Peter Hudson is a writer currently researching the history of North American banking in the Caribbean. He teaches in the Department of African-American Studies at SUNY Buffalo.
Part 2
Caribana, Toronto’s annual Caribbean festival, took to the streets of Toronto this past weekend. Last week, Peter Hudson began looking at Scotiabank’s recent decision to sponsor the Caribana parade, as a way of celebrating the diversity of the city. Scotiabank has come a long way; as Hudson noted, at the turn of the century there was little embrace of people of colour, especially those of African descent, by the Bank. This week Hudson concludes his assessment of the double-edged sword of corporate sponsorship of cultural events like Caribana.
By Peter James Hudson
Scotiabank has claimed that their Caribana sponsorship is a way of supporting Toronto’s ethnic diversity. The bank appears ready to embrace the Caribbean community, both at home and abroad, take their money, and recognize their contribution to Canadian culture. But at what price comes recognition? Certainly, it is not as if Scotiabank has stolen the soul of Caribana. Unless a visionary Caribbean financier steps to the plate, no matter how much grass-roots participation, the size of Caribana makes it invariably dependent on forging financial alliances with governments and corporations. And while a party of Caribana’s size will inevitably need big-time funders, from the Medici’s to Morgan, bankers have been funding culture (although usually without the indiscrete and gaudy branding) from almost the earliest days of the business.
Yet there are some criticisms to be made of the newly-branded Scotiabank Caribana. In the first instance, there is the size of Scotiabank’s sponsorship: $250,000, plus in-kind goods and services over two years. The amount is almost laughable. It’s pocket change for a festival as big as Caribana and for a bank whose first quarter profits, despite an eighteen percent drop, were still an astonishing $835 million, while they made a record-busting $3.55 billion in 2006. And it’s miniscule in comparison to the $30 million dollar that Jamaican-Canadian investment guru Michael Lee Chin gave to have his name attached to the Royal Ontario Museum’s extension – or the $100 million (US) former Blackstone CEO Stephen A. Schwarzman gave to the New York Public Library to kick start a $1 billion fund-raising campaign. Perhaps Scotiabank’s slogan, “You’re Richer than You Think,” should actually be “We’re Cheaper than You Know.”
While the amount of money Scotiabank is putting up for Caribana is relatively insignificant, it reflects their extremely conservative approach to arts and cultural funding generally. They are not providing funds for infrastructure, for new buildings, for the addition of material to libraries or art collections, or for direct grants to individual producers. They parasitically attach themselves to well-established cultural institutions – Caribana, Hockey Night in Canada, Nuite Blanche – stamping their brand on events whose audiences (or, for the bank, markets) are large and demographically well defined.
Scotiabank’s approach to culture is astute without being visionary, edgy without taking risks, and potentially lucrative without significant investment. It’s a brilliant, albeit cynical, policy. By effectively paying for naming rights, the returns to the bank will far exceed anything garnered by Caribana or any of the other cultural events and institutions that now bear the bank’s name like the mark of Mammon. Who can count the number of times the bank’s name will be spoken during Caribana? The number of times its new, slightly goofy, ersatz tropical Scotiabank Caribana logo will be viewed – not only on television, but on the personalized, home-made videos and photographs of Caribana posted on YouTube and circulated on MySpace and Facebook. This viral approach to marketing allows the bank to tap into a vast, underground social network of a sort that admen and demographers can only dream.
There was a time – both in Canada and the Caribbean – when the perception of the power and presence of a handful of banks sparked calls of cultural imperialism and critiques of the centralization of authority and wealth. During the 1970 Black Power Revolution in Trinidad, the Bank of Nova Scotia, along with the Royal Bank of Commerce and the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce, were singled out as agents of empire, as exploitative, foreign institutions transferring wealth from the Caribbean to Canada while contributing little to the local economy. Protests against them spurred the nationalization of the Royal Bank, while the Bank of Nova Scotia underwent a process of “localization.” Shares of the bank were offered to the public as a way of increasing local control. However, the shares were offered at inflated prices and the offering only served to direct more local capital into a foreign institution. Meanwhile, then, as now, ultimate control of the local institution rested with its Toronto-based Canadian directors. “No real change has taken place,” commented Ernest Massiah in Tapia in 1973. “We have simply witnessed a bit of window dressing put forward to camouflage the continuing exploitation of the nation’s resources. Control of the bank and its assets remains firmly in foreign hands.”
Today, however, there is no protest – indeed, there is no basic questioning of the relationship of banks such as Scotiabank to the sponsorship and promotion of Caribbean culture. In this regard, the bank’s shift from symbol of imperialism and neo-colonialism to icon of diversity and local development has been wildly successful – even as the actual benefits of using the bank as a customer have dwindled and perhaps most importantly, even as every single interaction with Scotiabank erodes the strength and vitality of truly local financial institutions.
On the occasion of Scotiabank’s centenary in Jamaica, Tony Lindo, the bank’s first Jamaican-born General Manager, offered a positive gloss on the bank’s ubiquity in that country. “Throughout these hundred years,” he noted, “your needs have been many and varied, but we have always been there in the fields with the farmers in the factories, turning the wheels of production, in the board-rooms giving advice and counsel, in the homes, keeping the family together through hard times, and in the schools, ensuring our future through education.”
Now, it seems, with its sponsorship of Caribana, the Scotiabank’s totalizing, pervasive reach has extended itself to the Caribbean diaspora, to its culture – and perhaps to its very consciousness. We have yet to see the nature of the return on Scotiabank’s investment. Regardless, in the meantime, it’s a little surprising that a community of people who enthusiastically wave their flags to assert their national affiliation during Caribana can’t be bothered to jump up and say something when their countries and cultures are sold out to the first bank that comes along.
