Welcome to the inaugural edition of The Future of Culture, a space designed to uplift and inspire Canada's cultural workforce of over 642,093 people (Q2 2024, Statistics Canada) and the organizations they work for.
Each month, we aim to give you a glimpse above the tree line—where you can see the blue sky and the horizon ahead, offering clarity, perspective and some fresh air.
While we’d love for this first edition to embody that vision, it’s necessarily a bit more practical instead —offering a guide to navigating the uncertain terrain ahead.
With the inauguration of Donald Trump as 47th President of the USA just two weeks away, our January 2025 issue focuses on helping your organization anticipate and plan for some potentially challenging times ahead. The divisive policies and combative leadership style favoured by the incoming U.S. President and administration have many economists and leading experts, including 75 Nobel Peace Prize recipients, predicting that if enacted as promised, would cause widespread economic chaos in all 50 states. That chaos will not respect the largest unoccupied peace border in the world - it will quickly jump over and create further economic and political havoc for the "USA's closest ally and trading partner", or "the 51st State of the United States of America" as the USA's President Elect has widely wished our sovereign nation would become instead.
With this top of mind, focusing this edition on helping you blunt the potential social, political and economic impacts that tariffs and other US protectionist policies would have on Canadians and thus on cultural non-profits the nation over seemed the only responsible course of action to take with this edition.
In Our January 2025 Newsletter
To that end, here are the key articles featured in this month’s Future of Culture newsletter:
