More than 5,500 people have signed a petition asking the federal government to ease artists’ tax burdens and create new funding opportunities in next year’s budget as they reckon with precarious and uneven income.
The Canadian Artists Network, a group representing about 2,200 senior-citizen artists, launched the petition in July, and said it submitted the results Thursday as part of its submission to prebudget consultations for the 2025 federal budget.
The submission asks Ottawa to recognize that artists have long functioned as gig workers, with irregular incomes that are often much lower than the national average. “Any kind of break that they can get at tax time would go a long way toward enabling them to continue working and creating for the benefit of all of us,” said Scott Walker, the Canadian Artists Network’s executive director.
A 2022 report by the Department of Canadian Heritage surveying 4,747 artists found that three-fifths of respondents had a pretax income of less than $40,000 in 2019 – and that nearly the same proportion saw their incomes fluctuate by at least 50 per cent year-to-year.
The Canadian Artists Network is asking Ottawa to provide a 15-per-cent refundable tax credit for up to $10,000 of artistic income per year, which it says could significantly benefit artists at the lowest levels of income. The group is also asking for broader copyright reform, including a long-sought right to resale royalties for visual artworks, and an expansion of the private copying levy.
The group is also recommending a tax regime that would back-average professional artists’ incomes over four years. This could ease artists’ tax burdens in cases where they make significant income from a project in one year, after years of that project’s gestation – such as for film writers, actors and visual artists who suddenly come into lump-sum payments.
Walker, whose work ranges across the performing arts, said he’d struggled with uneven taxation in the past because of the nature of his work. He watched his gross income rise from $25,000 one year in the late 2000s to $51,000 the next after writing and producing a pageant that year – only to be hit with a high tax bill for that fiscal year just as his income plummeted again.
He said he got a call from a collections agent one day demanding sudden repayment – and that the agent suggested he max out his credit card if he didn’t have the cash on hand. Walker eventually solved the problem with postdated cheques – but said that back-averaging his tax payments would have prevented the shocking tax bill in the first place.
The group is also recommending that the Canada Council for the Arts dedicate a tranche of funding to older professional artists, including those from Indigenous, racialized, disabled, and other equity-deserving communities. The Canada Council has come under fire in recent years for how it hands out grants, including a decision to allocate 20 per cent of its funding to first-time applicants.
Though the group had made similar requests in past prebudget submissions, its board chair Garry Neil said that they had not gotten sufficient traction, and decided to initiate a petition to showcase the gravity of artists’ financial situations. “We’re building support for these ideas within the community,” he said.
Some of the Canadian Artist Network’s requests expand upon recommendations from a March, 2023, report by Ottawa’s Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage, which suggested changes to artistic and tax laws that could simplify and reduce artists’ tax burdens.