Hamilton festivals reeling after provincial funding cut

Some of the Hamilton's biggest summer festivals say they have been blindsided after discovering they will not receive funding from the province this year through the Celebrate Ontario grant.

Funding for Supercrawl, the city's largest music and arts festival, is being cut from the $275,000 received last year to nothing this year, the festival's organizers said in a statement. That amounts to about 20 per cent of the festival's overall budget, director Tim Potocic told CBC News.

"To be chopped to zero seems extreme," he said. "It's unbelievable."

"As a not-for-profit organization staging a major free festival, Supercrawl has reasonable expectations that funding will not be removed after our program has launched, and that the funding process should be equitable, transparent, and informed by clear guidelines established at the outset," Potocic also said in a statement.

According to the organizers, there was no advance notice of any Celebrate Ontario cuts during the application process for funding, and no cuts were mentioned in April's provincial budget. Potocic said they only found out last Friday, when usually the grants would be announced in early April.

Supercrawl's organizers say there was also no consultation around these changes, nor advance notice they would be coming. That makes things even more frustrating, Potocic said.

"It's the wrong way to do business," he said. "It's a huge challenge."

Festival of Friends also sees funding cut

Other Hamilton festivals that are also impacted by the cuts include the Festival of Friends, Dundas International Buskerfest, and FrancoFEST Hamilton.

"Until last week, the Festival of Friends had received support from Celebrate Ontario for over a decade," said Festival of Friends' general manager Robert Rakoczy, in a statement.

"This regular funding stream gave our event the security to grow into a concert powerhouse, providing some of North America's largest musical acts for free. Last year, Festival of Friends brought over 150,000 attendees, with thousands coming from Western New York for our country music day alone. Our mandate over the last 44 years has always been to provide the best in music, while celebrating Hamilton. This will not change, but the cut to Celebrate Ontario will certainly make it more challenging going forward."

The province did not immediately respond to a request for comment Friday about the cuts to Hamilton festivals.

In an email about the issue sent earlier this week to CBC Ottawa, a spokesperson for the Ministry of Tourism, Culture and Sport said that the program got more than 400 submissions this year for a pot of $20 million, and approved a similar number of requests as previous years.

"We made sure to provide funding to those festivals and events that demonstrate a clear return on investment, respect for taxpayer dollars, and were focused on increasing tourism in the province of Ontario," wrote Brett Weltman.

Other provincial festivals are feeling the effect of cuts as well.

The Ottawa Jazz Festival lost out on $290,000 it had applied for from the province through the same program. It called the cut "catastrophic."

"Three weeks before the opening of our event, a loss of this kind, I can't even really begin to describe its impact," said Catherine O'Grady, the festival's executive producer.

The festival has received funding from the grant for the last 13 years and expected to receive money again this year, she said.

Minister says festivals can 'stand on their own'

In an interview on CBC Radio's Ottawa Morning Thursday, the provincial Minister of Tourism, Culture and Sport said the Celebrate Ontario grant was created to support new and developing festivals, not established, successful events.

"That's how the money was allocated: to ensure that the small, the medium-sized, the ones that we see have a future, [grow] to become like the jazz festival," said Vaughan—Woodbridge MPP Michael Tibollo.

He also hinted that other big festivals could see cuts in the future.

"I'm confident the jazz festival, as well as some of the other festivals, can stand on their own and be sustainable, and that's what we're moving toward ... if they are, then those funds can be allocated to other events and other festivals, and that's how we're going to grow tourism."

Potocic says he is hoping the province will revisit the approval, restore funding for festivals that applied in the 2019 grant cycle, and reveal the scoring evaluations assigned to the funded projects.

"If cuts must be made, those cuts should be announced well in advance and implemented in the next budget year, so that organizations and groups across the province can plan accordingly," he said.

[email protected]