I do not know how to explain it. Librarians and records officers have been talking about it for eight years. Eight or nine years ago, we were leading the pack. Lise Bissonnette and I, as well as other colleagues, were ahead of the game. Unfortunately, governments did not heed the recommendations of librarians. We held consultations and workshops to discuss the issue in great detail, and we developed a national strategy. We built a professional foundation to facilitate progress. Unfortunately, however, there is no program aimed at digitizing our heritage.
The situation you described regarding the rapidly disappearing customs and languages of first nations illustrates the necessity to record them permanently and make them available on the Internet. It can be done, it is not that hard. I am saying that, now, it is not a matter of having the technology. Canadian technology is very sophisticated, it is great. We can use that technology to preserve our documentary heritage. That is what Library and Archives Canada, our museums and the National Film Board of Canada are trying to do, but they have very limited budgets. To my mind, this is a crucial project. It is not just another expenditure.
We've just spent how much money on stimulus programs to build buildings? Someone described what we want to do to create the knowledge network to put Canadian knowledge, Canadian detail, online as building the Canadian Pacific Railway. This is building the trans-Canada railway but for a knowledge society for our intellectual capital. This is a whole new world we're working in, and we're still using models that were really good in the 1980s--that was good stuff--but we're in the 21st century. We're dealing with a whole new way of working and we're working in an environment that's highly competitive.
In the United States, the last I heard, the Library of Congress was investing over $100 million in digitization. The French government sent some senators to Waterloo to talk with us at the university and with Open Text, and they're looking at spending 780 million euros over five years on a project to digitize the accumulated material in
the national library and, I hope, the national archives. It is essential for us, for Quebec.
But we are not in that game. What we're describing, what the Canadian Library Association, Canadiana.org, our network of major libraries in this country are describing is a key part of the infrastructure for a knowledge society. We're saying that if you only have to do it once, we should do it well. We should preserve it.
We should put a very powerful Canadian research engine on it. We have it. Between Open Text and in Montreal there's a company called Nstein, and their technology for semantic web and data mining is extraordinary. Why don't we have a very powerful...? This is the way to get Canadians engaged with their memory, with their creative expression, and build on it for the future.