Gigantic rubber ducky is tax money well spent

The duck bound for the Toronto waterfront is six storeys tall, 27 metres long and weighs about 13,500 kilograms. It may yet be the thing that sinks Premier Kathleen Wynne.

The Progressive Conservatives have been pounding away at the government’s funding of a Toronto festival featuring this giant inflatable Dutch duck for days.

“Was a giant rubber ducky really worth $120,000 of hard-earned taxpayer dollars, yes or no?” their leader Patrick Brown demanded in question period.

The question is kind of disingenuous. The duck isn’t costing $120,000 of hard-earned taxpayer money. What he’s really getting at is whether governments should fund fun.

The three-day Redpath Waterfront Festival in Toronto, which starts on Canada Day, is getting a grant of $121,325 this year, its third year of support under the province’s Celebrate Ontario festival-funding program. Some of the money is for the duck but the grant is in support of the whole festival, which includes an artisan market, a ship from the navy to tour, lumberjack games, a dance performance, and so on. It’s, you know, a festival. They’re not just inflating the duck and calling it a day.

The festival included the duck in its grant application — the government said yes to it but it wasn’t the government’s idea.

As it turns out, other festivals are piggybacking on the duck’s visit to Toronto — since it’ll be here anyway, it’ll pop into other festivals this summer, including in Brockville. Duck spin-offs. They all imagine, as organizers of large public events, that the duck will be a draw. And you know it will be. Who doesn’t want to see a six-storey rubber duck? Its very ridiculousness is its appeal.

In this country we have a giant nickel, a giant Easter egg, a giant hockey stick, a giant goose, a giant beaver and a giant Muskoka chair. We like giant things. Toronto littered its streets with moose sculptures some years ago.

In Ottawa, we do oversized tulips and we have a giant spider, too. This summer we’ll have a giant clockwork dragon. Why? Because it’s fun.

If the National Gallery had asked for our opinions on whether it should install the spider sculpture on Sussex Drive, what would we have said? Luckily it didn’t ask. It took the funding we give its management on the understanding that they know what they’re doing. It bought Maman and it put her in. Now she’s the subject of a million photographs and the cause of a lot of cricked necks.

You can make a solid argument for not funding any festivals with government money. Want to throw one? Find some sponsors, some vendors willing to pay for concession rights, and charge admission. If you want to use public land, pay a rental fee for it. If you can’t make a go of it on those terms, maybe you don’t have that great an idea. Why do governments pay for the Tulip Festival? Why do they subsidize Bluesfest and Jazzfest? Let them sink or swim on their own.

Arguably our priorities are messed up, celebrating Canada Day while children are starving in Yemen and native reserves don’t have clean water.

But we’ve collectively decided that festivals are something we’re willing to spend public money on because they’re good for tourism, they make people happy and it’s important to mark anniversaries. Having made that decision, insisting that we only spend money on the same snoozes we’ve always spent money on makes no sense.

You can’t plan for greatness but you can be sure you won’t find it in the standard kit.