Relational Vitality to Economic Utility

A critical analysis of the Ontario Arts Council’s structural pivot from community-led equity to market-driven performance metrics.

The Ontario Arts Council (OAC) has spent a great amount of time over the past few years reviewing and updating its evaluation metrics for the peer assessment of grants. This has led to changes implemented relatively quickly pivoting between high-level philosophies and values around the arts which may have a huge impact on Canadian life and cultural security in Canada.

CPAMO intervention in Toronto 2017

Peer assessment is a collaborative evaluation process where a rotating panel of professional artists and arts workers with direct, current experience in the field, review and score grant applications. Instead of a permanent government staff making funding decisions,”peers” are recruited to ensure that the evaluation is grounded in the practical realities, cultural nuances, and artistic standards of the community itself. During this process, the assessors deliberate as a group, using the council’s specific rubric to provide an independent, arm’s-length recommendation on which projects or organizations should receive public support.

The following table is a brief history of how the scoring rubric has changed over the past few years.

The transition from the legacy model to the 2024-25 equity-focused framework represented a fundamental shift from valuing “art” as an aesthetic to valuing “people” as artists and power dynamics within society. For decades, the OAC’s legacy approach relied on a traditional concept of artistic merit, where excellence was often viewed through an abstract, Western-centric lens. Success was measured by historical longevity, organizational capacity, and a reputation-based standard of quality that frequently favored established institutions. Over this time, diversity was often treated as a peripheral “outreach” goal shifting over time towards strategic priorities to include more communities of peoples.

With the launch of the 2024-25 equity model, the OAC moved toward a “Relational” philosophy that placed the intersecting points of peoples and cultures at the center of its evaluation. This framework introduced a standalone category for Priority Groups, which accounted for 25% of an organization’s total score. The metric of success moved from the stage or the gallery into the boardroom, as assessors began to evaluate organizations specifically on the diversity of their staff and board representation in addition to their actions and programming. It was no longer enough to program diverse artists; the institution itself had to reflect the communities it served to receive strong scoring in the rubric.

This shift also redefined the organization’s responsibility toward labor and cultural sovereignty. The 2024-25 model introduced explicit scoring for the protection of artist interests, including the payment of fair fees and the implementation of cancellation policies, viewing the arts worker as a partner to be empowered rather than a contractor to be managed. It integrated the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP), moving beyond simple inclusion to recognize the inherent rights of Indigenous and cultural groups to maintain sovereign control over their stories and practices. This brief but vital era established that an organization’s core purpose was inseparable from its ethical footprint and its commitment to relational health.

The transition between the 2024-25 and 2025-26 OAC evaluation rubrics marks a profound philosophical shift in how the province defines the “value” of a cultural institution, moving away from its briefly implemented relational, community-centered model toward one defined by mechanical market utility. The previous framework rooted in an organization’s relationships regarding equity and labor, fostering social justice and providing stable livelihoods for artists has been replaced with a utility-based model focusing on market-driven economies.The introduction of the 2025-26 Performance Measurement Framework effectively dismantles any social-justice and replaces it with an economic engine.

This jarring pivot offers the disappearance of a standalone category for Priority Groups, which previously held a 25% weight within total scores. In the new rubric, this weight has been transferred to a massive 30% Economic Impact category, which evaluates organizations based on their contribution to the Gross Domestic Product and their ability to attract regional and international tourism. By prioritizing the TREIM (Tourism Regional Economic Impact Model) and CADAC financial ratios, the council has shifted its gaze from the internal ethics of an organization to an external fiscal output. My fear with such a shift is that success will no longer be measured by arts actions or who sits at the leadership table, but by how many awards, sales, subscriptions or tourist dollars an organization can generate for the provincial treasury.

This economic repositioning trickles down into the very definition of artistic quality, which has undergone a significant corporate makeover. Where the earlier rubric sought “vitality” and “exemplary” initiatives, the new framework prioritizes “wide audiences” and “high numbers of sales.” Artistic excellence is increasingly tied to market validation; if a work does not tour, attract significant media coverage, or command a large audience, its “value” is diminished within the rubric’s mechanical logic.

For artist-run centres, this shift poses a significant structural challenge, particularly for interdisciplinary and experimental practices like low-resolution media or site-specific non-monitary works. These initiatives are often intentionally designed for regional depth and localized community resonance rather than mass-market breadth or commercial scalability. With the OAC pivoting toward metrics that prioritize wide audience appeal and sales volume, the new rubric essentially treats the contemporary arts and artist-run sector as a service industry. In this mechanical framework, the “Artistic” score becomes a measure of brand reach and market validation, effectively devaluing the creative risk, long-term mentorship, and specialized community-building that have historically served as the purpose of these organizations.

Even the language of labor has been re-contextualized to fit this new fiscal reality. While both rubrics emphasize the payment of artist fees, the 2024-25 version framed this as an ethical obligation to protect the “interests of artists” and provide “stable employment” for the sector’s workers. In the newest version, these fees and salaries are rebranded as “economic impact” and “skills and capacity-building.” The artist is no longer a collaborator to be empowered, but a unit of labor whose wages contribute to the “Economic” pillar of the grant. This shift reflects a broader provincial strategy to align the arts with industrial goals, moving the council away from being a “sole funder” of culture toward acting as a sector that must now prove its efficiency and market relevance to survive.

This shift towards an economic-driven model would be less troubling if it were accompanied by new resources; however, the reality is that arts workers in Canada remain radically underfunded, with Ontario consistently ranking among the lowest in provincial support. According to the OAC’s 2024-25 statistics, total public support through the OAC sits at just $3.24 per Ontarian, a figure that remains significantly below a $6-$7 benchmark even when factoring in additional culture-specific investments like Ontario Creates. In stark contrast, Quebec remains the gold standard for provincial investment, with its primary granting body, the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec (CALQ), historically providing per capita funding between $12 and $15.

This creates a severe funding gap where Ontario’s investment is roughly one-fourth that of Quebec’s, despite Ontario supporting the largest creative workforce in the country with over 273,000 direct jobs. While Ontario’s culture sector contributed a staggering $27.9 billion to the provincial GDP in 2024, representing 43% of the total national impact, the province’s per capita investment continues to lag behind Newfoundland and Labrador, Manitoba, and Quebec, forcing a high-performing sector to navigate new and increasingly mechanical rubrics with a dwindling share of public resources.

The move from a “Relational” to a “Mechanical” model suggests that the OAC now views arts organizations as social enterprises that must balance their books with the same rigor as small businesses. The “Social” category, once focused on the depth of community engagement and the quality of experience, now emphasizes “demand,” as quantifiable outcomes. For those operating in the artist-run sector, this evolution requires a radical translation of their work, recontextualizing actions into economic data as yet another workload added to the already overburdened and underfunded positions of arts workers. To remain viable under this new rubric, the qualitative success of a community incubator must be translated into the quantitative language of new provincial priorities. The challenge for the modern administrator will be to maintain their purpose and mandates while successfully navigating a system that increasingly values Economy over Community.