When you walk away from a conversation with Claire Hopkinson, a former opera and music theatre producer who is the director and CEO of both the Toronto Arts Foundation and the Toronto Arts Council, you will find yourself asking a question that sits at the heart of the city’s relationship with its cultural industry.

It’s not a complicated one — at least, not to formulate. But it’s a question that is always difficult for those who oversee government spending to answer.

How, you might wonder after being in the presence of Claire Hopkinson’s enthusiasm for the city’s myriad artistic communities, initiatives and projects, can we measure the value of something that is unquestionably extremely valuable but that, by its nature, can’t easily be measured?

The question concerns the arts, of course, and why their support is not more deeply, dynamically and meaningfully integrated in the fabric of the city than it is.

On the one hand, it seems a no-brainer. Why — given the proven capacity of the arts to draw together people and communities within the GTA, to overcome cultural differences, to enrich the local economy, to improve the quality of life in Canada’s largest and most diverse city and to attract visitors from outside Toronto’s borders — are the arts not universally acknowledged as a vital tool of city building? Even with the much-needed boost of the arts-directed revenues of the city’s new billboard tax, there remains an inherent lack of stability in the long-term cultural planning to which the city is committed. People such as Claire Hopkinson are required to keep fighting.

Over and over again, we are told how far behind cities such as Berlin, such as Chicago, such as Montreal, Toronto lags. A 2008 report, compiled by the Martin Prosperity Institute at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management, was blunt in its assessment of Toronto’s national context: “The fact that average cities around the country have expanded their cultural expenditures by more than 4 times as much as the City of Toronto has put Toronto at the low end of competitive growth for cultural producers and by extension cultural consumers.”

Two years later, Toronto made it clear how it felt about the Martin Institute’s dire warning. The city elected Rob Ford. And the question remained unanswered.

Hopkinson is either too positive by nature or too strategic by design (my guess is that she is both) to let the same question much dampen her ebullience. If the recent antics of the brothers Ford have given the impression (to everyone on planet Earth) that supporting the city’s culture is not exactly at the top of city hall’s current agenda, you’d never know it talking to Hopkinson. She is cheerful and optimistic, but she is no dreamer. Producers seldom are, in my experience. In fact, she has about her the certainty of a toughened general — well aware of the difficulties to be faced in the battles ahead, but convinced of the rightness of her cause.

Whether Hopkinson is talking about TAC’s vision of building a “Creative City; Block by Block,” or TAC’s collaborations with the Toronto Public Library, City of Toronto Museums and the Toronto District School Board, her overall message is that the creativity of Toronto is a force of extraordinary power that needs to be even more widely unleashed.

But, in the end, the question is one of civic leadership. (An unfortunate obligation, in Toronto’s case.) When something is of huge importance to a city, but too long-term and too integral in its over-all impact to be measured concretely, intuition, knowledge, faith and optimism are required of our leaders. But we’ve managed to make it clear to the rest of the world that isn’t going to happen for the time being. Too bad the rest of the world doesn’t know Claire Hopkinson. She’d tell them.