When I made that comment, I wasn't specifically referring to railway museums. The reason I think--I'm not alone on this--museums should have the same kind of arm's-length relationship that the visual arts and the performing arts have is that museums can be very controversial. Art galleries and fine art museums have frequently been controversial with respect to some of their purchases.
Some of the things a natural science museum could do on climate change might not necessarily please the government of the day. There's another issue. Even for transport museums, and railway museums in particular, given the fact that the world is running out of gas, there's a free-choice educational role there. Railway museums could say, basically, that it is not going to be possible to drive cars to do everything by way of transport forever. It's for the same reason; it's to protect them from that. And that's my main reason for doing that.
There's also another one in that the way Canadian Heritage is presently organized, the actual grant analysis is done at the regional level by regional grants officers who are doing it for a whole plethora of grant programs run by Canadian Heritage, and they don't have the same sort of hands-on feel for any particular one of them, because they just don't have time to do that.
Certainly one of the things that could be said for the National Museums of Canada before it was restructured, despite all the perceived imperfections of that organization, was that at least the board started its approach to assistance to the other museums in the country, besides the four nationals, by defining their needs, rather than the program needs of a government department. And that's what the Canada Council does. Certainly, my own experience is that that's quite important.