Thank you.
I'm a great fan of the smaller museums. I am a member of them in my own province. They tell stories that are intimate and personal in a way that the big ROMs don't. They are more artistically oriented, in large part.
I don't think we have what is known as a national museum strategy. There was some talk some years ago about the national museum strategy from the federal point of view. I don't think there is one. We have national museums, but we don't have a national museum strategy looking at the whole sector across all jurisdictions and sizes. So getting a national museum strategy is probably a good piece of homework to work on.
On the issue of how that would that fit into Canada 150, I use the example of a school bus of kids from Jane Finch coming down to the ROM, kids who had never been to the museum and had never been downtown. The only way they got there was through philanthropy, because we have to charge the kids for the school visits. We now have a whole program there where we go out to our philanthropic boards and ask them to fund school buses to bring in kids from the whole GTA, from economically disadvantaged areas, and get them into the museum. We ask them to try to get 50,000 students who don't have to pay to get here. They'll pay for the bus; they'll pay for all of that stuff and get them in and out. So that's mixing up and moving around, isn't it?
They're coming into a world they haven't been before, they're coming downtown maybe for the second time or the first or the third time. Programs like that would fit in with Canada 150. Maybe you're not going to support museums for Canada 150, that they are just one of a number of worthy causes; but if the museums come to you and say they've got the message and that their approach is to get all of these people who have never been to their museums, from the areas where people never visit museums, and they will visit as a result and somehow reciprocate, they might qualify for something like this.