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PRELUDE

Canada’s National Arts Centre (NAC) opened its doors to the world on Monday, June 2, 1969. It was unique. Built both to produce and to present music, opera, dance, and theatre, it was also bilingual, designed to reflect Canada’s linguistic duality—the first, and still the only, arts centre in the world with such a complex mandate. A fortuitous crossing of the stars had brought it about. While rooted in the modest hopes of Ottawa’s local citizens to build a good concert hall in their city, the project had expanded, thanks to Canada’s 1967 Centennial, into a magnificent edifice. The building of the National Arts Centre had been the right project at the right time for Prime Minister Lester B. Pearson, who had wanted something special for Canada’s capital to mark the country’s 100th birthday celebration. In G. Hamilton Southam, the man who was now its first director general, the Arts Centre had the right executive, one with the vision, background, and connections to ensure its creation. But even as this glittering first night unfolded, a new constellation of stars was moving into place in Ottawa—men who would bring new ideas and objectives to the development of Canada’s arts and culture.

After a weekend of splendid weather, the opening night was rainy and windswept. The mood, however, was exuberant. Time, America’s most popular news magazine and the sponsor of the night’s live CBC English-network television broadcast, declared: “Not since Expo 67’s shimmering debut has an opening night stirred such an exhilarating sense of grand occasion.” A First Nights Committee had struggled for months to cut back the guest list of nearly three thousand names of Ottawa’s “notables” to fit the 2,100-seat capacity of the Opera hall. A third of the audience was to be government officials; another third, “artistic people”; and the rest, members of the general public. With the possible exception of the governor general, everybody was supposedly paying for their own tickets, yet tout Ottawa wanted to be part of this evening.

There were no speeches. The organizers had decided that, in each of the centre’s three beautiful new halls, the curtain rising on the first performance would mark its opening. The formalities had taken place two days before at a ceremony filled with politicians and dignitaries. Standing before the tall, embossed bronze doors of the Salon, with a children’s choir serenading the proceedings, newly minted Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau had handed over control of the site to NAC chairman Lawrence Freiman. All through that sunny Saturday musical groups ranging from bagpipers to rock bands, stationed on the building’s multi-levelled outside terraces, had entertained the forty thousand citizens who had poured into downtown Ottawa to scramble around the brand-new building. Its final cost, a cool $46.1 million, had titillated, outraged, and bemused politicians and the public alike for more than six years.

At the outset, in 1963, the price tag had been set at $9 million, but that first estimate had spiralled rapidly upwards to what was now, to many, an astronomical sum. Throughout construction, and in the face of devastating attacks from political opponents and the press, Pearson had resolutely backed the Arts Centre. On this opening day there was no doubt, at least in the minds of its organizers and builders, that “the Canadian public had got a first-class building at a bargain price.”¹

Trudeau’s new minister for cultural affairs, Secretary of State Gérard Pelletier, did not agree. Shortly after his appointment, he had made it clear that if he had been in office at the time the NAC was proposed, he “wouldn’t have built it … at least not at the cost.” He had also added that he did not want the place to be “snobbish.”² Pelletier’s remark had little effect on Southam, who ensured that the opening night was a grand social occasion. The handsome and sophisticated scion of a blue-blooded Ottawa family, he favoured full-blown elegance when the event called for it—and this triumphant evening was one of those occasions. As the rain poured down, chauffeurdriven cars rolled up to the main entrance to deposit their distinguished passengers—the men striking in white tie and tails; the women gowned and bejewelled with a glamour rare in Ottawa.

Nothing stirred more excitement than the arrival of Pierre Trudeau and his entourage, which included Pelletier and his beautiful and cultured wife, Alex. Trudeau looked resplendent in white tie, the usual rose in his lapel, and on his arm Madeleine Gobeil, by day a lecturer in French literature at Carleton University but tonight dazzling in a lime-green lace minidress and tumbling blond tresses. Their photo would dominate the country’s front pages the following day. Gobeil, a long-time Trudeau friend, had already been appointed a member of the first NAC Board of Trustees.

Though not yet detectable, a pivotal moment was occurring in Canadian cultural affairs. The old lèse-majesté way of doing things was about to give way to a more proactive, practical use of the arts in the country’s political and cultural struggles, especially in Quebec. The concepts of “democratization and decentralization” in cultural policy that Pelletier was about to introduce would be different from the traditional kind of government support which had led to the building of “arm’s-length” cultural institutions and organizations such as the NAC, the Canada Council, and the CBC. Over the long term, the new policies would change irrevocably the place of the arts in national life in Canada and the way that national institutions operated.

The arrival of the “French fact” in Ottawa also ensured that a new set of “notables” would take over, changing the established practices of the generally anglophone (though often bilingual) elites that had run cultural affairs to that point. The old guard, many of whom had been educated abroad and had travelled widely, generally held an international perspective on the arts. The new voices coming on the scene would focus more intensely on Canada’s own experiences and history and insist that the broader world view should be secondary.

The civil and outward-looking perspective of the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism, with its proposals for a bilingual, bicultural Canadian society, was about to be overtaken and changed by the narrow nationalism surging in Quebec and the struggle within the Quebec family between Quebec federalists and separatists. Arts and culture would become just another tool in the long dispute between these opposing views. While the NAC had been forged and created in the older context, the environment would quickly change as decentralized interests took power away from the centre of the country. In the years to come the Arts Centre would have to fight to justify its existence and, by the early nineties, would reach almost total collapse. Only by recasting itself, particularly in terms of its financial model, has it recently begun to regain a place at the centre of Canada’s national artistic life.