Federal Budget 2024 offered the cultural sector a year of uneasy continuity—no major new investments, no stabilization measures, and no structural reforms, but also no significant cuts. Sector groups across the country described it as “status quo” at best: pandemic-era supports had ended, labour shortages were deepening, capital needs went unresolved, and rural, remote, and volunteer-driven organizations continued to absorb rising costs while working with flat funding envelopes. In short, Budget 2024 preserved the landscape without addressing the sustainability challenges already placing rural cultural organizations under considerable strain.
Budget 2025, by contrast, is defined as much by what it omits as by what it includes. As the BC Museums Association noted, the budget delivered “no substantive supports for the arts, culture, and heritage sector” and no stability measures for organizations still grappling with thin staffing, aging infrastructure, declining revenues, and shrinking volunteer capacity. This absence lands hardest on rural communities, where cultural organizations operate with the least margin for disruption and the greatest demands for social connection, local identity, and community well-being.
Yet Budget 2025 isn’t uniformly negative. Several long-standing programs finally receive long-overdue core increases after years of being propped up by temporary, ad-hoc supplements. The Building Communities Through Arts and Heritage program rises from its ~$15 million 2024/25 baseline to $21 million; the Canada Arts Presentation Fund moves to $42.7 million in stable annual funding; and the Canada Music Fund grows to $48 million starting in 2026–27. These are meaningful shifts—turning what used to be inconsistent top-ups into permanent baselines. They signal an acknowledgement that festivals, presenters, and the national music ecosystem need more predictable federal support. At a time when government departments are being asked to cut their budgets by 15%, the fact that major programs saw an increase is significant and demonstrates the importance of arts, culture and heritage in building Canada Strong.
But while these increases strengthen the national cultural framework, their benefits will not be felt evenly. These programs remain structurally oriented toward mid-size and large organizations with professional staff, touring networks, and the administrative capacity to manage complex applications and reporting. Rural cultural organizations—often volunteer-run, seasonally operated, or juggling heavy workloads with minimal staff—remain at a systemic disadvantage. Put simply, the system may be stronger but it is not more accessible.
So, while Budget 2025 contains pockets of progress, rural organizations continue to face an unchanged reality: aging buildings with no capital program to repair them, shrinking volunteer bases, staffing instability, rising operational costs, and ever-increasing expectations for community impact. The gains are real—but without a rural lens or an infrastructure strategy, they do little to close the widening sustainability gap between urban and rural cultural ecosystems.
In the end, Budget 2025 marks the full withdrawal from cultural stabilization funding at a time when rural cultural organizations are least able to absorb it.
What’s In Budget 2025 for Arts, Culture, and Heritage?
- Building Communities Through Arts and Heritage (BCAH). For the first time in a decade, BCAH receives a significant increase in Budget 2025 from a baseline of ~$15 million in 2024/25 to $21 million in Budget 2025 beginning in 2026/27. This increase likely reflects the program’s heavy demand and the approaching anniversaries of Treaties 6, 7, and 8. For rural communities—where BCAH is one of the few federal programs accessible to small volunteer-run presenters, heritage events, and festivals—this is welcome.
- Canada Arts Presentation Fund (CAPF). CAPF receives a genuine increase in funding to $42.7 million in core funding, up from $31 million with years of temporary supplementary funding. While this helps sustain performing arts presenters, the program remains structurally better suited to mid- and large-scale organizations with professional staff and urban touring circuits. Small rural presenters—often run by volunteers, seasonal staff, or one overwhelmed administrator—remain at a structural disadvantage, even when program funding increases.
- Canada Council for the Arts. The Canada Council for the Arts received a baseline of approximately $281.6 million in grants and prizes in 2024-25. In Budget 2025, the federal government committed an additional $6 million over three years (starting in 2026-27) to support professional artists and arts organizations. While the increase ensures the Council is exempt from spending-cut targets (very welcome news), the modest size of the top-up means it will likely cover targeted strategic initiatives rather than a broad expansion of rural outreach (except in Alberta).
- Canada Music Fund (CMF). The CMF rises from $31 million (2024–25) to $48 million starting in 2026–27. This will benefit national music organizations, record labels, and touring artists tremendously. The impact on rural culture will be indirect unless paired with rural touring support.
- Canada Strong Pass. Sector groups, including the BC Museums Association, confirmed that Budget 2025 does not expand the Canada Strong Pass to include most non-profit-run museums. Official eligibility allows for participation by museums and galleries under provincial/territorial authority, but this exception excludes most small community museums governed by local boards. The implication for rural communities is that most rural museums are still not eligible to benefit from the program.
- Celebration and Commemoration Program. Budget 2025 allocates $20 million over four years for Canada Day and $4 million over four years for National Acadian Day. This is an increase from the 2024/25 program baseline of approximately $12.744 million (Grants: $9.75M; Contributions: $2.994M. For rural communities, Canada Day is often the most visible and well-attended annual cultural event—a rare moment of mass gathering. But this program funds events, not the infrastructure, staffing, governance, training, or year-round cultural programming those communities depend on.
- Commitments to language and Truth and Reconciliation. There are notable gaps in social areas, including no specific First Nations investments in health, training, language or Truth and Reconciliation.
- Cultural Spaces Fund. The Cultural Spaces Fund—historically the federal government’s main mechanism for addressing capital needs—has been significantly narrowed. Budget 2025 removes funding for new cultural capital projects and restricts funding to specialized equipment only. For rural communities with aging, fragile cultural buildings—many more than 50 years old—this is arguably the single most damaging cultural-policy shift in the entire Budget 2025 package.
- No new funding for heritage sector organizations. Budget 2025 contains no increases for the Canadian Museums Association, the National Trust for Canada, the Museums Assistance Program (MAP), national museums, Telefilm. Couple this with no movement towards a new national museums policy and cutbacks to the federal public sector - this leaves the heritage sector—already identified by Statistics Canada (2025) as structurally fragile—without any path to stability.
- Commitments to Indigenous language and Truth and Reconciliation. There are notable gaps in social areas, including no specific funding for language or Truth and Reconciliation programs.
- 2SLGBTQI+ funding: Alongside the Pride-related supports offered through the Building Communities Through Arts and Heritage (BCAH) program, Budget 2025 introduces targeted investments that respond to the growing scale and visibility of Pride events across Canada. The budget allocates$7.5 million over five years, with $1.5 million ongoing, to help offset the rising security and insurance costs facing Pride festivals—a particularly heavy burden for smaller and rural Pride organizations that operate with limited staff and volunteer capacity. Budget 2025 also expands the 2SLGBTQI+ Community Capacity Fund, strengthening the organizational foundations of queer-led groups and networks. This reflects a broader recognition of the increasing number of Pride organizations nationwide and the central role Pride events play in fostering safety, belonging, and community connection in rural and remote regions.
- Youth Employment: A Bright Spot. While Young Canada Works did not receive new funds, Budget 2025 invests heavily in broader youth employment programs, including $635.2M for Student Work Placements, $594.7M for Canada Summer Jobs, and $307.9M for the Youth Employment and Skills Strategy. Many rural museums reported being denied YCW funding in 2025, including long-standing recipients. The expansion of youth employment funding may help fill summer staffing gaps, even if it does not replace the heritage-specific training value of YCW.
Our Analysis: What Budget 2025 Means for Rural Culture
Across these programs, a pattern emerges: Budget 2025 supports activity but not capacity, events but not infrastructure, and selective program envelopes but not the structural conditions that would sustain rural culture over time. Key implications include:
- No stabilization funding means rural museums, galleries, archives, and cultural centres remain at high risk of operating at reduced capacity or closure.
- Loss of cultural capital funding removes the only national mechanism for maintaining and updating rural cultural infrastructure, which is often housed in heritage buildings.
- No rural lens means funding continues to disproportionately benefit urban organizations.
- Increased youth employment funding may help summer operations but does not address long-term workforce shortages.
- Small boosts to BCAH and CAPF will help some rural communities—but with high competition and limited capacity, access remains unequal.
Together, these decisions create a policy vacuum for rural cultural resilience. Rural cultural organizations are being asked to deliver social connection, community pride, youth engagement, cultural tourism, and reconciliation—with fewer tools, older buildings, and no new investments in long-term sustainability.
Federal Budget 2025 Compounds Sustainability Pressures Facing Rural Culture
The impacts of Budget 2025 do not land on a blank slate — they stack directly on top of long-standing sustainability pressures that rural cultural organizations have been struggling with for more than a decade. Chief among these is the erosion of volunteer capacity. Rural museums, heritage sites, festivals, and cultural centres have historically depended on large, generational volunteer bases. Those bases are shrinking dramatically as older volunteers retire, younger residents juggle multiple jobs, and population decline accelerates in many small communities. Without renewed investment in staff, training, and community outreach, the collapse of volunteer capacity becomes a structural threat to rural cultural continuity.
Rural cultural organizations also face deep challenges in staffing and workforce sustainability. Recruiting trained cultural professionals into rural roles was already difficult, mirroring the challenges seen in healthcare, education, and other specialized sectors in small communities. Wages in rural culture remain low, roles are often precarious or part-time, and staff burnout is widespread—exacerbated by the growing complexity of digital reporting, evaluation requirements, fundraising demands, and year-round programming expectations. When federal budgets fail to stabilize rural cultural operations or invest in core capacity, it becomes even harder to attract or retain the skilled professionals needed to build organizational strength, manage heritage assets, or deliver meaningful community programming.
Finally, Budget 2025 lands amidst of a growing crisis around rural heritage infrastructure and revitalization. Many rural museums, archives, cultural centres, and community halls are housed in heritage buildings with aging or inadequate HVAC for today’s climate realities, accessibility gaps, and urgent conservation needs. The narrowing of the Cultural Spaces Fund to supporting the purchase of specialized equipment only removes the only federal mechanism for cultural capital reinvestment, leaving communities without tools to preserve built heritage or adapt it for contemporary cultural use.
Closing Thoughts
Budget 2025 supports rural cultural organizations and communities in two key areas: increased supports for community events and greater funding for youth employment, an area that has been a stubborn area to increase. Increases to other funding programs will not materially support rural communities, as their current design naturally advantages larger, urban cultural institutions.
This leaves rural cultural organizations—already operating with the smallest budgets, thinnest staffing, and greatest geographic challenges—to navigate rising costs and increasing expectations without new structural support.
The data is clear that without targeted investment, rural cultural ecosystems face heightened risk of program cuts, building closures, organizational collapse, and reduced community cohesion.
Now more than ever, Canada needs a rural cultural strategy, a cultural infrastructure plan, and a national framework for cultural vitality that reflects the realities of rural life.
Budget 2025
- Government of Canada — Budget 2025: Protecting Our Culture, Values and Identity (Canadian Heritage Budget Backgrounder)
- Government of Canada — News Release: Budget Measures for Arts & Culture
- Department of Finance Canada — Budget Tables and Cultural Program Allocations (2025)
- Canadian Heritage — Budget 2025 Cultural Program Allocations: BCAH, CAPF, CMF, Celebration & Commemoration Program
Budget 2024 / 2024–25 Baseline References
- Canadian Heritage — Fact Sheet: Budget 2024 – Support for Arts, Culture, and Heritage
- Canadian Heritage — Departmental Plan 2024–2025
- Canadian Heritage — Departmental Results Report 2024–2025 (used for Indigenous languages & anti-racism spending profiles)
Program-Specific Federal Sources
- Building Communities Through Arts & Heritage (BCAH) — official program page
- Celebrate & Commemorate Canada — program background & 2024/25 spending table
- Canada Arts Presentation Fund — multi-year funding profile
- Canada Music Fund — baseline 2024/25 and Budget 2025 increases
- Young Canada Works — allocations & status updates
- Canada Strong Pass — Canadian Heritage eligibility definitions
Sector Organizations’ Analyses & Advocacy Statements
Canadian Museums Association (CMA)
- CMA statement on the Indigenous Cultural Heritage Rights Framework
BC Museums Association (BCMA)
- Federal Budget 2025: What It Means for BC Museums
- Key Takeaways from Budget 2024
- BCMA Year-in-Review 2025 (context for sector stability)
BC Alliance for Arts + Culture
- Federal Budget 2024: Analysis & Sector Impacts
Canadian Arts Coalition
- Public statement on Budget 2025 (sector stability gaps & modest gains)
National Trust for Canada
- Budget 2025 Heritage Response: No Path to Protecting Places
- Commentary highlighting lack of funding for the National Cost-Sharing Program
- Endangered Places List (2025) for infrastructure framing
Canada Council for the Arts
- CEO Michelle Chawla — Letter to the Arts Community on Budget 2025
- Canada Council 2024/25 funding baselines (grants & operational figures)
