Defence of buskers sounds sour note

Coun. Ryan Donn was right about one thing at Monday’s council meeting: Festivals Kelowna wouldn’t exist without city funding.

It was certainly an accurate observation, since about three-quarters of the funding for Festivals Kelowna comes courtesy of city taxpayers.

But it was also an odd one, because it was a reminder that Donn used to work for Festivals Kelowna. By law, city employees cannot hold municipal office in the community where they work.

But Festivals Kelowna, despite its deep reliance on Kelowna taxpayers, is a non-profit society. So Donn was able to run for and win a seat on council in 2014.

All of which is a history lesson in the unusual path to electoral office taken by Donn, who after the election got a new job as theatre manager for the town of Lake Country.

But it’s also a connection to events this week, when Donn styled himself as great defender of arts and culture, much to the visible annoyance of his colleagues.

In theory, buskers are musicians who sing or play music to the delight of passersby, hoping to make a few bucks for their efforts and helping animate the streetscape.

In fact, they are occasionally annoying dudes with bongos, wailing away to the disturbance of everyone within earshot.

The 20 or so annual complaints the city receives about bad buskers suggests both that everything isn’t sweetness

and light about street performers, but also that there’s no great ongoing problem with lousy musicians or horrible mimes.

To deal with the very few characters that give busking a bad rap, city staff suggested Kelowna simply do what many other cities do: require buskers to get a permit. Calgary’s application is straightforward — no auditions required. It’s free and requires would-be buskers to only submit a photo and some basic information. It’s basically a very low-barrier way of ensuring those who use parks and sidewalks to busk have at least some genuine interest and ability to entertain rather than annoy.

But in Kelowna, the permitting proposal, thanks to some credulous news reporting and resulting tizzy on social media, was greeted with outrage. Some in the arts crowd ludicrously denounced the proposal as an attempt to “criminalize culture.”

That was a phrase Donn himself used at Monday’s meeting, further whipping up what he must see as his artsy electoral base.

Some artists were in the council gallery on Monday, and they applauded Donn as he criticized city staff for writing a bad report, and accused them of not reading other city documents in their entirety and not talking to every bongo drummer in town before presenting before council.

Theatrically, Donn raised his hand and urged his supporters to hush up and let him do the talking.

Unfortunately for him and his supporters, Donn’s overwrought talking was remarkably unpersuasive.

Almost to a person, the other councillors defended the proposed busker bylaw as reasonable and in keeping with the best practices of other municipalities, and suggested Donn had needlessly and inaccurately fanned the flames of indignation on social media in the days before Monday’s meeting.

“This is not a bylaw that’s intended to crush the arts,” Coun. Gail Given said.

“I certainly don’t see this as a war on culture,” said Coun. Luke Stack.

“This is not out of the norm in terms of what you’d see in other communities,” said Coun. Tracy Gray.

Channelling his inner Shakespeare, Mayor Colin Basran said of the flap over the revised busker program: “This is much ado about nothing.”

Councillors voted 5-3 to adopt the busker permitting process, with Donn on the losing side. In another way, though, he probably won.

When we asked Donn earlier this year if he planned to run for re-election in October, his response was to affect a world-weary cynicism and sigh that “silly season” must be here.

Asking a politician if he intends to keep being a politician isn’t an unusual or unfair question.

And most people who use the phrase “silly season” in a political context intend it to refer to trivial or silly stories in the media that precede an election campaign, with candidates trying to stake out attention-grabbing positions on issues of no real import.

Donn was just slightly ahead of himself in his answer to our question.

Silly season is here. He ushered it in on Monday.