“The Royal Conservatory of Music has asked the Ontario government to rescue it from crushing payments on a $75-million [Canadian] debt,” reports Martin Knelman in Tuesday’s (3/8) Toronto Star. “Sources say [the government] is close to offering relief from that burden, even while stopping short of wiping the loan off the books. The crux of the problem is that last year’s loan payment of $4.5 million represents almost 10 per cent of the RCM’s annual budget ($46 million)—and precludes Canada’s pillar of classical music education from living up to its mission. ‘Koerner Hall and all the activities at the Telus Centre have made an enormous contribution to the city,’ says Peter Simon, the conservatory’s CEO. ‘But the burden of the loan payment takes away from what we could be doing with our programs, which we are always trying to make better.’ While the cash-strapped provincial government needs to keep the cap on its culture budget, nobody wants to see the RCM fail.… One goal of building the concert hall was to attract top students from all over the world to the RCM’s Glenn Gould School.”
Posted March 9, 2016
