“An impassioned plea to keep culture at the heart of the Canadian experiment”: this line, written across the cover of the new book from longtime B.C. arts writer and critic Max Wyman, is both essential and misleading. Essential in that it refers only to culture, rather than Canadian culture; misleading in that it claims to be “impassioned.” This book is actually a closely argued, carefully reasoned approach to the minefield of arts funding and, more crucially, to the role of the arts in Canadian society.

The Defiant Imagination defines culture as “everything that is created of an artistic nature – the imaginative expression of civilization rendered visible.” Rather than building toward a unified Canadian culture, however, Wyman embraces cultural diversity as the defining characteristic of our national community, noting that “to properly protect our culture, it is excellence in creativity that should be supported, not nationalism.”

With that working definition (broad enough to include both the globetrotting magical realism of Life of Pi and the rooted, prairie realism of Who Has Seen the Wind? as part of the CanLit canon), Wyman draws on such popular ideas as Thomas Homer-Dixon’s “ingenuity gap” and Richard Florida’s “creative class” to develop a model in which culture and the arts would have a central role in the daily lives of Canadians, reinforcing “the value of a society built on compassion and shared values, in which widely different cultures can live alongside each other in a spirit of positive compromise and mutual understanding.”

While Wyman is clearly passionate about the arts, The Defiant Imagination is curiously dispassionate, almost remote. It reads more as policy paper than polemic. While this is probably deliberate, it blunts Wyman’s attack. After all, if a true believer like Wyman isn’t worked up about the arts, why should we expect it of a bureaucrat? A little more fire would have driven Wyman’s points firmly home.