A coffee with… Tania Kontoyanni | Facing the wind

Tania Kontoyanni tells me the anecdote with a sigh in her voice. On June 24, the president of the Union des artistes met Prime Minister François Legault as part of the national holiday celebrations.

“I wished him that our culture would survive. He replied: ‘That, madam, is because of immigration!’ I asked him if he realized he was talking to Tania Kontoyanni, who came from Greek parents who insisted that their daughter be French-speaking. I said: ‘No, it’s not immigration. It’s our way of integrating immigrants that is flawed. It’s our culture that will make the difference.’”

Tania Kontoyanni was lucky, she says, to have forward-thinking parents who insisted on sending her to school in French in the 1970s, even though they were not required to do so by law at a time when the vast majority of Greek immigrants educated their children in English.

Tania Kontoyanni met me this week at Café Falco, a few steps from the offices of the Union des artistes, in Montreal’s Mile End district. A member of the UDA board of directors since 2017, the former treasurer succeeded Sophie Prégent as president of the Quebec artists’ union in April 2023.

The actress came to the head of the UDA at a time when artists are at a crossroads, it seems to me, due to artificial intelligence which is developing at great speed and the globalization of content, which is accepted as inevitable.

“These are pivotal years for culture, for Quebec in particular, even if it is a global issue,” also believes Tania Kontoyanni.

National cultures are being undermined more than ever by digital platforms “that are sucking the life out of local markets,” she notes. This is all the more worrying for Quebec, the United States’ immediate neighbour. The UDA president also wonders whether there is a real political will, in Quebec as in Ottawa, to make the web giants pay their fair share. She speaks in a soft and calm voice, but without mincing her words. As François Legault must have noticed…

“The problem right now,” she says, “is that culture is extremely underestimated. There is no vision. We have to recognize what is, particularly in a society like ours, a local, national culture, of a language other than the North American majority.”

Governments are increasing funding for culture, the UDA president acknowledges, but it is not indexed to the cost of living. “So we are really atrophying our culture,” she says.

Tania Kontoyanni resents this political double talk that suggests, on the one hand, that culture is extremely important, but on the other, does not support it with considerable investments. “Culture is always important in words, but not in gestures. I became an artist because I was convinced that the arts transform the viewer’s vision. It is essential, artists who transcend our human condition. It opens our eyes.”

There are also a multitude of economic arguments in favour of increased funding for culture, argues this business administration graduate who was aiming for a master’s degree at HEC when she switched to the Conservatoire d’art dramatique de Montréal.

It’s not that she feels like she’s preaching in the desert, but Tania Kontoyanni notes that the people who are sensitive to the artists’ grievances “are not those who have power, neither financial nor political.”

While the CAQ government promises to invest billions in controversial projects for an electric car battery plant and a third highway link, decision-makers sometimes ask it if there aren’t too many artists… “What I tell the government is: you train these artists in visual arts schools and theatre schools where 60 to 70 actors graduate each year. From the moment they are trained, the UDA’s job is to protect them. I defend their right to work in the field they have chosen.”

She knows what she’s talking about. Like most of her peers, she’s had her share of down times and lean years, even though she did play in three theatre productions last year. Tania Kontoyanni hadn’t worked for two years when Gilles Duceppe asked her to run for the Bloc Québécois in 2006. She declined and, ironically, the next day she received an offer to play in the youth TV series Kaboum.

Today, the president of the Union of Artists is concerned about the impact of artificial intelligence (AI) on the work of some 4,000 actors who earn income from dubbing.

She communicates regularly with UDA members through capsules. Last week, to test the AI, a colleague translated her capsule into Italian.

“It took two minutes and my lips were in sync! I then had it translated into Greek and despite the union terms, it was impeccable. How can you tell the truth from the falsehood? If I were a dubbing actress, I would be panicked. As a citizen, I see that I can be made to say anything. It’s panicking too! We are not at all joining the UDA against the evolution of technology, but we need to think more about the issue from an ethical and philosophical point of view. Who are we going to give priority to, the machine or the human being?”

Tania Kontoyanni believes that the Quebec population often has an erroneous perception of the economic conditions of artists, because they recognize on television those who earn the most money. “This is the 1% of the 13,000 members of the UDA who contribute greatly to the social safety net of their peers. They are not ultra-rich and their careers could end tomorrow morning!”

In 2016, according to a study by the Canada Council for the Arts, the median income of a Canadian artist was $17,300, less than half the median income of the general population. The Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec (CALQ), now headed by Sophie Prégent, suffers from underfunding and obtaining grants seems increasingly difficult.

“We consulted all the performing arts artists’ associations following the responses to the CALQ grant applications and we found that among the artists who were not funded or were underfunded, no one cancelled their project. The artists were not paid or went into debt. That’s the reality,” laments Tania Kontoyanni.

“How many times will we have to repeat that culture is structural for a people? It is one of the essential pillars. There is health, education, but it does not just stand on two legs. It takes three and the third, for me, is culture.”

There is an educational effort to be made, acknowledges the president of the UDA, but she does not lose hope. “I often have political disillusionments, but I am rather optimistic by nature. I lead the battles that I can lead, as respectfully and with the greatest possible elegance, even if I am firm and sometimes say things that are difficult to hear. I am happy to serve my peers at this precise moment, when there is a lot of headwind.”