By BRUCE ERSKINE / Business Reporter
A greater emphasis on culture could make Halifax and Nova Scotia magnets for immigration and business, says Paul Greenhalgh, president of NSCAD University.
"The general enhancement of the cultural sector will enrich everybody, so everybody gains," he said in an interview on Tuesday after addressing a NovaKnowledge luncheon in Halifax.
"Nobody can lose from it. It's not that somebody gets something and someone else loses it. It will pay for itself and expand all the other things as it goes."
Mr. Greenhalgh said cultural institutions like NSCAD, which he credited with preserving a historic section of Granville Street in downtown Halifax that is a major tourist attraction, generate huge revenues for the local economy that are out of proportion with the level of funding they receive from government. But he said that unseen benefit is threatened by reduced government funding.
"As our provincial grant gets shrunk, our ability to actually carry on delivering that (revenue) goes down," he said. "So in actual fact, for the sake of a relatively tiny amount of money, an enormous amount of money goes begging."
In his address, Mr. Greenhalgh noted that a number of cities around the world have reinvented themselves through cultural investments, for example, the city of Bilbao, Spain, which has been transformed by the construction of the striking and controversial Guggenheim Museum, designed by renowned architect Frank Gehry, a Canadian based in the United States.
"Much of what I showed is kind of like a foreact of the fact that artists live here and that interesting, exciting people live here," he said, alluding to the many examples of artwork by NSCAD graduates that dot the Halifax landscape, which he referenced in his presentation as evidence of their contributions to the community.
| 