Canadian Heritage Committee on Dec. 6th, 2011

[Andrew Cash, NDP, Davenport, ON]

Or they would not want to do.

[Claude Joli-Coeur]

Exactly. So is it a distraction? No. We always take the approach of being innovative.

[Andrew Cash, NDP, Davenport, ON]

Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Rob Moore]

Mr. Young.

[Terence Young, Conservative, Oakville, ON]

I really enjoyed your presentation, gentlemen. Thank you for coming today.

Mr. Joli-Coeur, I wanted to ask you about an opportunity that exists right now, maybe for the first time in history, to expand on the oral history. The veterans project was so exciting, because real veterans went on camera and told everybody forever what it was like to be at war. It's invaluable for anybody who wants to retell their stories or who has this understanding of them, and it's relatively cheap to do. You sit somebody down, you put a video camera in front of them, and you have it forever. And you can repeat it at a very low cost.

I want to congratulate you for that project and ask what you're doing to expand on the use of oral history in any of your areas of endeavour, and what might be done leading up to 2017 to tell future generations, and anybody in the world who is interested, what Canada is and where Canada is going.

[Claude Joli-Coeur]

Thank you for your comment on that project. It was very emotional. I was sitting beside a veteran when it was shown at the museum, and the emotion there....

Mr. Young is referring to the project we released on November 11, on the Afghanistan soldiers from the 22nd Regiment. We were very successful in broadcasting that piece on the Internet, and over the weekend 46,000 Canadians viewed that film. So that's a very good point. Generally our productions are very much focused on people like that.

We are currently involved in a project for which we are documenting the stories of Inuit located in Nunavik, and it uses exactly that approach. People who are going to die in the coming years are being filmed and their memories will remain available on the web. That's a very good point to keep in mind for future projects.

[Terence Young, Conservative, Oakville, ON]

I realize it's early—it's six years away—but I just wanted to suggest it. I also wanted to ask you if you had any ideas yet for preserving it or if you wanted to consider developing any.

I wanted to ask you about the film in Shanghai, because that was so interesting. You said six million people, so I guess that would be people from all over the world, but mostly from China.

[Claude Joli-Coeur]

They were mostly from China.

[Terence Young, Conservative, Oakville, ON]

What was that film about? What was the purpose? How do you measure its success?

[Claude Joli-Coeur]

The film was six minutes long. It was screened non-stop. You have to realize that they have 30,000 visitors every day at the Canadian pavilion. Our challenge was that they had to see that six-minute film and go out so that new people could come in. Our challenge was to tell one day in the story of Canadians living in cities, because the theme was cities. We had a team of photographers who went all across the country, took hundreds of thousands of pictures all over the country in cities. We did an animation film from those pictures, and we had that story in six minutes.

The Chinese were surveyed just after the exhibition. There was a survey taken of their impression of the Canadian pavilion. Six months later, what came out was that what they remembered the most about the pavilion was our film, which was at the end. That's something we were quite proud of, and I think it was a success, since you could say six million Chinese have an idea of what Canada is.

It's still on our site. You can see it on your computer. It's small, but it gives you a good idea.

[Terence Young, Conservative, Oakville, ON]

Do you have any thoughts on a theme for Canada's 150th anniversary?

[Claude Joli-Coeur]

At this early stage, it would really be to expand on what we did on Canada CODE.

Maybe, James, you can explain a little bit more what we did.

[James Roberts]

Canada CODE is a project that allowed Canadians from everywhere to document something about their daily lives and their pride in Canadians and Canadian athletes through photography, video clips, sound, music, etc. The site allowed them to upload their personal stories to the site and share them with other participants on the project. The stories were projected at various locations during the Olympics and also on the web.

The idea is to expand on that and capture Canadian stories by Canadians locally where they live and share them amongst ourselves and build on that. We're thinking right now about what that will become.

[Terence Young, Conservative, Oakville, ON]

Thank you.

Does your system have redundancy to protect the data in case there's a fire in your building or something?

[James Roberts]

Yes.

[The Chair, Conservative, Rob Moore]

Go ahead please, Mr. Nantel.

[Pierre Nantel, NDP, Longueuil—Pierre-Boucher, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I want to thank the three of you for being here this morning.

My first question is for Mr. Joli-Coeur.

Do you have any intention of creating a kind of inventory or directory of especially relevant films, documentaries and short features as part of the 150^th anniversary?

[Claude Joli-Coeur]

That's already being done regularly through our website, at www.nfb.ca. It contains certain specialty channels, and we broadcast theme-driven films.

Mr. Roberts, could you provide more details, please?

[James Roberts]

We create channels, and we create collections of films on various topics. Some of them will certainly be about the 150^th anniversary, but also about other topics that tie in with that.

[Claude Joli-Coeur]

We need to get organized in terms of technology. We are selecting films related to certain events or themes.

[James Roberts]

It's all very flexible; we can practically do it overnight.

[Pierre Nantel, NDP, Longueuil—Pierre-Boucher, QC]

My question is for the three of you. Much has been said about the fact that Canadians from all walks of life should be consulted about those celebrations. Will you possibly gather heritage-related information that would be seen as relevant to the 150^th anniversary, be it in terms of archives, documentation or even home movies?

[Daniel J. Caron]

We work with our collections. We do not create or interpret. We try to offer the best possible representation of what has been done in the past. With that in mind, we regularly consult our portfolio partners who provide us with ideas. In addition, our experts tell us where to find the most important parts of the collection related to that. Therefore, we hold internal discussions, but we also talk about those issues with all our external partners. They include archives, libraries and Montreal.

Users help us as well. I want to mention that we have a relationship with our website users. They help us in terms of brainstorming. They visit our website, and we see which areas Canadians are more interested in.

[Pierre Nantel, NDP, Longueuil—Pierre-Boucher, QC]

I would like to talk about the website. I visited it, and it is very modern. I saw that it talks about December 6, the anniversary of the École Polytechnique tragedy, as well as other events.

Mr. Caron, you say you have no opinion. Last week, an article in Le Droit said that losing the data from the long-gun registry was unfortunate. Do you have any comments on the fact that some information may be erroneous? There must be many errors in the documents that were written with a quill on birch bark. What's your opinion on that?

[Daniel J. Caron]

Our omnibus legislation does not apply to that. So I would have to look at the data on it.

In addition, we discard many records because they have no historic value, especially the case files. If we were to keep those, it would be a monumental task.