieces about trans interiority, and short films so insufferably “experimental” that the director should be legally required to sit through them as punishment. Not that it matters—success is measured not in ticket sales or audience engagement but in how many buzzwords and grievances one can cram into a grant application.
This is not a meritocracy; it is a cartel of self-importance, where survival depends not on talent, vision, or audience appeal, but on one’s ability to appease bureaucrats who wouldn’t recognize real artistic excellence if it kicked down their office door and painted itself across their walls.
The Learned Helplessness of the State-Funded Artist
The most remarkable product of this system is not the art itself but the peculiar breed of artists it has cultivated. Fresh out of university, these delicate creatures enter the art world with a single assumption: the government owes them a living. The very mention of entrepreneurship sends them into fits of pearl-clutching so severe one fears for their fragile constitutions.
Instead of asking, How can I make a living through my art? They ask, Where can I apply for funding? Instead of building an audience, they build a portfolio of grant proposals. When their art inevitably fails in the marketplace (as most of it does), they don’t see it as a sign that they should improve or adapt, but rather as proof that the market is unjust.
And the worst part? They are convinced of their own superiority. These professional grant-chasers sneer at artists and artisans who dare to find a market in the corporate world—those who create paintings for hotels, sculptures for bank lobbies, or decorative pieces for high-end restaurants. In their minds, only art that is financially unsustainable is “pure.” This is the mindset that independent comic book entrepreneur Eric July so perfectly skewered—the delusion that losing money is a sign of artistic integrity rather than economic incompetence.
When the grant money inevitably runs dry (as it always does), do they finally consider taking control of their own careers? Of course not. They pivot seamlessly from “radical artists” to full-time advocates for wealth redistribution. Funny how their scathing critiques of capitalism always end with, and that’s why you should give me more money.
State-Funded Filmmaking: The CBC-NFB Welfare Complex
The problem doesn’t stop at fringe art galleries and obscure performance collectives. In Canada, even the film and television industry—particularly documentary filmmaking—functions as a publicly funded welfare state, utterly incapable of standing on its own two feet.
The National Film Board of Canada (NFB), the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC), and provincial organizations like TVO operate less like media entities and more like socialist employment programs for filmmakers who can’t survive in a competitive market. These organizations continually pump out films and series nobody watches, documentaries nobody cares about, and propaganda that serves only to justify their own continued existence.
The CBC, in particular, is a 1.4 billion-dollar-a-year black hole where taxpayer money goes to die. For decades, it has hemorrhaged viewers while insisting that it remains a vital part of Canadian culture. If that were true, people would actually choose to watch it. Instead, they overwhelmingly prefer American or independent online content. But rather than compete fairly in the marketplace, the CBC (sustained by tax payer’s money) lumbers along like a bloated, senile emperor, convinced of its own importance despite all evidence to the contrary.
Meanwhile, the NFB continues to produce endless documentaries about climate change, colonialism, and whatever other fashionable social issues guarantee another round of funding. The quality is irrelevant. The audience is irrelevant. All that matters is that the messaging aligns with the bureaucrats who control the purse strings.
It is the perfect scam. Filmmakers don’t have to sell tickets, attract an audience, or even make a compelling product. They simply need to check the right ideological boxes, and the state will ensure their work sees the light of day—whether the public wants it or not.
A Propaganda Machine, Not a Funding Body
And here lies the most revealing truth of all: this isn’t just about incompetence or waste—it’s about ideological control. These funding bodies are not neutral. They are not interested in fostering diverse perspectives or funding truly independent voices. They are, at their core, propaganda operations designed to reinforce the ideological narrative of the political ruling class.
Ask yourself: When was the last time the CBC, the NFB, or a provincial grant program funded an openly pro-life documentary? A film that made the case for fossil fuels? A documentary critical of gender ideology? A film about how illegal immigration burdens working-class Canadians? You’ll be hard-pressed to find one. Not because such projects don’t exist, but because they are anathema to the institutions that control arts funding.
Government arts grants are not an open competition for the best ideas—they are a filtering mechanism, ensuring that only approved narratives receive funding. If you want a grant, you know the game. Your project has a winning chance if it includes the right buzzwords—decolonization, climate justice, systemic oppression. If your ideas challenge progressive orthodoxy, don’t bother applying.
This is why, despite the billions poured into Canadian media and the arts, there is no real ideological diversity. The entire funding structure exists to amplify the views of the political class while ensuring that dissenting perspectives get ignored. It is a closed-loop system, where state-sponsored artists regurgitate state-approved talking points, which are then funded by the very state that benefits from their repetition.
Marxist Patronage: The Myth of “Ethical” Public Funding
This is where the ideological rot is most exposed. The belief that taxpayer-funded projects have higher moral value than those backed by private investors or corporations is a widespread delusion in Canada’s art world. The assumption is that if the money comes from tax dollars—extracted from citizens whether they like it or not—it is somehow untainted. But if an artist secures funding from a wealthy patron, a corporation, or—heaven forbid—an audience paying willingly, the work is seen as compromised.
This is an absurd moral pretzel. After all, private investors and corporate sponsors choose where to put their money. They fund projects they believe in, that align with their values, or that they think will resonate with an audience. Taxpayers, on the other hand, have no such choice. Their money is seized through taxation and funnelled into these artistic welfare programs regardless of their personal preferences.
So, if there is an ethical question to be raised, it should be this: What right do these artists have to claim moral superiority while forcing the entire population to subsidize their work, even if the people funding it find it repugnant or irrelevant?
The answer, of course, is that they don’t see this as a contradiction at all. In their view, the public good—as defined by government bureaucrats and arts councils—outweighs the preferences of mere individuals. The same people who screech about corporate influence in art have no problem whatsoever with state influence, because they assume the state will always side with them—and that in it of itself puts it at a higher moral ground.
It is an extraordinary mix of hypocrisy and entitlement. If your art is truly important, why can’t you find voluntary backers? Why do you need the state to coerce people into funding you?
The answer is obvious: they don’t want the responsibility of making something people actually want to pay for. They would rather force the hand of the entire population than accept that their work might simply not be good enough.
Bailout Culture: How Even Successful Artists Run to the State at the First Sign of Trouble
It would be one thing if this reliance on government handouts was limited to struggling artists and filmmakers. But even commercially successful artists—those with the financial means to secure private or corporate funding—still insist on dipping into the public trough.
Whenever the economy tightens, rather than adapting their business models, refining their strategies, or diversifying their income streams, these artists turn to the state with open hands, demanding taxpayer-funded bailouts. They do not ask, How can I reach new audiences? Or How can I make my work more valuable? Instead, they lament the cruelty of the market and lobby for government intervention to “stabilize” the arts—by which they mean subsidize their own continued existence at everyone else’s expense.
Take, for example, the reaction of many commercial artists and designers during economic downturns. When ad agencies cut budgets, when corporate clients reduce spending on murals, branding, or animated shows, do these artists adjust their approach? Do they pivot to new markets, create digital products, or seek direct support from their audiences? No, their first instinct is to demand grants.
Some of the very same illustrators, designers and animators who earn comfortable six-figure incomes during good times will, at the first sign of economic instability, rush to the Canada Council for the Arts or provincial grant programs to plead their case for taxpayer relief.
There is no moral dilemma about taking tax dollars from struggling small business owners, from the very workers they would never dream of painting or illustrating for. The illusion of state funding as virtuous remains intact, even when that funding is extracted from people who had no choice in supporting them.
We’re All State Employees Whether We Want to Be or Not
Even for those who strive to remain independent, it is nearly impossible to work in Canada’s film and arts industries without touching government money in some way.
In this heavily subsidized system, nearly every creative project—be it a film, documentary, theatre production, or even commercial animation—receives a segment of its funding from taxpayers. This alone leads us to the conclusion that, whether we acknowledge it or not, we are all, in some capacity, state employees.
This reality distorts the very foundation of the industry. Instead of functioning as a marketplace where audience demand shapes the direction of artistic production, the Canadian arts sector operates as an extension of the government’s priorities. No matter how much private money is involved in a given project, the moment state funding enters the equation, it brings with it a set of expectations, limitations, and ideological strings. This creates a perverse situation where even projects that could have been self-sustaining end up conforming to the grant system’s criteria, warping creative decisions to fit the priorities of bureaucrats rather than audiences. The result? An arts industry that is not truly independent, but one that masquerades as such while surviving on coerced taxpayer support.
The Envy Economy: How Grant Funding Breeds Resentment
A fundamental sickness of the grant-dependent art world: success itself is viewed with suspicion. Any artist who rises above the rest—through skill, effort, or negotiation—is not admired but resented. In a system where funding is finite and arbitrarily distributed by bureaucrats rather than earned through market demand, every grant handed out creates as many enemies as beneficiaries. When money is doled out like rations in a Soviet breadline, the natural response is bitterness—toward those who receive funding and toward those who dare to succeed without it. This is the perverse logic of the zero-sum grant economy: if one artist secures a grant, it means another did not, and that alone is enough to breed hostility. Success is not something to aspire to but something to be resented, because in a world where money does not flow freely through competition and consumer choice, but is instead rationed by a centralized body, every victory is someone else’s loss. The result is a culture where artists see each other not as peers or inspirations but as rivals for government crumbs, perpetuating a cycle of grievance, entitlement, and self-righteous failure.
The Sneering Contempt for Their Own Audience
Perhaps the most telling symptom of this entire delusional ecosystem is the grant-chasing artist’s contempt for their own potential customers. The free market terrifies them not just because it demands competence, but because it demands humility. It requires them to acknowledge that art is ultimately about serving an audience—and they find this idea appalling.
Instead, they construct elaborate moral frameworks in which the very people who could financially support them are cast as villains. And so, in their world, “rich” is not an economic descriptor but a moral category. To be wealthy is to be greedy, exploitative, and unworthy of serious engagement.
Even those within the industry are not immune to this knee-jerk class resentment. Case in point: A close acquaintance of mine was dismissed in a single breath as a “rich conservative” (neither one of those things being inherently bad) by a group of these grant-chasing artists, without a single thought given to how she actually built her career. That she had done so in independent film and animation—precisely one of the fields they claim to care about—didn’t matter. The mere fact that she was successful was enough to mark her as suspect.
This is the great irony of the modern Canadian arts scene: the people who claim to fight for artistic freedom are the first to sneer at those who achieve it on their own terms. They don’t want a world where artists thrive independently. They want a world where their struggles are romanticized and their failures subsidized.
The Occasional Diamond in the Bureaucratic Rough
To be fair, not everything funded through government arts grants is worthless. There are a handful of publicly funded projects that have real artistic or cultural merit—some even great. Occasionally, a genuinely talented filmmaker, writer, or painter manages to create something remarkable despite the system rather than because of it. But these successes are the exception, not the rule.
And this is the great tragedy: if the system were more market-driven, we would almost certainly have a better arts scene, not a worse one. A system that forces artists to think about audience engagement, artistic value, and long-term sustainability would naturally weed out mediocrity and reward those who create work that genuinely resonates. Instead, Canada’s arts sector is weighed down by a culture of subsidy, where creating art is treated not as a calling or a craft, but as a career in applying for money.
If Canada is wealthy enough to afford an arts grant system, then it should at least come with some serious constraints—designed not to eliminate all public funding, but to prevent it from fostering careers based entirely on government dependency. Grants should be limited in scope, structured to encourage artistic independence rather than bureaucratic loyalty, and explicitly designed to push artists toward financial self-sufficiency.
Instead of a perpetual welfare state for the arts, public funding should be treated as a launchpad: something that supports early-stage projects but does not enable lifetimes of unaccountable, taxpayer-funded creative stagnation.
A grant system with clear limits would curb the perverse incentives that turn artists into full-time bureaucratic petitioners, competing not for audiences but for government approval. It would encourage artistic risk-taking rather than ideological conformity. And most importantly, it would force artists to recognize that if their work truly matters, it should be able to stand on its own, without the artificial life support of state intervention.
The Solution: Burn the Grant Applications, Build a Business
There is a way out of this mess, but it requires something radical: an abandonment of the grant system and a complete embrace of the market.
Artists must stop treating financial struggle as a badge of honor. They must abandon the idea that government funding is a birthright. They must learn to sell their work, cultivate an audience, and treat their craft like a business.
The digital age offers opportunities that previous generations of artists could only dream of. No longer do artists need to beg bureaucrats for validation. They can build their own platforms, connect directly with their audiences, and create sustainable careers without ever setting foot in a government office.
But first, they must perform the most difficult artistic feat of all: standing up without government assistance.
The alternative? Well, you can always keep playing the grant game—filling out applications, parroting the right political narratives, and sneering at those who found success without grovelling for public funds. Just don’t pretend it’s anything more than a performance piece in state-funded hypocrisy.