Canadian Heritage Committee on Nov. 17th, 2011

[The Vice-Chair, NDP, Pierre Nantel]

Good morning, everyone.

This morning, we have a special presentation. We have representatives from the Glenn Gould Foundation, Mr. Brian Levine and Ms. Clelia Farrugia. Although they appear in second place on our agenda, we will start with them. There is another special thing: the video being presented is in English only but our interpreters will give us a simultaneous translation on the sound system. If you want to listen to music, you will have to find two headphones, one for English and the other for French.

After that, we will hear our other witnesses, Mr. William Thorsell and Dr. Robynne Rogers Healy.

Thank you very much for coming here this morning.

The clerk is advising me that there is a technical problem with translation. It should be fixed in a couple of minutes.

We will now present this video from the Glen Gould Foundation. Then Mr. Levine will address the committee.

Mr. Levine, do you have something to say before we proceed with the video presentation?

[Brian Levine, Executive Director, Glenn Gould Foundation]

To begin, this video is a good backgrounder to help set the context for what I'll be saying. I think it's pretty self-explanatory.

[Video Presentation]

[The Vice-Chair, NDP, Pierre Nantel]

Thank you very much.

Mr. Levine, the floor is yours.

[Brian Levine]

Chairman, and honourable members of the committee, thank you so much for the opportunity to speak with you today.

The Glenn Gould Foundation would be honoured to play a significant role in the Canada 150 celebrations. In fact, we have actually been developing plans to mark this historic year for some time. To explain how, I need to outline our primary areas of focus today. Then we can move on to our plans for the future.

First is to cement the Glenn Gould Foundation's position as a global cultural institution and the Glenn Gould Prize as the world's pre-eminent award for artistic achievement and creativity in the service of humanity, and as a powerful vehicle for using the arts to transform lives. Effectively, our objective is to make Canada the home of the Nobel Prize of the arts. In so doing, our goal is to project Canada as the leading centre of excellence and innovation on the world stage. It is to build the Canadian brand, if you will, using our most iconic symbol of originality and creativity: Glenn Gould.

Second is the celebration of our future. Of course, the young emerging artists of today are our creative future, which is why we present the Glenn Gould Protégé Prize to recognize and promote the promise of outstanding young artists. Now we're going further with the establishment of the Glenn Gould concerts. They are a wonderful platform for recognizing and promoting the most gifted young musical talent in the land and for boosting their career development by associating them with Gould's legacy.

The first of these concerts featured eight brilliant young artists and was held for Their Excellencies, the vice-regal couple, at Rideau Hall last December. Our plan is to continue in this vein, seeking out the best and brightest. In fact, this very evening we have a concert at Carnegie Hall featuring a young Montreal pianist.

Now the template has been established, and we're going to be partnering with other arts organizations across the country to present these Glenn Gould concerts to the Canadian public from coast to coast to coast.

That brings us to 2017 and the unique opportunity to take our foundation's 30 years of experience with world-class celebrations and the promotion of gifted young artists to the ultimate level by creating a Canadian musical dream team of incredible young musicians. This roster of fresh new talent will reflect the rich diversity of musical cultures and genres in our great country, from east coast Celtic to Québecois chanteurs; from aboriginal, jazz, classical, country, blues, urban, singer-songwriter to folk rock and metal. We plan to conduct a national search for young Canadian musicians of true superstar potential throughout 2016. This will create public awareness, anticipation, and excitement, both for our young artists who are vying for pride of place and for the coming 150th anniversary year. These exceptional young Canadians will receive their big breaks in the sesquicentennial year. Like our Olympians, they'll be given a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to own the podium by becoming our musical ambassadors not only to Canadians, telling our musical stories to ourselves, but also to the world.

In short, the Glenn Gould Foundation proposes to mount a spectacular year-long Canada 150 world tour. Our specially selected dream team, representing the cream of our future musical stars, will perform for six months across the country, in major venues and smaller communities from coast to coast to coast, in a unique showcase presentation of Canada's most exciting musicians under 25. The six months in Canada will culminate in an epic Canada Day concert to express musically the dreams, hopes, and aspirations of all Canadians.

For the remaining six months we'll be taking the show on the road, visiting world cultural capitals and spreading awareness of Canadian excellence and cultural brilliance. Our young artists will be a living expression of Canada's national confidence, maturity, and culture of innovation. They will be spreading the word to our friends and most valuable trading partners alike. The adventures and triumphs of the Canada 150 musical team will be the stuff of legend. Captured by media and preserved in documentaries, they will inspire all Canadians, especially our youth, to strive for excellence and to always believe in the limitless potential of this great nation.

It is our hope to present a commemorative multi-media memento of our musical Team Canada 150 as a gift to every Canadian schoolchild as an inspiration in years to come and as a keepsake to remember this historic year.

The Glenn Gould Foundation possesses the experience, the network, the expertise, and certainly the big vision, and above all, the powerful symbol of Canadian excellence represented by Gould himself that are needed to bring this ambitious goal of a national celebration of our musical future to the world.

Thank you for letting me share the vision with you. I hope the members of the committee will embrace it and join with us in helping to make this dream a reality.

[The Vice-Chair, NDP, Pierre Nantel]

Thank you, Mr. Levine.

Mr. Thorsell, would you please introduce your topic.

[William Thorsell, Consultant, As an Individual]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I thank you for the opportunity to come here and think about Canada 2017. My remarks today are taken from a paper that I gave in July to the annual meeting of Canada's federal and provincial ministers of culture and heritage in Whitehorse. This is a much abbreviated version of that paper, which I have supplied to the committee.

I'm looking to start back in 1967 at the time of Canada's centennial celebrations, and to talk a little bit about how Canada has changed and suggest how I think we should think about what to do in 2017.

Our celebrations in 1967 had a major focus, Expo 67, at which I had the privilege of being the manager of the western Canada pavilion at the age of 21. In those days you could get jobs like that when you were just out of school from Alberta. Of course, Expo 67 was but a star attraction in a myriad of events and projects created to mark that centenary, many of them under the Centennial Commission, and many others coming up through the provinces and municipalities.

The centenary was a fervent mix of bottom-up and top-down projects. A lot of infrastructure was built, the National Arts Centre among other examples. We had a lot of good times. It was fun and productive, which is good to know when we don't have enough fun or are not productive enough.

But was it something more? Did the centennial and Expo 67, along with the new flag and medicare and the Canada Pension Plan, set the stage for a golden age of national unity and economic progress? Did Montreal vault into that league of international cities that we assumed it would at the time? Did our estranged regions and communities across Canada create new networks of understanding and shared purpose?

Unfortunately, the answer is no. Within three years of the centennial, we endured the extrasensory trauma of the October Crisis in Quebec, followed by the dramatic economic erosion of Montreal, a decade of national stagflation in the 1970s, not to mention shag carpets and bell bottoms and disco. We had the election of the Parti Québécois in 1976, a referendum on sovereignty association in 1980, and the dramatic intensification of western alienation, to the point of a separatist party arising in Alberta by 1980.

I think the question is, can our celebrations of 2017 make a more enduring contribution to the national project than the centennial of 1967, for all the latter's brilliance? I think so, if we act on the basis of two salient points, with a bias to looking towards the future.

The first of them is what I call the “Canadian equation”, which is the equation between land and people. Something has changed here in the last 50 years. Canadians have among the biggest claims on earth to the world's lands and oceans, and not just per capita but in terms of the sheer extent of this territory: about 7% of the global land mass is under our sovereignty. This creates a delight and a responsibility for its management that is global in depth and scope.

The grandeur of this space alone can be an enormous source of pride and commitment to Canada. Who else's nationality includes such potent and inspiring real estate? As the rest of the world's population scrabbles to live on more crowded and compromised lands, we retain a sense of Eden about our own.

What has changed in the last 50 years is the rampant degradation of ecosystems around the planet since 1967. We now realize here that competent management of our territory is of exploding significance to us and to the entire world. We are going to be famous in history, unavoidably, for how we manage the Canadian equation alone: very few people, much land, the capacity as rich people to do something about it.

To do it well, a great many more Canadians need to get out and actually experience the breadth and depth of the land. Most Canadians have no concept of the landscape of Canada, because they have never seen it.

The second salient fact since 1967 has to do with our human geography. In 1967, the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism realized that biculturalism was not a viable concept. Canada was clearly a multicultural country, which was officially recognized in 1971 with Mr. Trudeau's famous speech in Parliament.

Since then, multiculturalism, however, has grown dramatically. Several years ago, Statistics Canada published a report looking ahead to the nature of Canada's visible minority population in 2017. What did it say?

Amounting to some 7 million people—looking at 2017—these communities of predominantly Chinese, south Asian, black, Filipino, Latin American, southeast Asian, Arab, west Asian, Japanese, and Korean peoples will constitute 20% of our population. These communities are growing at six times the rate of the rest of the population. And 75% of these peoples are concentrated in the three cities of Montreal, Toronto, and Vancouver—and 95% of them in our cities as a whole. The more urban we are, the more multicultural we are. Even more striking is the fact that in 2017, fully 70% of these visible minorities will have been born outside of Canada. This is the highest proportion of foreign-born Canadians in the last 100 years.

One can say something qualitatively about these numbers. Newer immigrant communities are clearly more distinctive or different from mainstream Canada than in the past. Multiculturalism once referred to various ethnicities and peoples within the ambit of Europe, that is, the west. Now it refers overwhelmingly to peoples who come from different civilizations and religious traditions and values. They are visibly and culturally much more distinctive than earlier generations of immigrants from Europe. And they are likely to maintain that distinctiveness with unusual ease and passion, abetted by unbroken relationships with their homelands in the digital age.

At the same time, our aboriginal populations are emerging as more urban, self-confident, and participatory than we have ever known them to be.

This is a very significant change from 1967. The cultural differences among our communities and regions are deeper, the size of our minority communities is larger, and the concentration of different communities in certain suburbs or provinces is bigger. All of these trends are deepening. Canada is becoming multicultural with a capital G and a capital M, Global Multiculturalism.

How do we sustain shared commitment, knowledge, and familiarity among various communities in the country—a swath of common ground, if you will—so we do not become many more communities of others, not two solitudes but many?

Given the Canadian equation of land and people and the concentration of various communities in far-flung cities and regions, how do we give these groups a real appreciation for each other and for the country, for the landscape itself? How do we make this happen?

I believe that 2017 is a very good opportunity. One of the gaping truths about Canada is that very few of us know it, either in the sense of having physically experienced it or having come to actually know fellow Canadians of different cultural and regional backgrounds. Aristotle is the one who famously said that one's first sacred duty is to “know thyself”. We don't pass that test, as Canadians, in this country.

This is where I think we have an opportunity to create a transformational year in the development of our very surprising society, a celebration with unique and serious purpose. So here is my proposal.

With great energy and conviction, we need to mix up our communities and get those mixed up communities on the road together to experience each other and the country. We can envision a national mixer and mover, if you will, on a scale not before seen in any other country, social networking of a dimension and reality unparalleled anywhere. Diversity, yes, but diversity up close and on the road.

The goal is the creation of broader, deeper human networks, more shared values, more social trust, social networking, more knowledge and pride in the country, and more commitment to the health of our lands and oceans.

And so I would say that Canada's 150th anniversary should not be about things; it should be about relationships. It should not be about places; it should be about movement among places. It should not be about existing communities or groups; it should be about networking among communities and mixing up groups. It should not be about government defining a country; it should be about individuals and groups discovering their country and thereby redefining it themselves.

Imagine something like this. Under the title, “Mix-Up and Move Around”, the Canadian social network program, Know Thyself 2017, would fund an enormous variety of projects, exactly like the Glenn Gould Foundation proposal here--a huge variety of travel and schemes--on the condition that they mix up people by ethnicities, age, and other demographic qualities, and take them into parts of Canada they have not experienced before, sometimes even across a metropolitan region.

When I was at the ROM we brought a bunch of grade 4 school kids down from Jane-Finch. They came as a philanthropic thing. I met them as they got off the bus, and I said to the teacher, “These kids have never been to this museum”. She said, “Mr. Thorsell, most of these kids have never been downtown.” They didn't know they lived in a city like this. They didn't know they lived on water. They live in suburban Toronto. That's how bad it can get.

So under the title, “Mix-Up and Move Around”, we would support only the projects that come forward that mixed up people by demographics and got them out of their own backyards into other parts of the country. That would be the lens or filter by which we would assess them.

Former UN Secretary-General Javier Pérez de Cuéllar put it this way in 1991 when he gave his whole collection of mementos to the Canadian Museum of Civilization. I went to a dinner at the Prime Minister's house and I asked him, “You're a Peruvian diplomat. Why did you give all five years of your mementos from your time as Secretary-General to a Canadian museum?”. He said he had travelled the world and that Canada was the country that the rest of the world needed to become. By that, he was talking about our species of multiculturalism and living together.

We cannot be complacent about this. We must work intelligently and intensely to keep it true. The 150th birthday of the country gives us a perfect vehicle through all of these other groups who are looking for support. The goal of Canada 150 is neither immodest nor modest: We will enrich and deepen Canada's unique national character beyond the reach of cynicism or a reversal in hope for the world.

As a postscript to realizing that people often look for material projects anyway, these are not material projects. This is move, move, move, talk, talk, learn, see, experience, and then create a Facebook page to make sure these relationships develop forever in the next 10 or 15 years, instead of having Expo 67, the centennial, just fall off a cliff.

I have two short proposals for the federal government.

First, consistent with this, let's build an unforgettable bridge over the Ottawa River like those old bridges in Venice, Paris, and London that had buildings on them. It's would not be a bridge for cars, but would be accessible only to pedestrians, that is, a Bridge of Canadian Persons. Canada is made and changed by individuals like Glenn Gould, as well as by groups. Let that bridge include a contemporary version of a national portrait gallery, if you want to use that phrase, but with gathering places, performance spaces, restaurants, bars, and lookouts over the rushing waters and romantic spires. Let that bridge be both a fact and a metaphor, identifying and illuminating the individuals, not groups, that stand out in the creation of our society.

We are also part of this great geography. So consistent with Mix-Up and Move Around and getting to know each other and Know Thyself, the Government of Canada should complete, in full dress, the Trans Canada Trail project for Canada and inaugurate it on January 1, 2017. The Trans Canada Trail literally extends and completes that bridge of persons across the Ottawa River and mixes up and moves people around in a very intimate way, literally across the country.

So the Government of Canada would complete a perfect circle—there's only one kind of circle, a perfect circle—for Canada 150 by creating the biggest social networking experience in the history of any country. The rest of the world will be dumbfounded by this. By building a Bridge of Canadian Persons in a breathtaking structure over the Ottawa River and by tying it all up into the romantic Trans Canada Trail as an accessible national artery for mixing up and moving around....

Mixing up and moving around: Know Thyself. That's it.

[The Vice-Chair, NDP, Pierre Nantel]

Thank you very much, Mr. Thorsell, for this very clear demographic description.

We now turn to Dr. Robynne Rogers Healy.

[Dr. Robynne Rogers Healey, Associate Professor of History, Department of History, Political and International Studies, Trinity Western University, As an Individual]

Thank you.

I'd like to thank both the chair and the committee for the opportunity to appear. I am before you today as an historian, and am always happy to celebrate any opportunity to discuss the heritage of our great country. I'd like to focus my comments today on the sesquicentennial celebrations in three specific areas, one of which I think is quite connected to Mr. Thorsell's comments.

The first is on 2017 as part of a nation-building process, with this caveat: let's get the history right. We sit on the cusp of a number of important celebratory events in Canadian history. As most of you know, next year is the bicentennial of the war of 1812. It has already received a fair bit of press. Two years after that marks the centennial of the beginning of the First World War which, for good or for ill, has claimed a fairly important position in Canadian history. And just over five years we shall celebrate the 150th anniversary of Canadian Confederation, an event that created a state, not a nation.

In 1969, shortly after the centennial celebrations of 1967, Canadian historian J. M. S. Careless published his famous article “'Limited Identities' in Canada”. Among historians, at any rate, it's famous. In that work Careless argued that region, ethnicity, and class tended to be more important signifiers of identity than national patterns and attitudes. The flood of scholarship that followed, which focused on limited, not national identities, was by his own admission not as much a response to his commentary as it was to the academic climate of universities in the late 1960s and 1970s, which reflected the cultural upheaval of a country that has had its share of discontented Canadians and has teetered occasionally on the brink of dissolution.

That immense body of work, however, should not be interpreted as evidence of the lack of a national identity. Many historians, including Careless, as well as many if not most Canadians would agree that limited identities are integral to a larger national identity. Limited identities do not negate a national identity as much as they are a particular part of it. I think most of us personally are aware of our own limited identity before we are aware of a larger national one.

However, celebratory moments such as 2017 offer us opportunities to gather around an identity that can be constructed in positive, not negative, terms. I think a perfect example of this is the torch relay that predated the 2010 Olympic and Paralympic Games in Vancouver.

Creating a national identity has been an ongoing process since the Dominion of Canada came into existence on July 1, 1867. As the country has expanded geographically and in population, Canadian history attests to the number of disputes the country's inhabitants have had about what it means to be a Canadian. But Canadians have worked through their differences. I think Canadians continue to be prepared to work across differences to find the links that connect each of us to a larger, national narrative. While we may not see ourselves in the entirety of the Canadian story, we can each know where we fit into the evolving story of Canadian history. Getting the story right, then, is critical.

Consider the centennial voyageur canoe pageant, which is viewed as one of the most successful events of the 1967 centennial year. It garnered probably the most media coverage of any of the events that year. Ten teams representing eight provinces and two territories—Prince Edward Island and what was Newfoundland at the time did not participate—took part in the race, which left Rocky Mountain House in Alberta on May 24, 1967, and arrived at the Expo site in Montreal on September 4. Organizers and publicists, representing the race as re-enacting a specific nationalist historiography, portrayed the voyageurs as the founders of Canada and legitimized Canada itself as a culturally and geographically unified nation.

In the notes I'ved handed out, I refer to an excellent article by Misao Dean on this pageant, and I really encourage people to consult that article because it examines this issue in much more detail.

The re-enactment was not authentic. There was no effort to recruit first nations or a Métis team of paddlers, even though they were the majority of the voyageurs. They did participate, I will say, but in a minority on provincial teams. They were in a majority on the territorial teams, but they experienced such horrendous racism throughout the process that it was a horrific experience.

Secondly, very little was interpreted in French, and it should be noted that the Official Languages Act did not become law until 1969. That was part of it. Very little was interpreted in French, even though it was the French who had forged a unique relationship with their first nations allies in North America, a relationship that predated and was, in my opinion, more successful than the relationship established by the English in the Hudson's Bay Company with their allies.

First nations women, who served so importantly as translators and guides to European fur traders, were entirely absent from the pageant. Despite this, the spectacle was presented as the re-enactment of the founding of the nation of Canada. It had the three founding peoples. It incorporated lots of narratives on conquering the wilderness and so on.

This type of error continues. Just this week, I was asked to write an article for a magazine focusing on one of the issues that is related to the coming celebration of the bicentennial of the War of 1812. The request was to contribute a piece on pacifism. I'm going to quote to you from the request, because I think it's important. Specifically, the request was for "...a story on how Canadians developed as a nation of peacekeepers, with direct connections to the War of 1812 and Quaker pacifism during that conflict." I was shocked. This is the area of my own research. Such a connection does not exist. My response to the request was that any such piece would be anachronistic at best, and a fabrication at worst. Reading history backwards or reading into history the things that we wish had existed does nothing, in my opinion, to encourage Canadians to learn about their history or to take any pride in it.

The second thing I would like to comment on are the opportunities to connect to local history and heritage as part of a national story. Again, this seems to connect to Mr. Thorsell's comment. From a practical perspective, I'd encourage the committee to consider the value of local history to the larger national narrative. You have already heard from a number of witnesses representing large cultural groups in Canada. Large-scale productions will play a critical role in the celebration and its legacy. Don't forget the museums, however, in every town in Canada with their shoestring budgets and cadre of loyal volunteers. I sit on a couple of those museum boards. I have been struck by their important role as a place of experiential learning for young people.

In communities across Canada, thousands of school children go through these museums' doors each year and experience the history of their communities' pioneers, connecting them to the larger story of their country. In my current community, the local museums re-enact the resource history of British Columbia's Fraser Valley, weaving together the stories and heritage of the first nations, Euro-Canadians, and Indo-Canadians, all of whom are represented by the students who come through the site. My own children grew up in a community in Alberta that was deeply steeped in its francophone heritage, and they participated in wonderful programs through those local museums. Compared with the types of facilities available in Ottawa or the provincial capitals, local heritage sites and museums can appear as the poor country cousin. Their value, however, should not be overlooked. They too should be invited to the party.

Finally, I'd like to comment briefly on the importance of education programs that reflect accurately on our country's past, and the role that the digitization of archival records might play in this.

As I'm sure all of us are aware, educational programs and access to materials are critically important to encouraging Canadians across the country to be part of the larger national story and to inspire learning about our country's history. In this digital age, it seems to me that so much more can be done to make archival materials from across the country available to all Canadians. Inspiring students to learn their history in documents is possible if the documents are widely available.

As historians, we spend a lot of time in archives. When I can share some of that experience with students in a virtual capacity, history comes alive for them. I recognize that the process has already begun. The National Archives of Canada has some amazing digitization projects that have been ongoing, and some of the provincial archives have wonderful digitization projects. I think that any expansion of this would be welcome. As Mr. Thorsell says, if we want to connect our large land and the people of this land to one another, having resources available to do that would be a welcome.

Thank you.

[The Vice-Chair, NDP, Pierre Nantel]

Thank you, Dr. Healey.

Thank you for this vibrant testimony on the value of small museums.

It is now Mr. Paul Calandra's turn.

By the way, I think everyone knows that members of the committee have in turn a period of seven minutes to ask questions. After each period, a member from the opposite side has the floor.

[Paul Calandra, Conservative, Oak Ridges—Markham, ON]

Thank you all very much. I appreciate each of your coming here.

Ms. Healey, I'll start with you. You said something interesting about the small museums. I represent a community with four small museums--in Markham, Stouffville, King, and Richmond Hill. I get to spend some time there because a lot of events happen there. What strikes me is that the archival information they have is truly amazing. What also is a bit frightening is the fact that a lot of the local history seems to be getting lost as they compete for dollars.

How do we actually do that? Can our local museums somehow be connected in a different way so that they aren't necessarily competing against each other? In my area all four of these museums are located in the York region. They share a lot of common history but they compete against each other for resources and information. How do we tie them together?

You mentioned, again, archival information. We hear a lot about this. We heard it from Stratford the other day and the CBC when they came before us. Do you have additional thoughts on how we go about archiving across Canada? And what types of resources are needed to do that?

The last thing I'll leave you with is this. If I put a hundred historians in a room and tell them to write the history of Canada, how long would it take them to do it and what would it look like?

[Dr. Robynne Rogers Healey]

I'll start with your second question. I don't know if I can answer the third question, because I would say it would take us forever. Certainly, all of us come with our own perspective to history. I do think, however, that there is some agreement on a larger national narrative. I would not suggest that the writing of a national narrative is impossible; I would suggest that the writing of a national narrative gets bigger each year.

As to archival information and how we do this, I believe that the digital age is an opportunity for us to preserve documents in a way that didn't exist before. Of course, that's going to mean that we're going to have to be able to read those documents digitally. In 1990, had documents been digitized and saved on large square floppy disks, we would be in the unfortunate position of having to figure out how to read those documents. One thing that digitization allows for is the collection and preservation of documents in such a way that they can be shared.

Documents take up an awful lot of space. One of the problems that small, local archives face is their inability to deal with all of the materials that come to them. Within the last 50 years, and especially within the last 30 years, we've become much more aware of the importance of materials other than documents for the preservation of Canada's history. This is material history, and those artifacts are space-consuming. How do we preserve those? Regardless, I think it's important to do it.

As to how we tie museums together, I think that museums in small regions, or even in large regions, need to be encouraged to work together instead of at cross purposes. In the community that I live in—and I sit on the board of one museum—there is competition, and usually it's for resources. That's usually the problem. It's not a competition over the narrative; the competition is over who's going to get the funding to be able to do more work. Museums need to be encouraged to become part of the larger story, not just to preserve employment for themselves.

Local museums operate with important groups of volunteers. One of the archivists with whom I work in my own field is a volunteer archivist. She's over 80 years old. She drives from St. Thomas, Ontario, to Newmarket every time I want to meet with her to get into the archives. If those small archives aren't protected, we will definitely lose a critical part of Canada's history. It's not all in the national archives, or even in large provincial archives. In fact, as a historian who works largely in local archives, I think a very important part of our story is found in those places.

[Paul Calandra, Conservative, Oak Ridges—Markham, ON]

Mr. Levine, you have a very ambitious program for Canada 150. I'm wondering about some of the challenges that you're going to face, and how the government, in its Canada 150 planning, might assist you in overcoming some of those challenges in Canada and internationally.

[Brian Levine]

Of course, there's a good deal of modelling yet to be done, and I've given you the vision in broad strokes. We're in the process of assembling a strategic planning group of people with varied expertise throughout different areas of the arts and media. I communicated just yesterday with a very senior-level, award-winning television producer who has built one of the most successful media companies in this country. He has offered his services as an ongoing adviser to the project.

We can accomplish a great deal through our own networking. Obviously, at a certain stage, dollars and cents are going to enter into the equation, and our plan is to build this in a way that is scalable from a budgetary point of view. Essentially, the increments will be the number of concerts in the tour. The assistance of provincial governments to access key performing venues and historic locations obviously will be crucial. We will be reaching out and asking them to join with us as part of this process.

I would say, based on my own experience, which is entrepreneurial, that one of the most important things a government can do is to help establish some terms of reference and objectives they would like to see met and to give us as much freedom as possible once they're satisfied we can deliver.

The week of events briefly depicted in the video that I showed from our last prize celebration was accomplished by a core staff of three persons at the foundation. These events included a 250-member orchestra that was brought from South America; and work with all of the school boards in Ontario in the creation of a multimedia study guide; an international symposium on music education with guest speakers and performers from all over the world; and visits to schools, and so on. There were literally hundreds and hundreds of moving parts,

We believe in efficiency and keeping the critical path clear of too many unnecessary obstructions, simply because we have a lot of work to do and we want to be able to focus on the things that will deliver the product and results at the end of the day. Obviously, we need to be good collaborators and communicators, if we to be fortunate enough to receive public funding to help us in the realization of this project. So I'm not saying give us the money and then leave us alone. That's not how it works, and we understand that.

But what will be of the greatest assistance to us is keeping the path as clear and non-bureaucratic as you possibly can, and trusting in the skills that our organization and our partner organizations have demonstrated. Be clear to us about what you want us to accomplish. Be clear about the subsidiary goals, that we're doing more than just putting on shows, but that we're helping to build national consciousness and awareness, that we're helping to celebrate the kind of diversity and mixing of cultures that William was talking about.

Make it clear what you expect of us and then, as long as you're satisfied that we know what we're doing, let us do it.

[The Vice-Chair, NDP, Pierre Nantel]

Thank you, Mr. Levine.

Mr. Benskin has the floor.

[Tyrone Benskin, NDP, Jeanne-Le Ber, QC]

Wow. I have to applaud all of you for your presentations. I had heart palpitations, quite honestly.

I want to get to Mr. Levine, but I'm going to zero in on Ms. Healey and Mr. Thorsell because I see a link between your references to the lost history of Canada and how in 2017 we have an opportunity to remedy some of that by connecting people—almost a back-to-the-future thing—by looking at our history and using it to move forward.

With regard to some of the lost history of Canada, how would you say we could present it in such a way that it doesn't become a “look what you did” history, but “this is what we've missed and this is what you as Canadians should know and be proud of”? I'll put that to both of you.

[Dr. Robynne Rogers Healey]

In terms of praxis I could see a number of different methods or mechanisms for putting something into play that would allow individual communities to tell their own stories and make them part of the national story.

I would be disappointed if we continued to focus on the bad things that have happened in Canada. We've made mistakes in terms of actions that have been part of our own history and also in the way that we've told them. However, I don't think we need to focus on that as much as look forward to see what we have accomplished.

So in that way we should get communities to tell their own stories—and by communities I don't necessarily mean local geographic communities, but communities that expand across the country—and make them part of the national narrative. I think that digital projects are a wonderful way of doing that. People from all parts of the country could be involved in a way they couldn't be 45 years ago.

[The Vice-Chair, NDP, Pierre Nantel]

Mr. Thorsell.

[William Thorsell]

Thank you.

History is bound to be a major topic during a birthday party for a country. Certainly, some of the projects that would come forward under “Mix-Up and Move Around” would have to do with history. Of course, all of these new immigrants from different worlds—in very large proportions now—need to know some of the history that predates them in this country, although they're now making history themselves here.

The approach I'm taking is that you have to have a strategic heartbeat for something like 2017. It needs a brand, in the sense that this is what this year is about. It can't just be scattershot, where you have 500 good, worthy causes that come forward and you say, “Okay—these, these, these, these, these.” Then there's no overarching way to understand what we're doing or why we're doing this.

I'm proposing that there be an overarching idea to whatever you want to do, whether it's trying to revive history, or doing a national tour of kids from all around the country and traveling all around the country—which really is a Mix-Up and Move Around classic case—so that you don't have to decide all of these projects for yourself, but you know what you're looking for, and you tell everybody what they need to do if they want support. In a strategic vision where you say, “This is what this is about and not other things”, your worthy causes are subject to the sacred cause of knowing thyself, because this is the biggest challenge we have going forward. I'm more interested in the significance of going forward of what we can do this year than looking back so much, although history can be part of it.

How much can we strengthen the good road we're on, and not go into the ditch on multiculturalism, by framing the year and saying that whatever you have to do or want to do—whether it's in the arts, sport, conferences, or business—you've got to mix-up and move around if you are to get support for 2017. That's the core issue.

There's a wide variety of things that you would hear from across the country. Let's say you announce two years earlier what your approach will be, and you say that by 2017, all of you have a chance to come up with all these great projects. Some would be “crazy Canuck” projects and some would be serious projects, but they all have to go through the filter of mix-up and get out into the country and know thyself. That means you'd be off the hook of this risk of incoherent worthy causes, which are there every other year. History has a different value for different people in different times.

Thinking about the GTA, where I spend a lot of my time now, I am very concerned that they get to know the present—the country as it is, other parts of the country, other communities in the country—more than the past, because the parochialism that's developing among different groups with very different backgrounds is profound. When you look at the GTA, the residential distribution of populations in different parts is clearly such that it's quite common that many people—some say south Asian people in Brampton, or Asian people in Markham—may go downtown once a year in Toronto, and their children hardly ever do, maybe on a school trip or something.

We have many people in Montreal, Vancouver, Toronto, or Winnipeg who have never been to another region. They've hardly been out of the cities they live in, and have no idea where they live or who else lives there. This is an opportunity to say to all of those people, "Be creative. You guys have all the ideas, but you have to mix yourself up, and you have to get out there if you want to be part of this particular season's agenda.”

[Tyrone Benskin, NDP, Jeanne-Le Ber, QC]

Thank you.

Am I over time?

[The Vice-Chair, NDP, Pierre Nantel]

A very short question.

[Tyrone Benskin, NDP, Jeanne-Le Ber, QC]

Okay.

Just to address Mr. Levine, my colleague, Mr. Calandra, had asked a general question about the.... I'm interested in hearing a little more about the roll out of the 2017 project, in terms of how you expect to connect with communities, geographically as well as with peoples, in order to start putting this thing together?

[Brian Levine]

That's a very good question.

First, of course, we'll need to communicate with the public to let them know that this is happening. That is going to have to start happening well in advance of 2017, possibly as early at the last half or quarter of 2015. By that time, of course, we'll know whether we're a go for this project or not. We will have finished evaluating the different models for selection, if it's something more like a sporting qualifying process to choose the young artists who will move on to be finalists, and be part of the selection. Obviously, the use of communication techniques, from social media and Internet to traditional media, will be part of the announcement.

The one very real model as a possibility for the process of selection throughout 2016 is a televised event, which could be presented as a series. Although we're certainly not committed to that model, it is at least one of the options; hence our discussions with the gentleman with the very distinguished television production background whom I mentioned. The trick, if it is done in a televised series, is to provide a tremendous vehicle for using that whole process as essentially a year-long advertisement for the 2017 event that will come. Once you have accessed the mass media, you're reaching a great many communities.

But we can do more. We can use the techniques of social media. We can actually use individual outreach to community organizations and centres. We can get right down to school boards, libraries, churches, and the cultural institutions representing the diverse communities, and conservatories, and university faculties to encourage the faculties to urge their best students to come forward. The initial processes might be to submit a tape or some sort of media audition online, or to send panels of auditioners around the country—which, again, could be very interesting and provide a viable method of helping to spread the word and enthusiasm.

My feeling, though, is that it is going to snowball. Once the announcement is made, and once you begin to think of this as akin to trying out to be part of the Canadian Olympic team—only, in this case, in music—I think that people are going to figure it out and reaching across the country isn't going to be hard to do.

[The Vice-Chair, NDP, Pierre Nantel]

Thank you, Mr. Levine.

Mr. Scott Simms.

[Scott Simms, Liberal, Bonavista—Gander—Grand Falls—Windsor, NL]

I'm going to pick up on some of the points that Mr. Thorsell made, but I would like everyone to weigh in on this as well.

Several years ago--and I won't say how many, because it gives away my age--I was an air cadet and went on a trip to Alberta. There were two kids from each province and we were on a survival course in the woods. I met someone there who became a dear friend of mine. He was from Quebec City. He barely spoke English and I barely spoke French. The relationship we struck was based on our similarities. First and foremost, we didn't like the Montreal Canadiens—but there you go. Beyond that, for our living spaces and our ancestors, the same narrative was there. The only thing that separated us was language. I bring that up only because of the points you make, Mr. Thorsell, about mixing up with others. I think we underestimate what a fantastic experience that is in nation-building.

We see the kids who come here with Encounters with Canada . It's an amazing program. I would like Encounters to happen in every province. If it has to be in a provincial capital, so be it.

The demand for national conventions in St. John's, Newfoundland is phenomenal. When I go there and I speak to people from far-flung areas of the country, I ask them whether this is their first convention in Newfoundland. They tell me that everybody wants to go there. The experience is so different from their own that they are just amazed it's their own country.

So I buy into what you're saying, and I think I probably had the same heart palpitations as Mr. Benskin. You're speaking to a narrative that we have to encapsulate. All the things that feed into this, like the social media, are going to enhance this as an extension of ourselves. Not to get too McLuhanistic with everybody, I suppose the medium is the message in a big way.

One of the things you mentioned and one of the things I seem to have a hard time wrapping my head around is the idea of the legacy. Personally I think the interpersonal relationships, the mix-up you talked about, is going to be that intangible legacy.

When it comes to the concept of having a pedestrian bridge, I think that's a fantastic idea, because the symbolism is rich and the experience is much richer. But giving $50 million to each province and territory would enable them to create some sort of a legacy project. Thank you for bringing that up.

I'd like to ask each of you, if you were to running this program and could tell each province you were going to give them $50 million, would you be asking them to show you what they've got, or would you be asking them how they can enhance the national narrative? I don't know if that question makes sense, but what I'm asking is, what do you see as the permanent legacies left over?

[William Thorsell]

That part comes out of my longer paper that you've obviously read. It's not in this one.

First of all, with respect to the legacy of relationships, there are these programs where you get people together. The Governor General has one and does something every year. Various groups get kids together and make them travel. Anyone who has ever been on one of those things says, “It changed my whole life and it changed my whole sense of the country”. They make friends and all of that kind of stuff. But for a year like this, it has to be an order of magnitude bigger.

In 1967, Expo actually lost less money than was budgeted for it, in terms of the costs to the taxpayer. It cost the taxpayer about $220 million in 1967 dollars to do Expo 67--not the whole centennial. If you took that amount of money in current dollars, you could have the biggest mosh pit in the history of the country—

[Some hon. members]

Oh, oh!

[William Thorsell]

—by funding people and mixing them up and moving them around.

[Scott Simms, Liberal, Bonavista—Gander—Grand Falls—Windsor, NL]

No, that's the House of Commons you're talking about.

[William Thorsell]

Then instead of having islands with buildings that were built to be torn down six months later, as at Expo, where only a few buildings were saved.... Instead of that impermanence being built in, what you would see with the digital media is everybody who went out on their two-week mixed-up trip up to Prince Rupert, for example, and met all kinds of people there, going back and getting on the Internet and creating Facebook pages. There'd be a tremendous legacy of relationships and appreciation of the country. It's the most important thing you could do. It's invisible and critical. It's not testable, I suppose, but it's fundamental to the future of the country to get to know it.

[Scott Simms, Liberal, Bonavista—Gander—Grand Falls—Windsor, NL]

Not to add to this—and I'll get others to weigh in as well—but just very simply, should we have an Encounters with Canada across the country? Should kids amalgamate in a place like Prince Rupert from across the country? Should they go to St. John's, Newfoundland?

[William Thorsell]

Yes, absolutely, and what I'm suggesting here is that you don't have to come up with all of these programs. All you have to come up with is the principle for all of the people who want to do programs.

Mr. Levine's proposal, which I heard only this morning, couldn't be a more perfect way of mixing up and moving around people in the area of music. Somebody else is going to mix up and move around in the area of wilderness, like the things that you did. Somebody else is going to do it in the area of sport. Somebody else is going to do it in the area of clowns or something.

As long as it is a credible commitment to mixing up groups as they are created, and going off into some other part of the country to deal with other mixed-up groups or doing something like that, then you can look at any proposal. The idea is that we build this bridge, this literal and metaphorical bridge, focusing on individuals of Canadian history and Canadian society, and tying into the trail. I think it would just be a nice physical memento of the year. But the real legacy is much more profound than that, and much more long-lasting. Not only that, but it wouldn't end, would it? People who went out to Alberta and made friends while travelling there, and discovered that Alberta is much more wonderful than they ever imagined are going to go back there and take their kids, and take some other people with them. So it has a huge leg on it, I think.

If you have a rigorous strategic filter for the year, and give the year a brand, and say whatever we're doing, we're all in the same game of mixing up and moving around, then I think we can get something done.

[The Vice-Chair, NDP, Pierre Nantel]

Mr. Levine.

[Brian Levine]

I'm very, very glad you raised the issue of legacy, because it's something that I think about a great deal. By legacy, I think we all tend to refer to things of great permanence and value. To my way of thinking, there are two forms that it can take. One is the kind of physical monument that we use as landmarks in our cities and public spaces, and the other is what I think of as the monuments of human consciousness, the things that live within us. I think we sometimes tend to undervalue those because we can't see them. We all feel them, and we share them, but to understand how powerful and how long-lasting they can be, perhaps I can share an anecdote.

Something that I remember reading with keen interest about eight or ten years ago was that there were researchers at Laval University who were going to very small rural communities across Quebec and collecting folk songs that the farm people were still singing. They managed to trace the origins of those folk songs back to France in the Middle Ages—in fact, to the 1100s. None of these folk songs were preserved in France because of the sudden break that took place with the French Revolution, so the last repository was, in fact, here in Quebec. Imagine 800 years of a shared conscious legacy. It's something that holds people together and is powerfully felt.

When we create experiences that are jointly shared by people, whether they're positive or they're national traumas and tragedies, they affect us and they last going forward. So this is really an opportunity to create that kind of intense enriching experience, and those of us who were around in the centennial year—perhaps not all of us were—know that it was a transforming movement. We all sang the songs. We all shared the pride. We all felt that rush of confidence, and I think that we all carry around part of that within ourselves today and have passed it along even to young Canadians who weren't there.

We certainly have some absolutely magnificent historical sites and edifices and, of course, they should be added to, and maintained, preserved, loved, and cherished because they symbolize that inner experience. But if we can invest in that legacy of consciousness, I think that's probably the one that's going to pay the lasting dividends for the nation.

[The Vice-Chair, NDP, Pierre Nantel]

Thank you, Mr. Levine.

May I have permission from everyone for an extra two minutes for Ms. Healey to answer Mr. Simm's questions?

[Dr. Robynne Rogers Healey]

All right, I'll try to be concise.

I want to say that I can't imagine an historian who doesn't think that the past is there to guide us into the future. I would hate it if anybody assumed that I'm suggesting we gaze only backwards, because historians look back in order to move forward. That is a critical commentary.

I was sitting here thinking about people becoming part of the story, so with mix-up and move around, I think we need to leverage digital resources for this. As somebody who's lived in every region of this great country—and I currently live in the west beyond the west, living on the coast that is so far away that people forget it's part of the west—I would like to see this as inclusive as possible. Being from the west coast, I can attest to how difficult it is for our young people to get out of British Columbia. That's why they all go south. The movement is north and south, not east and west, because it's a huge country. I think we should encourage programs that allow students to mix and to move around. I was a student who participated in many of those kinds of programs.

But imagine what we could do with digital resources that could connect classrooms across the country, with resources that could connect first nations communities to non-first-nations communities, that could connect English Canadians and French Canadians, that could connect people from Richmond to people from St. John's. I think those kinds of opportunities exist today, and that is the kind of legacy that would provide us with something to move forward.

So we can mix up and move around. I'd like to see it happening physically, but I'm also saying that it can happen virtually.

[The Vice-Chair, NDP, Pierre Nantel]

Thank you very much, Dr. Healey.

It is now Mr. Andrew Cash's turn.

[Andrew Cash, NDP, Davenport, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

[The Vice-Chair, NDP, Pierre Nantel]

No, sorry about that; I got confused here.

We'll go to Mr. Armstrong first.

[Scott Armstrong, Conservative, Cumberland—Colchester—Musquodoboit Valley, NS]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

We have great sympathy for you on your first day in the chair. Congratulations.

[The Vice-Chair, NDP, Pierre Nantel]

It's the second day.

[Scott Armstrong, Conservative, Cumberland—Colchester—Musquodoboit Valley, NS]

It's the second day. Oh, sorry.

I'm trying to organize my line of questioning, so I'm going to start in the past, as an historian myself.

Dr. Healey, you talked about a digital narrative. You talked about events in our past that we should celebrate to help inform people, including those who have come here after much of our history has taken place in communities.

When I look at the dates in history that may be pivotal in 2017, there are two that are close to me because I'm from Nova Scotia and my grandfather was a World War I veteran. On April 9, 1917, we had Vimy Ridge, and it will be the 100th anniversary of that in 2017. On December 6, 1917, we had the Halifax explosion, which was another pivotal date in history, particularly on the east coast, when the Mont Blanc and the Imo collided and killed thousands of people in Halifax and flattened a great part of the city. I'm sure there are other events in other regions that took place during that year.

Do you think we could use some of these centennial and other events that took place in Canadian history as centres to bring people together from other parts of the country? I could see our having an event, not just in Canada but at Vimy Ridge in that year—the centennial of Vimy Ridge and our 150th anniversary, our sesquicentennial. I believe a lot of our nationhood really began at Vimy Ridge. That was when Canada was reflected in European papers and American papers as a nation, not just part of the British expeditionary force.

I'm just going to stop here at this point. Can we use some of these pivotal events, particularly the centennials of some these events that took place during the First World War, to try to bring our nation together?

[Dr. Robynne Rogers Healey]

I would argue that we certainly can, and I think this reflects on my comments that we need to use local heritage to connect it to the larger national story. So yes, I would argue that the enthusiasm, the opportunities, the local volunteers who exist in those places, who will be able to work on celebrations of those events, can become a part of the larger story.

You talk about the Halifax explosion. This was an event that fundamentally and quite literally changed the face of Halifax. That story can be told to people in other parts of the country, as it's not just a Nova Scotia story. It happened in Nova Scotia, but it is part of the country's heritage.

I could see that happening across the country.

[Scott Armstrong, Conservative, Cumberland—Colchester—Musquodoboit Valley, NS]

Mr. Thorsell, you talk about moving around the country. We look back at the first 150 years of Canada and we see about 80% of our people living within 200 kilometres of the U.S. border. Most of our history has taken place just north of that parallel. I believe that a big part our next 150 years is going take place in the north, where we have our northern sovereignty, particularly with some of the decisions being made at the United Nations level about 2013 and beyond.

Mr. Thorsell, speaking of mixing it up and moving around, do you think we could use the sesquicentennial to actually move a lot of our people into the north and establish greater northern sovereignty and a greater affection in our entire country for the north? That could be a lasting legacy, I believe, of the sesquicentennial. Do you have any comments on that?

[William Thorsell]

I think that is a perfect example of what you could do.

To go to your earlier example, this is where I think you need some discipline. For example, why would the 150th birthday focus a lot on things like the Halifax explosion or Vimy Ridge, which happened a hundred years ago or at other times? There's a risk of dissipation. There's a risk of good causes, worthy ideas, coming forward and our saying that it sounds like a good thing. It wasn't 150 years ago, but it was 20 years ago or 50 years ago.

Again, the rigour, the branding, the strategic focus on getting certain things accomplished in 2017 would probably lead me to say that those are great ideas, but they don't fit under this rubric, because we have important work to do and concentrate on. That is unless somebody were able to mix up and move around on the Halifax explosion or something

Clearly, the vast parts of the country that nobody, no significant population, has ever seen or been to are there to colonized in a way in 2017. In a sense, it's a year of self-colonization, isn't it? All those people from Edmonton, where I was raised, who have never even been to Ontario, much less to the Atlantic provinces, are going to colonize their own country. We're going to go out there and find out what it's all about.

Package this and market this well as a challenge to the nation, to know thyself. Open it up to all sorts of ideas. Tell people to come to you with all of their ideas, and no idea is crazy as long as they mix up and move around. Then I think we will find people in unprecedented numbers and with a certain amount of joy, and even a kind of mischievousness, saying, for example, that they have an incredible group and they're all going up to Spence Bay and are actually going to camp there and hike 10 days and will organize a group up there to stay with and so forth.

I think we would be amazed at the creativity and the sense of fun in projects—and even competition among groups, that “I've got a better idea than you for how to make this happen”. It would be a kind of national shared idea. Who has the best ideas to mix people up, not only by ethnicity but by age, by disabilities, via all sorts of different kinds of mix-ups. Say we have a proposal, like Brian's here, that is just going to blow your mind when it comes to how many different people are going to run into each other and move out.

By the way, I thought of something when you were speaking. When I was at the Globe and Mail, we were trying to cover multiculturalism, as a newspaper. It's not a beat. How do you cover multiculturalism? I asked reporters to go to one of the most diverse high schools in Toronto and to spend two weeks there to see how the kids there were getting along. What was happening? Did they have fights in the cafeteria? Did they have gangs and cliques? What was happening? I told them to go and embed themselves in there.

They came back two weeks later to report that the kids were getting along really well. They were dating; they were in games together. There were no police and there was no conflict to any significant degree. And yet there were all these different kids. I said, “Do you mean that there's no story there, except that it's a good story?” They said no, “There's a real problem with their parents.” This was because the parent of a Chinese girl was appalled that she was dating a blonde-haired kid from Rosedale. She was appalled that her daughter wanted to go into dancing instead of physics or something. So there was a lot of intergenerational conflict, and that story turned out to be a story of conflict, not among the kids but between the kids and their parents on the basis of what the kids were doing with each other and what their career ideas were.

At any rate, there is wonderful potential for people to wake up about in Canada and to come back and become ever more mobile as a result, and for our claims on our own territory to be strengthened.

[Scott Armstrong, Conservative, Cumberland—Colchester—Musquodoboit Valley, NS]

Mr. Levine, I think you have a tremendous project. When I was being educated I went on four youth exchanges—two from B.C. to Nova Scotia, by the way. It's not just the challenge of geography, but there's also a challenge of time. By the time they get out there and get rested and free of jet lag, then they have to come right back. If we're going to go from coast to coast we actually have to plan for extended stays to deal with the time issue as well as the geography.

Mr. Levine, I'm very excited about your program and moving children all around to different areas. One of my concerns is this. We've heard that this can't be top-down, that it has to be a bottom-up experience. It can't be just the federal or the provincial governments being very restrictive and saying this is what you're going to do.

The project you're already planning is a very bottom-up one. We just have to find a model that could support you and other people. Do you have any suggestions for recommendations that we could make in support of support programs like yours that are staring and others that are already at the visionary stage? How can we support that without putting limitations on ideas you've already had?

[Brian Levine]

To hearken back to what I said previously, we need to understand the basic parameters of what government is hoping to see come out as a result. It should not be government saying it would like x number of young musicians, to use my model, to be performing in x number of cities, but a matter of giving Canadians as a whole the opportunity to share in the exchange of their cultures, whether through literature, interfaith events, music, painting. or whatever else. With these kinds of exchanges, the objective of lasting communications between the participants, and, as a result, their communities, will happen.

This is a very generic way of describing it, but if you understand the end results you'd like to see and if those are made clear as part of the terms of reference for any funding that's granted—and there should be reporting, as there always should be afterwards—there should be a deliverable that is less nitty-gritty or detailed as much as a broader picture of how we see this transformational year affecting our country and our society, going forward.

So if you can take a look at it from, let's say broadly, a broader policy point of view rather than x number of musicians performing in x number of cities point of view, I think you've basically got the starting point. I think if you take that view within the obvious limits.... It goes without saying that if you're working with young people, you have to have certain safeguards to ensure their safety, including background checks on the people who are going to be working with them, and all of those kinds of things. But if you basically are prepared to trust the people, the people who are creative and the public as a whole who are going to be basically providing the participation, this is really just about creating a forum for all of us in this country to come together.

We're pretty smart folks; we'll figure it out. If you basically give us the prod and the nudge, I think the Canadian people will do the rest.

[The Vice-Chair, NDP, Pierre Nantel]

Thank you very much, Mr. Levine.

We will now start our second round. The time allowed will be shorter, only five minutes.

Mr. Andrew Cash.

[Andrew Cash, NDP, Davenport, ON]

This has been an amazing morning of information for us, and I thank all three of you. We've come to expect this calibre of input from you.

Mr. Thorsell, I'd just like to say to you personally that you did a fantastic job in your leadership position at the ROM and, of course, at the Globe and Mail. It's an honour to have you all here today.

Mr. Levine, I think the idea of creating a Nobel prize of music excellence based here in Canada is a fantastic idea and one for which you'll find many allies in this room.

These ideas are excellent, and because I only have five minutes, let's try to keep these answers succinct.

El Sistema is a fantastically successful program in Venezuela with 250,000 children involved in it.

[Brian Levine]

Actually, there are half a million now.

[Andrew Cash, NDP, Davenport, ON]

There are half a million now. Well, there you go.

You know the story, but in 2007 a loan was leveraged for quite a lot of money, and with that money they built several regional centres for El Sistema. Not only is it a physical bricks and mortar legacy, but also, what goes into the bricks and mortar is the really lasting legacy of that program.

We have 10 hours of El Sistema in Toronto, I assume. How many kids does that serve right now?

[Brian Levine]

You have to understand that El Sistema Toronto rolled out for the first time about four-and-a-half or five weeks ago. It's brand new. It's a pilot project.

[Andrew Cash, NDP, Davenport, ON]

Fair enough. We'll move on then. Understood.

When I listened to Mr. Thorsell's excellent idea, I thought we could all go home. We have the plan right here. We don't have to spend any more time. We don't have to get a defibrillator for the heart palpitations this creates—or maybe we'll have to get more.

When I listen to what you're talking about, one of the groups you haven't mentioned--and maybe you would, if you'd had more time--was the mixing of social classes, which Ms. Healey referred to. That's an essential issue going forward for Canada. We see that in the “occupy” protests sweeping not just Canada but North America.

This is an essential part of the mixing. You referenced it when you talked about the kids from Jane and Finch. We know this is a huge problem in our city and across the country. We have difficulty in cities in getting people to mix, right? El Sistema creates that arena for mixing. Not only does it create an arena for mixing, it also creates a legacy that's not just about arts and culture. It's also about public safety. It's about education. It's about nurturing children. It's about keeping families together. It's about saving the federal government a lot of money when they're thinking about building prisons.

Do you think that this kind of idea could have a place in Canada 150?

[William Thorsell]

You mean the El Sistema thing?

It's another one of those things that sound like they would qualify really well under this rigorous filter. The growth of these kinds of programs would qualify really well.

There was an earlier question on how this is done. In 1967 we had a centennial commission, so what you probably need is some kind of Canada 150 commission or something like that. If it had a mandate that was rigorous, it would not only receive ideas for mixing up and moving around, but it could provoke ideas, particularly when it comes to social class mixing, which I think is a great opportunity here. Sometimes people maybe haven't quite figured out how to do that, but with that kind of commission, without their programming, they could provoke and inspire things and say, “Hey, here's somebody who has come up with this, and other people might want to do this as well” to get out there and market this idea of mixing up and moving around. It would be a little bit of stimulus—not programming.

[Andrew Cash, NDP, Davenport, ON]

You mentioned the need to focus, and I agree. I think we can get sidetracked. We really do need to settle on a legacy, to settle on an idea of what this means and to whom it speaks. Well, it speaks to us. Who are we? Know thyself, right?

Getting back to this wonderful little program that exploded in Venezuela, a country much smaller than our own and with fewer resources, we're looking for a place to hang this, a structure to hang this Canada 150 on. Children, mixing ethnicities, regions, classes, music.... One of the problems with classical music, as we know, is that it's often the place for privileged people. That's just what it is. That's just how things have gone.

I was able to travel the country and mix and mash up because I played music. I was able to go right across this country, say 25 times. It was an amazing opportunity. I think we need to strive for that kind of a mixing. We have the programs. The federal government has programs; provincial governments have those kinds of mixing....

Music is such a fantastic way of bridging these gaps, and I would just encourage this committee, with the input from all of you here, to really drill down on this issue of a model like El Sistema.

[The Vice-Chair, NDP, Pierre Nantel]

Thank you, Mr. Cash.

Mr. Jim Hillyer.

[Jim Hillyer, Conservative, Lethbridge, AB]

Thank you.

Mr. Thorsell, in your paper you talked about Expo 67 being this big deal that everyone got excited about and that we still talk about and carry within our memories. You said it didn't have much of a lasting impact on the country, that it carried forward in our memories rather than in our lives, because shortly after Expo 67 and the centennial celebrations, you listed some pretty non-unifying things in the country, like the FLQ crisis and western alienation.

Could you comment on that a little bit? Is it just a fact of life that we may put too much expectation on this event to create some lasting legacy of unity? Should it just be a celebration? Was that a failure of the celebration for the centennial that we can learn from and make it work this time?

[William Thorsell]

That's a good question.

I think we can be overly portentous about these things. As I said in that paper, there's nothing wrong with having a great party just to have a party, even if it doesn't have any consequences. Of course, Expo and the centennial did have consequences in terms of a lot of good infrastructure. There are concert halls, libraries, art centres, bridges, and sidewalks all over the country that have Expo or the centennial on them.

I suppose, as I said, things might have been worse without Expo, because things got bad very quickly after Expo. It had nothing to with the centennial. Pierre Berton called 1967 Canada's last good year until about the 1990s, or sometime. We just ran into one problem after another thereafter. Perhaps there were global reasons for that and historical reasons for that. That's why, having been at Expo and having had a great time at the age of 21 in Montreal, when I was thinking about this idea of 2017, I wondered whether there's another way to come at it, where the odds of having a more constructive, lasting consequence would be higher than just having another world's fair, or building another building or having some parties.

If you're thinking about where the country is today and where it is going, there's a saying that if you don't change direction you're likely to end up where you're headed. On multiculturalism, I think we're headed in the right direction, so I don't think we have to change direction. As I put it in the paper, if that's true, gas up, hold onto the wheel and make sure you don't go into the ditch, because the challenges of multiculturalism are thicker now.

There are no guarantees, but I really like Brian's idea of a legacy of consciousness or legacy of relationships and building character. These are incredibly important things to do for a country. I really admire this meeting of the committee because most countries don't even have the capacity to think in these terms about themselves going forward. They're thinking about much more basic things, because they're not as wealthy as we are—or perhaps because they don't have our past. It's a marvel to be able, as a country, to think about a 150th birthday as a year of character building instead of “stuff building”, of relationship building instead of trophy building. It's a marvel to be able to talk about it like this.

[Jim Hillyer, Conservative, Lethbridge, AB]

Thank you.

Dr. Healey, I understand and actually share your concern about revisionist history. We say, let's tell our stories but let's not change them.

I don't know enough about the voyageur pageant to know what it really was. You talked about how it was a bunch of white Anglo-Saxon protestants who were doing it, when in fact it was Métis, first nations, and French who did it in the real world. Was that a case of rewriting history or was it just the fact of the matter that it was mostly the white Anglo-Saxon protestants who were participating in it? Then it was a failure of not including people in the party, more than revisionist history.

When we celebrate the Christmas pageant, we know that Joseph and Mary weren't really little kids and we know that the three wise men weren't there at the birth but showed up two years later, but that's not really the point.

We would be upset if some Chinese, some Blackfoot Indians, and some Punjabi participated in the pageant of the War of 1812, even though they weren't really there.

I guess my question is this: how do make sure we're not revising history without being too hung up on stuff like that?

[Dr. Robynne Rogers Healey]

Let me say that the story we choose to tell says a lot about who we are. That particular pageant offered a very specific nationalist narrative of nation building that wasn't reflective of what actually happened. I don't think that there's a problem at all if individuals want to engage in re-enactments for children of all ethnic backgrounds whose ancestors may or may not have been there to be a part of it. That's just participating in the story; that's not my point. My point is that the people whose ancestors were part of the voyager experience do exist in Canada and their participation was not sought. That's my point.

It's not that those who may be newcomers to Canada cannot participate in the story of Canada's past, but the fact that the story of Canada's past was changed in order to offer up a grand narrative. So when you have tourists coming and viewing this and this is the story you choose to tell, it's like getting your history from film and saying, I saw that in the movie theatre, therefore it must be true. We do a lot of analysis of that.

[The Vice-Chair, NDP, Pierre Nantel]

Thank you, Dr. Healey.

I will now give the floor to Ms. Marjolaine Boutin-Sweet.

[Marjolaine Boutin-Sweet, NDP, Hochelaga, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I am aware that I do not have much time. Anyway, my colleague Mr. Cash has already asked my first question. It was about social achievements which I think are very important. We have an opportunity to advance our Canadian social agenda, and I think we must do it on Canada's 150th anniversary.

I will therefore focus on museums. It is true that both small and large museums need help to survive. You mentioned volunteers. I for one have worked in museums for about 20 years. It is true that volunteers are very important but they do not have the same responsibilities as employees. For example, as a gallery attendant—I have a master degree—I could notice a difference in people's reactions when they tour a museum with a professional guide as opposed to a volunteer. You cannot ask volunteers to do the same things as permanent employees.

How can we help museums, both small and large, in the context of Canada 150?

My question is to Dr. Rogers Healy, and also to Mr. Thorsell who has experience with large institutions like the Royal Ontario Museum. By the way, I just got a message from my husband who asked me to say hello.

Dr. Rogers Healy, what can we do in general to help museums?

[Dr. Robynne Rogers Healey]

I do think that funding is an issue. I think though that funding for local museums needs to come from a number of different levels, from the municipal level to provincial levels. As a board members of a very small museum, I agree with you that we can ask and expect far more of staff members than volunteers.

But I think that in terms of funding, we make a priority those things that we to be a priority. If we believe that telling local stories is an important part of the national story, then we will make that a priority.

[Marjolaine Boutin-Sweet, NDP, Hochelaga, QC]

This was not exactly my question.

How can we help museums survive in order to tell these stories?

[Dr. Robynne Rogers Healey]

Survival is, for some of them, critical. Some museums operate on such a shoestring budget that there is very little leeway.

I guess I would say that is going to have to come. There is going to have to be some commitment to funding some staff for museums. Other than that, there has to be the will. There must be the political will to do that.

Without that, the history will disappear.

[Marjolaine Boutin-Sweet, NDP, Hochelaga, QC]

Mr. Thorsell, what are your thoughts about this?

[William Thorsell]

Thank you.

I'm a great fan of the smaller museums. I am a member of them in my own province. They tell stories that are intimate and personal in a way that the big ROMs don't. They are more artistically oriented, in large part.

I don't think we have what is known as a national museum strategy. There was some talk some years ago about the national museum strategy from the federal point of view. I don't think there is one. We have national museums, but we don't have a national museum strategy looking at the whole sector across all jurisdictions and sizes. So getting a national museum strategy is probably a good piece of homework to work on.

On the issue of how that would that fit into Canada 150, I use the example of a school bus of kids from Jane Finch coming down to the ROM, kids who had never been to the museum and had never been downtown. The only way they got there was through philanthropy, because we have to charge the kids for the school visits. We now have a whole program there where we go out to our philanthropic boards and ask them to fund school buses to bring in kids from the whole GTA, from economically disadvantaged areas, and get them into the museum. We ask them to try to get 50,000 students who don't have to pay to get here. They'll pay for the bus; they'll pay for all of that stuff and get them in and out. So that's mixing up and moving around, isn't it?

They're coming into a world they haven't been before, they're coming downtown maybe for the second time or the first or the third time. Programs like that would fit in with Canada 150. Maybe you're not going to support museums for Canada 150, that they are just one of a number of worthy causes; but if the museums come to you and say they've got the message and that their approach is to get all of these people who have never been to their museums, from the areas where people never visit museums, and they will visit as a result and somehow reciprocate, they might qualify for something like this.

[Marjolaine Boutin-Sweet, NDP, Hochelaga, QC]

Your national museum strategy is very interesting.

Do you have any special ideas or suggestions?

[William Thorsell]

First of all, I noted with amazement yesterday that the federal government gave $122 million to help fund the new Royal Alberta Museum. It's astonishing. I heard about it on the plane coming down, because the guy sitting beside me was coming here with the Premier of Alberta, who is meeting with the Prime Minister today, and said they had made an announcement that afternoon of more than $100 million in support of a provincial museum. It's amazing and very good that it happened.

In terms of a national museum strategy, there is a great diversity of institutions. Some are provincial, some are local, some are NGOs, etc., and some have nothing to do with government. I think the emphasis of a national museum strategy should not necessarily be on the biggest ones but those on the next levels down. Places like the ROM received valuable support for our expansion from the Government of Canada. It was a breakthrough again, as the federal government normally doesn't deal with a provincial museum.

Getting over some of those jurisdictional attitudes, as you did yesterday, is a very good thing to do. I think it should be focused somewhat on the smaller museums that have intimacy and that have a relatively greater need. That's probably where you might show some bias.

[The Vice-Chair, NDP, Pierre Nantel]

Thank you, Mr. Thorsell.

Thank you, Ms. Boutin-Sweet.

Ms. Wai Young.

[Wai Young, Conservative, Vancouver South, BC]

Thank you so much, and thank you to the witnesses for being here today.

I've certainly learned a lot. I'm not a member of the standing committee, but am just filling in for somebody. I deeply appreciate the wealth of ideas and information I received today.

Having said that, I am a sociologist and I've lived in Vancouver, Ms. Healey, for over 45 years. I've seen a great change in that city and across Canada, as one of my key things I do in going across Canada and seeing different communities has been visiting all of these little local museums, because it's a passion of my husband's. My children have been everywhere, including all over the world, experiencing UNESCO world sites, etc.

I really get this mix-up and move around thing, but I have some questions and have very limited time. So I'm going to be very specific, if you don't mind.

We have recently come through, I think, one of the most successful Winter Olympics in Vancouver. I think your notion of a strategic heartbeat is a really impressive concept. I wanted to explore that a little bit, because I believe that Vancouver and the Olympics were so successful because we had that. Everybody knows about this own the podium concept. We as a country set a goal. We included all communities in that goal via the torch relay, and then we joined together to achieve the single goal. Across the country we were inspired as Canadians. It wasn't just about winning medals; it was about our pride as a nation.

Having said that, I also believe that we can leverage this 150-year opportunity as an investment in a lasting legacy, whether via the memory of travels across Canada, as we've already discussed, or building a substantive program that our children and grandchildren can benefit from in the years to come.

My specific questions are to Ms. Healey. How can we dramatically correct our history, which I know as a Chinese Canadian is not accurate because the Chinese have been here for over a hundred years? That is not reflected in any of our history books and not taught in any of our schools. Perhaps I can pause on that for a minute before you answer.

Then I'd like to ask this. There seems to be a spectrum here of discussion around how we can correct our past and our history, but also around visioning for the future. How do we go forward, as I think I agree with you, as one of the symbolic nations in the world, as a global, multicultural, successful nation despite some issues in communities? I think that would be a successful statement to the world and a celebration of our global multiculturalism. We're not quite there yet; we need to do some work, absolutely.

Thirdly, how do we do this mix-up and move around thing--I guess that's an operational term at this point, or a concept--and still capture a legacy beyond that? How does one convert that in-the-moment experience? Throwing a great party is a great idea, but do we also want to have lasting icons and lasting legacies from that experience?

I'm going to give you a couple of things.

I don't know if Ms. Healey is aware of this, but in the City of Langley, B.C., community members are actually planning, for the Guinness Book of World Records, to hold the largest community gathering ever to create a Canadian flag of people. They need 22,000 people in a football field in Langley to put up placards--we've all seen this done--to do a Canadian flag. This will happen in the spring of next year. These events are already happening in people's minds and in communities.

I know a lot of Chinese seniors in Vancouver. A couple of years ago, VIA Rail had a discount, charging only $99 per senior to go across Canada. They could stop anywhere, get on anywhere, and experience Canada. I knew of so many Chinese seniors who had never seen Canada, but that's what they did. They went across Canada and were so excited. There were groups of them and tours of them. It was the most amazing thing. Is that the kind of thing you envision?

I know that's a lot to ask, but I only have a few minutes. Please, Ms. Healey, perhaps you can respond to some of the past and the future things and jump in as you want.

[Dr. Robynne Rogers Healey]

I'll try to be very brief so that we can move to the other speakers.

As for how we can correct our history, I think the history has been corrected. That's what historians have been doing. The problem isn't that we don't know our history, but that we don't teach our history in our schools in the way we should.

I think that the multiculturalism narrative is an example of this. The multiculturalism narrative in education has been so successful that I've had students come into my classrooms at the university level and say, “I would like to write my paper on Chinatowns as an expression of our wonderful multicultural heritage”. My response to them is, “Are you aware that Chinatowns exist because of the separation of Chinese Canadians from the rest?” So that's what I'm talking about. There's a disconnect, it seems to me, from the history that's taught in the grade schools and the history that students get as they go into post-secondary education.

That would be my comment on that.

[Wai Young, Conservative, Vancouver South, BC]

Great.

[William Thorsell]

I would like to say that your reference to the Vancouver Olympics was excellent, because that was another example of a clear strategic vision with a brand, a personality, and a program that was then developed to make sure that we all shared in a certain circle of understanding and experience.

It's very hard to say no to things, and it's very easy to see things dissipate. Vancouver was an example of a strategic vision closely held by the leadership there and implemented so that everything fed into the same sense of participation. That ran across the country with all of the different groups, symbolizing that very effectively in the way that first nations participated and so forth.

It just reiterates my sense, coming out of my own work experience, that on something like this, you need to decide what you want to do and what effect you want to have and to focus on that. Once you do that, it makes it really easy for a lot of other people to say, “I get it”. Then it liberates all sorts of participation and creativity. If you don't do that, you will just have a wish-wash and it will go away, and you won't get anything for your buck, if you will.

[The Vice-Chair, NDP, Pierre Nantel]

I wish to thank all those present this morning, and particularly Ms. Farrugia and Mr. Levine from the Glen Gould Foundation, as well as Dr. Rogers Healy and Mr. Thorsell. With your presentation entitled "Mix-up and Move Around: Canada's social network in person", you gave us a very good example of the unifying theme of the Canada 150 celebrations.

Thank you very much. We hope to see you soon.

[Tyrone Benskin, NDP, Jeanne-Le Ber, QC]

Mr. Chair, I had submitted a notice of motion, which I'd like to present before we adjourn.

[Paul Calandra, Conservative, Oak Ridges—Markham, ON]

Sorry, but this ends at 10:45, right? Could we have that business at the next meeting?

[The Vice-Chair, NDP, Pierre Nantel]

Mr. Benskin is seeking the floor. I will ask him to quickly move his motion.

[Paul Calandra, Conservative, Oak Ridges—Markham, ON]

Then I'll move a separate motion before he does so that we move in camera.

[Tyrone Benskin, NDP, Jeanne-Le Ber, QC]

Sorry, I have the floor.

[The Vice-Chair, NDP, Pierre Nantel]

We will have to vote.

We must have a vote to move in camera.

[Gord Brown, Conservative, Leeds—Grenville, ON]

On a point of order, Mr. Chairman, we would need unanimous consent to extend the meeting past 10:45.

[The Vice-Chair, NDP, Pierre Nantel]

In order to allow Mr. Benskin to speak, the clerk advises me that we should have a vote.

A motion has been moved for the committee to sit in camera. We are going to vote on this motion.

[Gord Brown, Conservative, Leeds—Grenville, ON]

Mr. Chairman, we need unanimous consent to extend the meeting. You need unanimous consent or the meeting is adjourned.