N.S. Oscar winner Tamara Deverell says province’s cuts to arts will hurt the economy

HALIFAX — One of Nova Scotia’s newest Oscar winners says the provincial government’s decision to cut funding for arts and culture will not only impact the development of young talent, but will also hurt the economy.

Tamara Deverell won the Academy Award for production design along with Dartmouth set decorator Shane Vieau over the weekend for the pair’s work on director Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein.

Her win comes a few weeks after the province tabled a budget with more than $130-million in grant reductions, including the scrapping of millions of dollars for the arts and culture sector. After public backlash, Premier Tim Houston’s government reversed more than $50-million worth of cuts to programs impacting people with disabilities, African Nova Scotians and Indigenous groups, but reductions to arts programs remain in place.

Cape Breton-based Deverell said tourists flock to the island to go to concerts, attend festivals and see artisans at work, all of which boosts the economy.

“If you want to look at it economically, the tourist trade in our province is huge and we should take advantage of that and welcome visitors,” Deverell said Wednesday in an interview from Toronto, where flight delays have kept her for two days on her way home from the Oscars.

“And how else do you welcome visitors? By sharing your culture and your arts.”

Deverell said that part of the reason she and her husband moved from Toronto to the Inverness area eight years ago was due to Cape Breton’s arts and culture scene. She’s the co-chair of the Inverness County Centre for the Arts, which she says saw about a quarter of its core funding cut in the provincial budget. The organization has already cancelled a concert series and won’t be moving ahead with planned programming for youth and seniors.

Deverell said Cape Breton arts groups and non-profits are banding together to fight the cuts and find new funding sources, including from the federal government.

While Deverell can now say she’s an Oscar winner, she noted how she established her career after working on films that depended on government funding.

“I look at the young people today who want a career in the arts, maybe they want to go into film and television, maybe they want to go in theatre, maybe they’re musicians, maybe they are artists, and they’re not going to have the funding and the backing and the support that they need to have these careers,” she said.

Deverell spent countless hours toiling over the film’s central set, a massive laboratory perched atop an old Scottish stone tower, with a massive round window letting light in on a workshop full of ornate apparatus and a malformed body splayed out on the operating table. del Toro has said he wanted a handmade movie of epic scale. All the props, design and wardrobe were handcrafted.

One program to get the axe was the $700,000 fund to help Nova Scotia book publishers. In a statement, the government said publishers can still apply for support under the Creative Industries Fund. Along with publishers, it also supports fashion, screen, music and performing arts. Its budget was reduced by about $800,000 to $1.1 million in the budget.

“Publishers in Nova Scotia play an important role in telling our stories and sharing them with readers across the province and beyond,” the culture and tourism department said in a statement.

Deverell isn’t the only prominent Nova Scotian artist criticizing the government. Rachel Reid, the Nova Scotian author of the “Game Changers” series of novels which are the basis for the “Heated Rivalry” TV series has spoken out.

“Whether we are creating or consuming it, art is how we connect with others and find ourselves. It’s also how we represent Nova Scotia on the world stage,” she wrote in a social media post earlier this month.

“The proposed cuts would be devastating, and would drive even more talent out of the province. Please don’t do this.”

Heather Fegan, executive director of the Atlantic Publishers Marketing Association, said the funding cuts won’t make much of a difference to the provincial budget, but they’re devastating for the sector and will mean less books published by Nova Scotian authors. She said having high profile artists like Reid and Deverell take up the cause will hopefully help.

“We’re seeing it on a global stage repeatedly, how folks from Nova Scotia have been successful and yet (Premier) Houston is ready just to obliterate it all by taking away the support, again, which is such a tiny drop in the bucket of the overall deficit. But the damage will be so, so great,” Fegan said in an interview.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published March 18, 2026.

– With files from the Associated Press.

Devin Stevens, The Canadian Press