Province House, home of the Nova Scotia Legislature, on Granville Street in Halifax. The province cut more than $130-million in grants this week across a variety of departments.Maria Collins/The Globe and Mail
The elimination of Nova Scotia’s Publishers Assistance Program has left the book sector reeling in a province that often depends on its own independent houses to preserve its history and tell its stories.
The province slashed more than $130-million in grants this week, across departments from agriculture to municipal affairs, in what critics have called an austerity budget – including mental-health supports connected to its 2020 mass shooting.
Many of the budget cuts came from its culture and heritage department, resulting in the closing of some local museums, the shrinking of cultural programs for Mi’kmaq communities and African Nova Scotians, and funding trims to the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia and its Screen Writers Development Fund.
The publishing sector has been quick to decry the end of its flagship provincial program. In a plea to the Nova Scotia government after the budget’s release, the Association of Canadian Publishers and the Literary Press Group of Canada warned that the decision will leaves Nova Scotia as the only province with no support for the industry.
The cut is a significant blow to regional independent publishers at a moment when they and their peers across the country are trying to carry the torch of Canadian storytelling in the face of U.S. hegemony and protectionism.
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Jack Illingworth, the Association of Canadian Publishers’s executive director, warns that there could be consequences from the cuts far beyond the Maritimes.
“There is some national worry that this is precedent-setting,” Illingworth said. “That if provinces see divesting from cultural industry supports as a short-term – and in our mind, short-sighted – way of balancing the books, other provinces might imitate this.”
Though the $700,000 program would be considered a small investment by other industries, it’s been a lifeline for publishers such as Nimbus Publishing, Breton Books, Formac Publishing and Fernwood Publishing.
Jim Lorimer, Formac’s publisher, says he’ll have to cut back to eight or nine titles a year, from 15, in the absence of the provincial funding. Provincial subsidies have helped Formac publish historical works such as Robert Ashe’s Seven Days in Halifax, a history book focused on a crucial week in 1970. It’s also recently published Holly Brown Bear and shalan joudry’s The Art of Mi’kmaw Basketry.
That kind of regional publishing, Lorimer says, highlights “a world that needs to be identified and celebrated.”
His fears are shared across the industry. “In Nova Scotia, and the Maritimes in general, we’re all very proud of our stories,” said Terrilee Bulger, the co-owner and general manager of Nimbus in Halifax.
She says changes to provincial funding earlier in the tenure of Tim Houston’s Progressive Conservative government had already forced Nimbus to cut 15 to 20 books a year from its previous 60. Even after that, she could depend on about $200,000 in annual operating funding from the Publishers Assistance Fund; with that money gone, she’s worried about another major drop in output.
“It’s a huge loss to future generations of Nova Scotians who won’t hear their stories,” Bulger said.
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Less operating funding also means fewer chances for people to break into the publishing world: Rachel Reid, author of the wildly popular Heated Rivalry book series that inspired the show of the same name, once worked as a publicist at Nimbus.
Dean Jobb, a nine-time author and non-fiction professor with the University of King’s College acclaimed master of fine arts program, says the subsidy cuts will give his program’s graduates fewer chances to get their work on the printed page.
Some grads spend their whole careers with local publishers and contribute to the province’s storytelling; others get their career started locally, then have their future titles scooped up by multinationals. Jobb himself put out his first book 38 years ago with Nimbus; now, he’s published by Algonquin Books, a subsidiary of Hachette Book Group.
Both those career paths, he says, could be curtailed by the cuts. And that doesn’t even account for publishing houses’ staff, or for the freelance editors and designers who live in and contribute to the local economies of smaller Nova Scotia communities.
“I think it’s appalling, how petty the cut is – $700,000 wouldn’t buy you a house in many areas of Halifax,” Jobb said. “This isn’t a huge amount of money compared to the deficit the government is trying to address.”
Numerous arts-and-culture organizations are planning a rally next Wednesday at the Nova Scotia Legislature to protest the sweeping cultural cuts.
In an e-mail, Rob Maguire, the director of communications for the Department of Communities, Culture, Tourism and Heritage, said the Nova Scotia government “has had to make difficult decisions to manage spending and focus on key priorities such as health care, housing and growing the economy. As part of that work, grants have been reduced across our department and across government.”
In the absence of the Publishers Assistance Program, he said publishing houses could instead apply to the province’s Creative Industries Fund. That pool of funding, however, is also shrinking with the province’s grant cuts – to $1.1-million from $1.9-million.
“That fund is going to be way more competitive than it ever was,” said Bulger, Nimbus’s co-owner. “The likelihood of getting anything near what we ever got before is very low.”