What is the Canada Council for the Arts?

The Canada Council for the Arts is the federal Crown corporation that funds Canadian artists, writers, musicians, dancers, theatre companies, publishers, and cultural organisations. It was established by an Act of Parliament on March 28, 1957 under Prime Minister Louis St. Laurent in response to the 1951 Massey-Lévesque Royal Commission on National Development in the Arts, Letters and Sciences. The Council reports to Parliament through the Minister of Canadian Heritage.

The Council's first endowment came from the estates of two Maritime industrialists, Sir James Hamet Dunn and Izaak Walton Killam, totalling $50 million, the largest single private bequest to the federal government at the time. The Council's current annual budget is roughly $363 million, used to fund individual artists, organisations, and projects through more than 6,000 grants a year. About half of recipients are emerging or mid-career artists.

The Council administers the Governor General's Literary Awards (since 1959), the Killam Prizes for outstanding career achievement in the arts and sciences (since 1981), the Walter Carsen Prize for Excellence in the Performing Arts (since 2002), and dozens of named prizes including the Molson Prizes, the Glenn Gould Prize, and the Sobey Art Award. Recipients have included Margaret Atwood, Alice Munro (Nobel Prize in Literature 2013), Leonard Cohen, Joni Mitchell, and Buffy Sainte-Marie.

The Council operates the Public Lending Right Programme that compensates Canadian authors when their books are borrowed from public libraries, the Canadian Commission for UNESCO that channels Canadian engagement with global cultural policy, and the Art Bank that holds more than 17,000 works of Canadian art rotated through federal offices and embassies. The Council's headquarters at 150 Elgin Street in Ottawa includes a public art gallery.