Like the others, I certainly appreciate the opportunity of being here. I might remark that this is the first time I've addressed a parliamentary committee, other than as a public servant.
I'll provide a little background about myself. Mr. Johnson referred to volunteers. My involvement with museums in general and railway museums in particular began when I was a teenager in Montreal fifty years ago, at what has since become Exporail, the Canadian Railway Museum.
I joined the public service in June 1962 and retired in February 1994, but my professional involvement in museums began in 1970, when I became part of the arts and culture branch of the Department of the Secretary of State, and in 1970 and 1971, I was one of the four people who put together the original national museum policy, under the direction of André Fortier, who at that time was assistant under secretary of state.
Then, finally, from March 1976 till my retirement, I was employed by the National Museums of Canada in a senior staff position, undertaking a wide variety of assignments regarding such things as friends organizations, volunteers, tax issues, copyright funding, governance, and many others.
I submitted a brief to the committee on October 1.
I understand there is a French version of this brief and it has been circulated. Fine.
I'd like to refer briefly to two points I made in that particular brief, and that is all. They are two that have bothered me for years. One is the lack of good statistical analysis of museums, obviously to serve as a basis for policy development and application of any policy, particularly with regard to funding from the federal level. The second point is how best to administer any enhanced federal financial assistance and other assistance to museums, if it ever happens in time.
On the first point, since the mid-1980s Statistics Canada, every two years, has been collecting information about heritage institutions: financing, volunteers, employment, visits, and so on and so forth. Up until the time of the 1992-93 collection, these results had been published by Statistics Canada in paper form, and the breakdowns had been done in several different ways, and included one by what I call museum sector. They're listed on the last page of my brief. There are eleven altogether, running from art, human history, multidisciplinary, and so on, including transport. Since then, they have published only aggregate figures for the entire heritage institution community, broken down financially but not by museum sector. Statistics Canada will furnish, of course, other analyses and other breakdowns for a price now, because they're on a partial cost-recovery basis.
In the exercise that the Department of Canadian Heritage did in 2005, leading up to the possibility of a new museum policy, they did finance from Statistics Canada an analysis broken down by budget size: museums with budgets under $100,000; between $100,000 and $1 million; and above $1 million. What they specifically were looking for was what had happened to attendance figures. In the ten-year period from 1991 to 2002-03, the aggregate attendance at museums with annual budgets larger than $1 million fell by 40%. Museums with budgets under $100,000 largely held their own, with a drop of only 8%. For museums in this range of between $100,000 and $1 million, the fall was 19%. So the obvious question is, “Why? Why did this happen?” The answer is that we don't know all that much about it.
However, anecdotal evidence does suggest that for attendance drops, if indeed there have been any, there is some variation by museum sector. But at the moment, we don't have the information to tell us this or not to tell us this. Certainly I would like to know. It was something that, if I were administering a grants program, I would want to know as well.
I took the last year for which some sector numbers were available--I'm already over five minutes--which was 1992-93. In that particular year, taking an average for the entire country, 80% of museum revenues were unearned; i.e., they came from one or another level of government, donations, and so on. However, for transport museums in that year, only 52% of the income of those museums was unearned. And I think this phenomenon was mentioned by Steve Cheasley when the CRHA appeared here.
Another interesting note here is that when you look at unearned income per visit for art museums in this particular year, 1992-93, it was $23.62, while for transport museums it was $4.70. Now these numbers, especially since they're fifteen-plus years old, raise far more questions than they answer. But these are the kinds of things I would like know about, especially now since after retirement I was given a post-retirement honourary position as a research associate at the museum studies program at the University of Toronto. What have the trends been since then, and just where is the museum community going?
So one of the things I've recommended is that the Department of Canadian Heritage sponsor the analysis by Statistics Canada to try to give some insight into where different parts of the museum community are going.
Since I'm already up to seven minutes, what I'm going to do is cut short the second one to say that in my own experience, if there's going to be a major increase and upgrade in federal financial assistance to museums, it should be administered by an arm's-length organization. Interestingly enough, in 1987, when the National Museums of Canada was being dismembered, the predecessor of this committee recommended that the museum assistance program be administered by an arm's-length agency.
Thank you.