Arts organizations across Canada are scrambling to secure future public funding after Prime Minister Mark Carney hinted the 2026 federal budget could deliver a critical blow to arts and culture programs.
Last spring, the Liberal leader campaigned his way to election victory on a platform that promised renewed investment in Canada’s creative economy and cultural infrastructure, including increased funding for agencies like Canada Council for the Arts, Telefilm, the Canada Media Fund, and the National Film Board. But in July, Carney instructed federal cabinet ministers to identify areas to reduce government spending by 15 per cent over the next three years, beginning in 2026.
With the 2026 budget scheduled to arrive in just days, constituents in the arts are bracing for the worst.
Fears of austerity have galvanized the cultural sector. Across the country, artists, administrators and cultural advocates are warning that potential cuts could hollow out a sector still struggling to recover from the pandemic while stretched thin by soaring inflation and dwindling private support. Major sponsors have quietly pulled funding from several events, ticket sales are down and the cost of living is up. Meanwhile, higher touring expenses and risks of crossing the Canada-U.S. border are adding to the strain.
If fears of arts austerity become a reality, it could mean artists and arts administrators being put out of work, galleries and music venues becoming ghost towns, and less Canadian art. But artists are putting up a fight, arguing that Canada’s arts industries are essential to the country’s future.
“[Reduced federal arts spending] would be a devastating mistake that will kill jobs and have an economic impact in communities from coast to coast to coast,” Chris O’Neill, a committee member of the Canadian Arts Coalition, tells The Grind. “It will impact the vibrancy of our communities and lead to the delay or elimination of construction projects for arts venues, festivals, productions and other cultural initiatives that give Canadians a sense of who we are and define our nation.”
Take, for example, Canada Council for the Arts, the government’s public arts funder, which delivered $325.6 million in funding to artists, arts groups and organizations between 2023 and 2024.
“They already only spend 10 per cent of their allocation on administration, and there have to be people to administrate the programs,” says O’Neill. “If they need to cut 15 per cent it will have to come from program funding, probably to the tune of $54 million.”
The accelerated release of the 2026 budget is adding to the anxiety. Budgets are normally tabled in the spring. This year, the Department of Finance announced in October that it would table the 2026 budget on November 4, months ahead of schedule. That gave advocacy groups only weeks to organize their responses.
Arts organizers push back
In September, the Canadian Arts Coalition, a non-partisan volunteer group, responded to Carney’s proposed austerity measures with a letter-writing campaign. The Campaign for Culture urges the federal government to not only protect existing funding to the arts, but to increase the sector’s current allowance from its 0.94 per cent share of the federal budget to at least 1 per cent.
If adopted, the recommendation would translate to a new investment of $140 million to the Canada Council for the Arts, and $190 million to arts programs administered by the federal government’s department of Canadian Heritage.
The Canadian Independent Music Association (CIMA) is also sounding the alarm about the risk posed to Canadian-owned companies and domestic musicians funded through the Canada Music Fund. Serving Anglophophone and Francophone markets, respectively, through the Foundation Assisting Canadian Talent on Recordings (FACTOR) and Musicaction, the Fund supports roughly 5,000 projects a year through recordings, tours, showcases, conferences, award shows and other events.
In the 2024 budget, the government provided a $32 million top-up to the Canada Music Fund over two years. With that funding set to expire in 2026, CIMA and partner associations across the country were gearing up to petition the government to permanently increase the annual allocation for Canada Music Fund to $60 million. But the expedited 2026 budget caught many in the industry off guard.
“If this money is not renewed, then investments made in Canadian-owned music companies and artists could be cut by up to 50 per cent,” CIMA president and CEO Andrew Cash wrote in a public letter about the Canada Music Fund campaign.
Despite the tight window, mobilization has been swift and enthusiastic. The Canadian Arts Coalition reports that more than 10,400 individuals have sent over 52,200 letters to Members of Parliament in support of the Campaign for Culture. The Canada Music Fund campaign has drawn widespread support from industry professionals and provincial associations throughout the country, with musicians like Rosalyn Dennett and Russell Louder sharing the campaign on social media.
O’Neill says the Canada Council for the Arts has funded projects and organizations in nearly every riding in Canada, “which is something that politicians should pay more attention to.”
“Cuts will hurt everyone,” she says, but those without any other funding avenues will hurt the most.
It’s an open secret that Canada’s arts funding landscape is uneven. According to a Toronto Star report, in the 2023–24 fiscal year, artists and cultural organizations in a single Montreal neighbourhood were allocated more than $27 million by the Canada Council, averaging $235 for every resident in the riding. In contrast, grant spending from the national funder amounted to less than a dollar per person in other regions of the country. Six ridings received nothing.
If the federal purse strings tighten, that disparity could deepen even further, concentrating funded activity in a smaller handful of economically advantaged cities while communities without robust municipal funding pools of their own are left underserved.
“In urban centres, there are often more opportunities to make up some of the shortfall with sponsorships or other kinds of engagement,” O’Neill says, but in rural communities and smaller urban areas, those circumstances “just don’t exist.”
Without stable federal support, many may have to begin winding down operations, with countrywide closures and layoffs.
“We will continue to see people leaving the sector, especially in underfunded regions,” she continues. “More urban organizations will be able to hold on longer, even if only by their fingernails.”
Carney’s finance minister has been promising to deliver “generational investments” in this budget — but at the same time, Carney has warned that his plan to transform the economy will involve “sacrifices.” These investments and sacrifices are distributed according to a peculiar logic.
For example: Carney has been publicly wringing his hands over the $10 million he claims Canada Post “loses” every day. In their analysis of that framing, The Breach pointed out that this number (an unusually high estimate) is tiny compared to the $169 million the military spends daily. That hasn’t stopped Carney from slashing the postal service’s activities, all while promising an extra $9.3 billion to the country’s armed forces by March.
That a prime minister with an advanced understanding of accounting who is touting the generational value of assets should so quickly default to dismantling a public service does not inspire confidence in his budgetary transparency, vision, or his commitment to the broader public sector.
Internationally, governments that are not dumping money into funding war and genocide are finding funds to further invest in the arts. In Ireland, for example, the federal government recently committed to establishing a permanent basic income for artists starting in February 2026.
Domestic arts organizations argue Canadian artists could benefit from a similar program. And they’ve got the data to back it up. In 2021, the Media Arts Network of Ontario (MANO) commissioned artist testimonies about how income precarity affects their lives and creative work.
Published in a report titled Artists on Basic Income: Beyond Precarious Livelihoods, findings from those testimonies indicated that more stable income for artists — through a basic income program or a stronger social security floor — would significantly increase artists’ ability to plan, produce, and engage with their communities.
Basic income and arts funding would also align with Carney’s stated vision of transforming the Canadian economy through what he calls “nation-building projects.” Not only do Canada’s cultural industries generate measurable GDP, they’re directly responsible for the production of the country’s social narrative.
According to a report just published by the Canadian Chamber of Commerce, Canada’s arts and culture sector contributed at least $65 billion to the national economy in 2024, representing two per cent of the economy. It generates an estimated $17 billion in federal and provincial tax revenue, taking the feds’ investment and returning it two times over just through federal tax revenue.
For the time being, MANO, a member organization of the Canadian Arts Coalition, has added its name to the Campaign for Culture.
“There are over 850,000 cultural workers across Canada, and most of us live in financial precarity,” a statement accompanying MANO’s declaration of support reads.
Because Carney’s Liberals hold a minority of seats, they need to secure voting support from at least one other party — the Bloc Québécois, the Conservatives or the NDP — to bring the budget through the House of Commons. At the time of publication, no other party has made such a commitment. Failing support for the vote approving the budget could trigger an election less than a year after the last one, thrusting the future of the arts (and the country as a whole) into further uncertainty.
Whatever the result, O’Neill maintains one thing is for certain.
“We know that austerity doesn’t work,” O’Neill says definitively. “It doesn’t provide hope or a way forward, it just makes people who live marginally more precarious.”