This past winter, arts and sports advocates were pitted against each other during negotiations for a revised Western Canada Lottery Act.
Lotteries in the Northwest Territories generate about $4.7 million a year, and traditionally, their proceeds have gone to sports organizations.
Caroline Cochrane, minister of Municipal and Community Affairs at the time, intended to for this practice to continue under the new law.
Artists and arts groups, perennially underfunded and undervalued compared with athletes and sports clubs (until 2018, Education, Culture and Employment granted the NWT Arts Council an annual budget of $500,000), saw this moment as their chance.
Arts promoters packed the committee room at the legislative assembly building and before a standing committee of MLAs, testified to the power of the arts to enrich lives and improve communities.
Their impassioned pleas did not, in the end, work to change the distribution of lottery revenue, but elected officials did take notice.
After much debate in the legislature over the draft territorial budget, the government upped the arts council's funding by $200,000.
To some, this was a small win. To others, it was an abject snub.
Reasons to support the arts are numberless and seemingly obvious.
Art promotes critical thinking, infuses the world with beauty, engages people with their cultures, draws tourism, the list goes on.
Indeed, one need only reflect on last week's Hay Days festival, a celebration of South Slave music, art and culture, to understand the joy and light art brings into our lives.
Young students of Cooper Studios, a music and entertainment school, shone as they bravely sang solo in front of crowds at both the acoustic night at the museum and Friday's street festival.
They confessed to being nervous before stepping on stage, and fabulous afterward.
Certainly, athletes undergo the same transformation on the court, rink or field.
And can anyone say that spectators are delighted more by games than concerts?
Many NWT communities have arenas, pools and baseball diamonds, but few have theatres, and galleries, and fewer still, if any, have public studio spaces.
Travis Mercredi put it well in a letter to Northern News Services in February.
"We put an incredible amount of faith in sports as our primary socially beneficial activity. I think it is either from bias or total lack of imagination that we deny this same consideration for the arts," he wrote.
"We are deeply lacking in arts-based infrastructure and stable core funding for organizations who are always living on the edge of survival," he continued.
"The arts are not seen as they should, as an investment in people, their culture and their future."
Talent, creativity and a willingness to experiment are abundant in the Northwest Territories, and Hay Days illuminates this plain fact.
It is the arts, after all, that brings the Hay River community together, and it is an arts event that is widely considered the social highlight of the summer, if not the entire year.
Recently, author Dave Eggers wrote that no president before him as has appeared so uninterested in arts and culture as Donald Trump.
Every president in recent memory, wrote Eggers, hosted concerts and poetry readings, and invited artists to the White House.
Trump has done none of the above, and actually, he has disparaged art and artists (e.g. Saturday Night Live, the rapper Snoop Dogg) on many occasions.
"With art comes empathy," wrote Eggers.
"It allows us to look through someone else's eyes and know their strivings and struggles… When we are without art, we are a diminished people — myopic, unlearned and cruel."
In truth, a debate over the value of arts versus sports is senseless, because both make communities healthier, more vibrant and more fun, and both are deserving of our support, and our tax dollars.
But at the territorial level, one is placed above the other.
Elected officials must do more than praise the arts and then fund it like so much change tossed into a busker's hat.
They must invest as boldly in the arts as they do in sports because, simply, we will all be better off for