Canadian Heritage Committee on Oct. 25th, 2006

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

That's a very good point. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

[The Chair, Conservative, Gary Schellenberger]

Thank you.

Mr. Malo.

[Luc Malo, Bloc, Verchères—Les Patriotes, QC]

Welcome to our guests. Thank you for being here.

Mr. Chair, comments by Mr. Johnson and Mr. Anderson are in full agreement with those made by people from the Musée ferroviaire de Delson/Saint-Constant.

The need to get funds to be able to conserve these large artifacts has been confirmed in their comments.

I thank our guests today for confirming these main elements of our analysis of the policy on museums.

They dealt earlier more specifically on their funding needs. But I think if we can agree on the vision we want to present to museums, or our vision of a policy on museums, the discussion should not continue here, but with the finance minister or the finance standing committee. They are the ones who will have to provide the funds to implement this vision or policy on museums. Obviously, this committee should provide this policy, but the Canadian heritage minister will have to promote it.

I would like our witnesses to comment, if they care to. I could even let Mr. Heard take the floor, since he did not have enough time to speak about all he wanted to deal with today.

[David W. Johnson]

Mr. Malo, in terms of having the debate at the Treasury Board, I'm sure that has to come. From your point of view, I'm sure the committee, if it chooses to do so, will recommend to Treasury Board that additional funding is needed.

There are specific steps that you could push the Treasury Board towards, for instance, to help with this funding and these decisions. Some of them were included in the recommendations in my report.

For instance, curators can currently identify artifacts and cover the rationale for tax receipts up to $1,000. This hasn't been adjusted in a significant number of years, and inflation alone might take that value to $10,000. Institutions need to be relieved of the responsibility of having to get third-party arm's-length appraisals for a significant number of artifacts that are donated.

That's one concrete way you could work with the Treasury Board to make a change to allow this to happen and to make things easier.

Similarly, I mentioned that it would be helpful to have the preparation and movement of the artifacts to the railway museums recognized within that tax receipt. I think this would be very helpful for all of the institutions. I think it could be expanded to other museums as well.

For instance, I think proof of fair market value for donated artifacts could be based on evidence that is even supplied by the railway companies. In our case, we're getting a donation of a particular locomotive, and its class happens to be an SD40. The railways sold hundreds of these in the recent past. Why wouldn't proof of value of sale be sufficient to justify that, rather than the institutions having to bring in a person to do an arm's-length appraisal?

There are ways to help work with the Treasury Board. Some recommendations for funding have already gone to Treasury Board, through the pan-Canadian funding practice in communities, from the Canadian Council on Social Development. Many recommendations in this report would correspond with the kinds of things that we're saying would make things better.

Are there any others?

[Ken Heard]

I don't think I have too much to add to that.

In connection with fair market value and evaluations, one of the difficulties that not only railway museums but technology museums in general have had is that the Canadian Cultural Property Secretariat and the Cultural Property Export Review Board don't have expertise in technology.

That's another one of the recommendations in my brief. I think that particular problem needs to be rectified.

If a streetcar is in good condition, its value could approach $1 million. We're now talking about artifacts, technological artifacts, that are at least fifty years old. It's not only works of art that are now getting into these sky-high numbers.

[Luc Malo, Bloc, Verchères—Les Patriotes, QC]

Mr. Chair, I would like to make one last comment to clarify what I think.

Mr. Johnson, the finance standing committee is having its prebudget consultations at this time. I urge you to send your recommendations to the clerk and chair of that committee.

[The Chair, Conservative, Gary Schellenberger]

Thank you.

Mr. Warkentin.

[Chris Warkentin, Conservative, Peace River, AB]

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Thank you to each of the witnesses for coming today. I appreciate your insight and your testimony today.

When you think of the things a person can collect in life, trains may not be the obvious answer for many people. When I think of it, if I had brought home a train, my wife would have looked at me strangely and said, “Well, what are you going to do with this?” I certainly see where the passion for it can come from.

I think of myself as a bit of a handyman. Maybe someday I'll have to come and volunteer and spend some time there stripping paint or something, but it certainly looks like a wonderful process.

I come from a different type of construction background, but I understand the issue that once you've built something, you have to be able to maintain it, and if you do it right, maybe there's a chance that maintenance will last or it won't have to be ongoing in the same way. I'm just wondering, in terms of the financial maintenance.... Obviously, these older structures need to be maintained, and there's an ongoing cost once they've been restored. I'm wondering if your museum has ever looked at a tie-in endowment fund to these types of structures. I know there are many museums that have been looking into it, but of course the cost seems inhibitive sometimes. I'm wondering if you can tell me about your experiences looking into endowment funds, or the possibility of those, to help with the preservation and the long-term maintenance of these units.

[David W. Johnson]

We have, and in fact one of the strategic objectives and management plans for the Revelstoke Railway Museum is establishing this endowment. There is already a Revelstoke Community Foundation in place, which will manage that, and they manage funds for many organizations in Revelstoke. As such, we don't need the expertise ourselves to look after and manage the funds; we need to do the fundraising and we need to spend the results of that--we hope.

[Chris Warkentin, Conservative, Peace River, AB]

What type of figure are you aiming to reach, and what would an annual return be on that? Do you know what those numbers look like?

[David W. Johnson]

This is difficult for us to say at the present time, because also part of the strategic management plan is the expansion of the museum. We have to judge our fundraising efforts in terms of both the capital campaign and the endowment. The two may be linked, but that still has to be resolved.

[Chris Warkentin, Conservative, Peace River, AB]

We have talked to a number of different museums, the two railway museums, and to the groups that have come before our committee, and we have spoken to some local volunteers and to people who are involved in our local museums. It seems to me the issue of ongoing funding is becoming a big issue. The federal government, in the past, has been involved in funding these one-time types of projects, and they've also been involved in the travelling exhibitions. The concern has been raised, it seems, that maybe the ongoing funding needs to be addressed. I'm wondering if it would be your view that help with an endowment fund or contribution from the federal government to an endowment fund would be one way of addressing the long-term funds that are going to be required to maintain the museums in the country.

[Garry Anderson]

That might be something that would be worthwhile in the longer term. However, right now some of the major conservation concerns are ones we have to look at before our artifacts deteriorate to the point where it would take a much larger amount of money to bring them back or where they disappear. In Cranbrook's case, we've been doing quite well in terms of developing our operating earned revenue, and that's making a major difference as we complete some of our business units, such as the tour ticket sales, the new gift shop, the rentals of the Royal Alexandra Hall. That will obviously support our core funding, but it's the large capital expenditure that we're faced with to reduce our long-term operating and conservation costs by the amounts of energy we're going to take if these cars aren't covered, in our case, for instance.

[Chris Warkentin, Conservative, Peace River, AB]

You talk about the necessity to tell a story if we're going to possibly look at a national strategy to preserve our railway heritage. I'm just curious. Of course, you talked about the necessity to identify the artifacts that are necessary to tell the story. Has anybody done a consultation as to how big the story would get? How many dollars are we looking at in terms of acquiring the necessary items to tell the story? How many facilities would we be looking at? The only reason I'm asking is this. How far do we have to go before we know what the overall project would look like, and then from that, how would we derive how much it would cost to maintain that?

[Garry Anderson]

I think a lot of the collections already exist and are being partially funded by other interests—the municipalities, maybe the province--other sorts of support. However, I think an assessment of the state of the railway museum heritage in Canada would be a very good idea. That has to be done at the federal level, to coordinate it all. I don't know what the amount of money would be. It'll depend on the terms of reference that make items of national interest versus regional or local or provincial interest. That would come out of an assessment.

Rest assured, though, a lot of these are already being partly supported.

[Chris Warkentin, Conservative, Peace River, AB]

I'm not looking for that, if it hasn't been done. I'm just curious as to whether any association has been involved in trying to identify what would be necessary to build the national story and what criteria would be used to identify what the national story is all about.

[Garry Anderson]

In my brief, I mentioned that the Canadian Council for Rail Heritage was looking at a draft evaluation mechanism for historic railway equipment, and this is based on what a lot of conservators and architectural historians are doing for buildings. They've adapted this. It's being done by Jim Cullen, a former senior management person with the California State Railroad Museum, and Hal Kalman of Commonwealth Historic Resource, and they do go into a number of questions that they ask, in many ways.

I will leave this in our package for you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Gary Schellenberger]

Thank you very much.

Mr. Angus, do you have any more questions?

[Charlie Angus, NDP, Timmins—James Bay, ON]

Yes. I want, for the record, to change the tone of the discussion a little bit.

You gentlemen are in the business of preserving big artifacts. I was in the business of preserving even bigger artifacts--mining headframes in the pioneer community of Cobalt--and we had a hell of a job. We had two levels of government that would say to us again and again, “Prove the value.” They saw these pieces as massive structures of junk. In fact, we had to fight with the government to stop them from bulldozing what we saw as artifacts.

Then lo and behold, a provincial television show voted Cobalt the most historic town in Ontario, and suddenly we had bureaucrats running in saying, “Oh my God, how do we save your heritage?” Well, we had lost most of it by that point. But we still had some worth saving. Finally, the federal government came to the table saying that this is a nationally historic site--after, of course, we had lost a lot of our artifacts.

I'm telling this story because the argument we always had to use was not so much that these were nationally significant sites that were being bulldozed, but that this was an economic engine. I don't think that in the discussion on museums we hear very often about the pivotal role museums play, especially in the regions.

So I'd like to ask you, in your experience, when economic development plans are being discussed, when economic development strategies are being discussed, when tourism strategies are being put forward, are the museums somewhere out there doing their own thing, or are you a pivotal part of what a lot of agencies and businesses are looking for in order to attract people and economic dollars to your region?

[Ken Heard]

One bee in my bonnet is the fact that technology and technology transfer in the economic history of the country has been underrated, and there are all sorts of examples of the things you were talking about. Railways are just one part of that particular story. There are mining, forestry, some of these major industries. They don't have a heritage value in the mindset of far too many people. When you go to a place like the U.K., you see all sorts of artifacts from the industrial age being preserved, but we're not doing that here. My own view is that we need to work on that point.

[David W. Johnson]

Just to continue on that, yes, the museums are aware of their importance to the community in terms of economic development. In my brief I mentioned job creation and the numbers of people employed. Statistics Canada figures show that culture in Canada constitutes something approaching 7% of the GNP, or GDP--whichever they use. So in fact, this is a major factor.

The Revelstoke Railway Museum, for instance, is identified in the Revelstoke cultural strategy as being one of the major factors that bring and keep people in Revelstoke, and as such, is worthy of support. We do draw upon that and we do make the point that it is a real, positive contribution to the community. And that goes for other railway museums too.

[Garry Anderson]

Likewise in Cranbrook. We're involved in the tourism development sector, the economic sector, which is part of that. We're involved in the educational sector with the college because of programs they do where they use our facilities. It's really a growth thing for us. We have to educate people as to what we really do.

Translating that into the dollars necessary to do the capital improvements we need to conserve the collections for the future is a very big task in a town of 20,000 people. We also have one smaller problem, and that has been, over the years, because we aren't just a local museum, people often don't identify with the national story. We have a local component; we have a provincial-regional component. So we're trying to balance all these things and keep people informed as to how we fit in that community.

A museum like ours, a collection, would normally be here in Ottawa with all of these long trains, and compared, but they're not; they're in a smaller community that's trying to see where they identify with it and how much they should be paying versus how much the province or the nation should be paying for these.

[Charlie Angus, NDP, Timmins—James Bay, ON]

Again, I wanted it on the record, because I know when I was a director on our chamber of commerce, when we were doing development strategies...what were we asking people to come to? Every town in northern Ontario has clean air, and every town in northern Ontario has bush, and every town in northern Ontario has a lake, but only this town had a railway museum, only this town had a war museum, only this town had a mining museum, and in Kirkland Lake now we have a hockey heritage museum. And that seemed to be almost the entire basis of our tourism strategy. So we were working at the chamber level with our museums.

Again, I'd like to give you an opportunity if you want to hammer home the point, because I think it needs to be hammered home. It's not just the lack of research dollars, it's not just the fact that artifacts are disappearing, but these are central parts, especially to a regional economy, of any tourism strategy. Is this not the case?

[David W. Johnson]

It's absolutely the case. Museums that are integrated into their communities take advantage of this and make that contribution to their communities.

[Garry Anderson]

Railways have a particular attachment to the Canadian identity, and people love to see what are in these railway museums or whatever story they tell.

One other aspect I can mention that is part of the development of the Canadian Museum of Rail Travel is the whole area of railway excursions. We happen to be on a rail line and the trains come right into the museum, so our experience is amplified in many ways, like Revelstoke. Not all railway museums have those connections, but what's going to be a very big important part of future business development are these trains that come right in, real trains, and then people visit the historic collections and then maybe have a dinner or something in the Royal Alexandra Hall--we can accommodate 200 to 300 people. So suddenly the volume is on our side, and being able to have large capacity for short-term or long-term visitors is really an important part of it. There are other museums that do the same.