.....when you are bent over feeding from the trough being maintained by taxpayers.
Arts cuts were more than Harper could chew
You'd think by the reaction to Prime Minister Stephen Harper's cutting back individual arts grants by some $45 million, that both the stability and possibly the existence of Canada were threatened.
Harper surely knew there'd be an uproar by the cultural class that gets these grants, but it's unlikely he anticipated the intensity and diversity of disapproval.
Someone on his staff should have warned him Margaret Atwood would be at the forefront of protests -- assuming he knows she's our most famous novelist, long overdue for a Nobel prize in literature. It's doubtful he's read any of her books.
Harper might have expected her to write an angry letter to the Globe and Mail, but it's unlikely he expected cutting funding for artists would be seen as his way of installing a dictatorship.
"Every budding dictatorship begins by muzzling the artists because they are a mouthy lot and they don't line up and salute very easily," Atwood wrote. "Individual voices must be silenced because there shall be only One Voice: Our Master's Voice. Maybe that's why Mr. Harper began by shutting down funding for our artists abroad."
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