A
city-owned parking
lot known as Larwill
Park in downtown
Vancouver—the
proposed home for one of the
most ambitious cultural building
projects B.C. has ever seen—is
likely to house cars, not Carrs,
for a good while longer.
Just one month before a
council-imposed deadline to
raise $150 million in govern-
ment funding for the project's
estimated $350 million in con-
struction costs, the Vancouver
Art Gallery's plan for a landmark
campus kitty corner to BC Place
appears fated to be postponed,
perhaps indefinitely. By most
accounts, the gallery is nowhere
near to meeting that fundraising
deadline, and it's likely to miss
another city condition for the
nominal 99-year lease on the
site: to raise 75 per cent of its
construction costs by December.
The
VAG's fundraising chal-
lenge is something of a perfect
storm. Both levels of govern-
ment have nothing to be gained
politically from dishing out
hundreds of millions of dollars
for what's perceived, in the hin-
terland, as an elite big-city insti-
tution; it's not the power base of
either the provincial Liberals or
the federal Conservatives. And
the
VAG is one of several cultural
projects planned or underway
that draws on a similar, small
pool of benefactors.
So what next? In the event
that the
VAG doesn't think it
will meet its April 30 deadline,
explains Richard Newirth,
ben oliver (top) march 2015 BCBusiness 17
t he mon t hly in for mer
TMı
"I do not regard employers
as the enemy. Sometimes we
have corporations that behave
extremely badly, and we will
say some harsh things about
them when we feel they are
trampling on workers' rights"
– Irene Lanzinger, p. 23
in the event
that the vaG
doesn't think
it will meet its
april 30 deadline,
gallery director
Kathleen bartels
(above) will have
to request that
council revisit its
deadlines.
m a r c h 2 0 15
The Countdown
C u l t u r e
Got $300 million to spare? the vancouver art Gallery would
like to speak to you–and soon by Jacob Parry
INSIDE
ruff times for Dogs ... Sharing the Wealth ... feedback on feedback ... meC's new Digs + more ...
