Thank you, Mr. Chair. Je voudrais dire un gros merci à vous, monsieur le président, and to all of the members of the committee.
I'm not going to read our brief to you. You have a copy of it. Instead I'd rather just focus on a couple of points and some of the recommendations. The brief that we've submitted I think is quite comprehensive. It includes a number of very clear recommendations.
I want to first say a little bit about the association I represent. It was founded in 1947, so it's been around a long time. We undertake a high level of consultation with our members, as you've heard from my colleague from Alberta. I think it's safe to say we're experienced and well recognized. I, for example, have been the executive director for over 25 years. I've worked in the sector for about 35 years. My colleague, Guy Vadenboncoeur, used to be the president of the association in the early 1980s. So there's a strong network within the museum community across Canada.
The recommendations that we have before you are built upon what was looked at last year by the Government of Canada. We have updated those and made some revisions to them. We've done that based on consultations. In fact in the middle of October of this year, we held a meeting with about 20 to 25 representatives from across Canada. They came to Ottawa. We took the policy apart. We came at it with some new ideas to face the realities that are there. For the most part, the situation has not changed, but we think there are some new opportunities we could build upon. In addition, my board has met. All of this has just been in the last couple of weeks, since the cuts have put museums much more in the public eye.
The other thing I want to touch upon before I get into the recommendations is that there is unanimity within the museum community on this. I think there is a very high level of unanimity within the general public that museums are in fact important. We have heard from cities, from councils, from towns. We've heard from the tourism industry and the municipalities. We know the provinces are all onside in official consultations, and we've heard from all political parties that do believe in the importance of our museums. So I think we've got a win-win situation here.
We met last week with the Minister of Canadian Heritage. At that time, we presented her with these recommendations in a slightly different-looking document, using, as we say in Ottawa, a “deck”. We've asked her to consider bringing in a new museum policy as soon as possible. She has in turn asked us to work with her department immediately, which we've agreed to, and deliver recommendations to her before Christmas. We've asked if she would actually see about delivering a new museum policy as early as early 2007, and we've offered her the opportunity to announce it at the Canadian Museums Association conference, which will be in Ottawa.
The recommendations we've made I think are quite clear:
We've asked to have the policy as soon as possible.
Secondly, we have presented them in short-, mid-, and long-term approaches. The first one, being the most immediate one, would be to revise or replace the museums assistance program with a new mechanism that will meet the needs of museums today. We have laid out a number of criteria for your consideration: multi-year funding; a competitive basis; a program that's more responsive, more flexible, and more efficient. We've suggested in fact that grants be turned around in a four-month period, noting that the Honourable Perrin Beatty, when he was minister, had guaranteed a three-month time, which he did deliver on. We currently have museums waiting many months for approvals.
Thirdly, we recommend that you consider how such a new program should be delivered. There are a number of criteria that we present to you about qualitative decisions, efficiency, effectiveness, low cost in administering the program, and the principles of having peer review.
That takes us to basically two scenarios. One is that it stays within the Department of Canadian Heritage. The other, which is our more preferred option, is that the programs be moved out to an independent arm's-length agency--and we can discuss that in further detail.
In terms of a mid-career approach, which was the short-term approach, we recognize that there are a lot of other programs that the department--and elsewhere in the government--provides to museums. We think many of these programs need to be evaluated just as the museum assistance program was evaluated, with external appraisers. That's going to take a little bit of time. There are other client groups that would be affected, but we think that would be in the overall best interest to ensure those programs are meeting needs today.
A longer-term recommendation we're making--not one that we have to wait for long term, but one that will take a number of years to get set up--is to create a public-private partnership to help fund preservation of important collections across Canada. You've heard from a number of the railway museums and so on. This is coming from the conviction we have that museums are best when they are funded by many different sources. We don't expect the federal government to come in and solve all the problems overnight. We want to have a realistic approach.
We've seen models that exist in other countries where endowments are created with the new tax incentives that have been recently brought in. We think there's an opportunity there to build up a fund that would complement the federal granting programs. We believe that this could be developed--it will require a bit of seed money--but it will take us a couple of years to really get something like that going and have a board of very prominent Canadians and the usual campaigns that would be associated with it.
In addition, we recommend a further tax incentive that would help in the building of such an endowment, and that would be to exempt capital gains on donations of land, property, and other elements that could go in as assets to such a foundation.
Finally, one of the other issues that face the government is the growth of new museums. There are new museums that keep popping up, and the federal government does help many of them out with capital funds. We think we need to get a better handle on this whole area. Further, we need to see better coordination between the left hand and the right hand of government. At the very least, we suggest a study be done with a five- to ten-year horizon that identifies upcoming major capital projects. This will help in the planning for those so that they're not so much of a surprise to us.
Secondly, we also believe there needs to be coordination with those programs that fund capital, which are often out of regional development agencies or in other areas--they're not out of the museum assistance program. It's something I think we've all heard for a number of years, and I think that would be very useful.
Those, in a nutshell, are the key recommendations we're making.
I'll turn it over to my colleagues. Thank you.