Canadian Heritage Committee on Oct. 25th, 2006

[Ken Heard]

Well, that I wasn't aware of.

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

What I'm hearing from museums is that there are incredible time delays between the time they finally get the programming dollars agreed to and signed off and when they finally see it. By then, most of the projects are done and they've run out of time. There seem to be major delays within the Department of Heritage in delivering dollars.

If a model like the Canada Council existed when the budget rolled over and the allotment was given and then the juried programs went out, people would have some sense of when and how to apply for the money, and flexibility in making sure the money actually got out there. That doesn't seem to exist within Heritage now.

[Ken Heard]

One of the problems with a government department, of course, is that any funds unspent at the end of the year lapse. That's not the case with an organization like the Canada Council. They have that flexibility if there is some delay. They can accommodate it.

For one thing, they like to rotate the program officers in the Canada Council among the field. The theatre officers have some theatre experience, and so on. They're much more closely aware of what goes on, how a theatre works, and what the problems are, like cashflow problems, for instance.

And the museums have had difficulty with this issue, certainly in Young Canada Works. These things are for summer students. If the museums don't get the grants until the end of July, and if they don't have the cash resources to pay the students, on the assumption that they'll get the grant—which is not guaranteed—most of them just don't do it. They wait.

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

Mr. Johnson wanted to intervene.

[David W. Johnson]

Mr. Chairman, on this issue, there are other funding agencies or other ways of funding that might also be considered. For instance, the government established the green municipal funds and gave the capital grant, in very large amount—a total of $550 million—to the Federation of Canadian Municipalities. They very effectively administer this by establishing the criteria, by setting up the juries, by evaluating the submissions, by awarding the money and monitoring it, and by then receiving and evaluating the reports. So there is another way of possibly doing it.

Another one might be to look at the Canada Fund for Innovation, which funds major capital expenses at universities and research institutes across the country. We should really be open in the approach taken, but at arm's length. Either that way or looking at public-private partnerships with the non-profit organizations involved, either directly with the railway museums or with museum associations, might be another way of going.

So there are a number of options, and there are a whole bunch of other questions that you people have, so I suggest that we move on.

[The Chair, Conservative, Gary Schellenberger]

Thank you.

Mr. Fast.

[Ed Fast, Conservative, Abbotsford, BC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair. I'd like to return the discussion to railroad museums.

I was intrigued a little bit by a comment made by Mr. Scarpaleggia earlier. He suggested it is a national shame that we don't have a national railroad museum, and also a shame that there is rolling stock that's deteriorating. I would gently chide the member by reminding him that for the last thirteen years, he and his government had an opportunity to address that situation. Very little of significance was actually done.

With respect to a national railroad museum, I'd like to direct a question to both Mr. Anderson and Mr. Johnson.

Are each one of your particular societies a member of the Canadian Railroad Historical Association? Are you part of that organization?

[David W. Johnson]

The Revelstoke Heritage Railway Society, through the Selkirk division of the Canadian Railroad Historical Association, is a member. In fact, we lease one of our major exhibits through the CRHA, through the division, yes.

[Garry Anderson]

We are a member of the Canadian Council for Railway Heritage. Because we don't lease equipment, the relationship with the Canadian Railway Historical Association is different. Therefore, there is that aspect of the CRHA—of leasing equipment—that makes these agreements necessary.

[Ed Fast, Conservative, Abbotsford, BC]

The CRHA appeared before us recently and suggested what you're suggesting: that there be some sort of national recognition. In fact, they suggested that their particular facility, which I believe was Exporail, should be declared a national museum, as are a number of others here in Ottawa, for example. Of course, their funding requests were significant. They were talking about $4 million, when their current total budget is less than $1 million.

I'd be interested to hear your comments on, first of all, whether you support their request to become the national railroad museum. Secondly, are you suggesting that railroad museums across Canada should receive not only some level of capital funding but also operational funding?

[Garry Anderson]

I'll take that first.

There has been a lot of discussion about a national railway museum. Many organizations such as ours have significant parts of our collection that tell a national story, and we would want to be part of what you might call a satellite of these important collections. Perhaps a major facility like Exporail could be designated the national centre for this collection, with a satellite of some other important collections linked to it.

I think the federal government has a very important role in providing part of the capital assistance for improvements to museums—not necessarily new museums but certainly improvements to those collections that tell a national story—while working with provincial and federal agencies, yes.

The operational aspect is a much more difficult question. When you break operations down into conservation, which is a particular part of a museum's operations, that is over and above what most people ever have to do, because they're conserving artifacts that return to the earth if they're not looked after. Therefore, the environmental controls, the relative humidity, and security are all extraordinary costs that we put in our budget as conservation costs, which are different from operations and different from capital.

[Ed Fast, Conservative, Abbotsford, BC]

Mr. Johnson, go ahead, please.

[David W. Johnson]

Thank you.

I think you have to understand--and I'm sure you heard on the 6th of October when Exporail was here--that the CRHA was around at the time the railways were going through major changes, and they were able to assemble what was truly an outstanding collection of representative railway and tramway rolling stock, and they have continued to do so. They have a large proportion of significant railway artifacts in their collection. They were able to pick and choose, literally, which class of steam locomotive they wanted to preserve.

They certainly have a significant portion of any national collection. They are also willing and able, and have demonstrated this, to disperse this collection to a certain extent across the country--they have pieces from Salem and Hillsborough Railroad in New Brunswick through to Prince George and Revelstoke in B.C.--to somewhere they can be assured that the artifacts are going to be properly cared for and preserved in conditions that are as good as or better than those in which they would have been able to look after them themselves. We have a location that happened, by circumstance, to have a wide-ranging collection assembled at the time these were becoming available.

Other institutions across the country have done an excellent job in assembling specific elements of the national railway historical collection, to tell the stories in their particular locales. Therefore, I think the federal government has a role to play both in supporting the local or regional locations where the national story is being told in railway museums and in supporting Exporail.

As far as funding goes, I would say that, yes, you could support both very easily. I believe you heard something in the range of $75 million, coming from the Canadian Museums Association, as a starting point for appropriate funding by the federal government for the museums in Canada. If 5% of that went to the railway museums, I think you would be making a significant contribution, on an annual basis, to improving and preserving railway heritage in Canada. We might be able to get some of the collections properly housed and properly displayed and properly interpreted for the public.

[Ed Fast, Conservative, Abbotsford, BC]

Has your organization ever received MAP funding?

[David W. Johnson]

No, we haven't received that kind of funding specifically. We have received civic funding and funding through some federal grant programs for specific projects, which were generally youth employment programs and things like this.

Revelstoke is rather unique in the railway museum field I think in that much of our revenue is self-generated. We run excellent gift shops in both Revelstoke and at Craigellachie, which, significantly, last year produced something like $80,000 of our net operating funds from the gift shops. We receive gate receipts and grants like that. That's how we survive. However, doing that means we do not have the resources we should to put into the preservation and conservation of the collection. We're more interested in the public program inside.

[Ed Fast, Conservative, Abbotsford, BC]

Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Gary Schellenberger]

Mr. Scarpaleggia, go ahead, please.

[Francis Scarpaleggia, Liberal, Lac-Saint-Louis, QC]

I'll give my time over to my colleagues.

I just want to respond, very briefly, though, to the point Mr. Fast made, by saying that my comment at the beginning, that it's a national shame that we don't have a national rail museum in Canada, was a totally non-partisan comment. This is a long-standing problem. If there's blame, it can be spread across many governments of many different stripes. I just think that now we have the opportunity to do something about it. If the Conservative government wants to do something about it, then more power to it on this scale. It was a completely non-partisan comment.

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

Thank you. I want to thank our guests today. Thank you for coming and sharing that.

I come from the opposite end of the country, where we have a lovely railway museum, in St. John's, Newfoundland. We don't have a railway any more, but we certainly do have a rich culture of it. It goes back to the stories of the Newfie Bullet, which actually existed. It was a very slow train; that's why they called it the Newfie Bullet. That's true. I'm sure you've heard of it.

In our communities across the province, we have a lot of railway cars, whether they are luxury cars or transport cars or snowplows, and they exist here, there, and everywhere, and there seems to be no organization to them. They seem to be madly off in all directions, that sort of thing.

In your experience with this stuff, what is out there that we haven't restored yet at this point? Maybe you can translate this into percentage terms. We've got a general idea of what has been done. I'm not asking for specific numbers, but it would be great if you had them.

[Garry Anderson]

To give you an example of how one-sided it was becoming, let me give you a little study I did about fifteen years ago. I'll go on to say what the Canadian Council for Railway Heritage is trying to do about this.

In 1990 or 1991, 52% of everything preserved was the caboose, and there was a very high percentage of locomotives. If aliens landed on earth and we were all taken out, they would look at what we were preserving in railway museums and think there were only locomotives and cabooses, nothing in between.

That was a pretty important note to make. The Canadian Council took it up and said, we've got to better define our story of what the railways have done in the country. So they are looking at ways to urge various groups, museums, to look at their collections policies to make sure they don't duplicate each other all the time and that they have a distinct story to tell. It has rationalized some collections, not all, giving them a better point of view on what to concentrate on, so you don't find the same story every sixty miles or five hundred kilometres. That's starting to happen.

[David W. Johnson]

I would just like to reinforce that. When you're looking at the story equipment is telling, when you're looking at the reasons for preserving it, the caboose preserved in Sicamous or the steam locomotive preserved in the park in Halifax may or may not be part of the national story, and that has to be determined. Looking at the reasons for the preservation, the relationship to its surroundings, and the technological innovations involved in that piece help tell a story, and when this analysis is done you will find a significant number of the individual artifacts tell a local or a regional story.

When you look at larger collections, you will find elements within those. In some cases, a significant percentage of the collections tell a national story or a very large regional interprovincial story, and the federal government has a role to play in supporting these.

I have no objection to cabooses in parks or snowplows in parks because they help relate to the local history, and the local community should be willing to support and maintain this equipment.

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

One of the stories to be told is that it was a great uniting factor, at least for our province at the time. This dates before we were in Confederation and before we had things like the CBC, that cross-culture of ideas. We had a train that carried whoever wanted to go to St. John's from anywhere on the island, and the camaraderie that was created and the connections created because of that is the story.... So I like your analogy of the alien who finds a caboose and a locomotive and yet not much in between.

Let me relate it now to government funding. How short are we when it comes to funding the restoration of these cars?

[Garry Anderson]

The Canadian Museum of Rail Travel has used job creation programs because of the scale of the....

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

Sorry, but I don't have much time. What I'm getting at is that in our province, and I'm sure in many others, these are one-off contributions similar to job creation projects, economic development that gets one infusion of cash, but never gets that year-over-year contribution. Is that in essence what we need more of--core funding?

[Garry Anderson]

Those programs are not made for museum restoration. You use unemployed people whom you train. They do the job under supervision. In eight months they're no longer eligible; a new group comes in.

We're constantly training people for something they won't continue. It's very hard on museums to take unskilled people who don't really know what they're supposed to do. That's been a major problem.

We've gained, but we've had a lot of work to do that.