Thank you, Chair.
Thank you for coming today. It is very interesting to me.
I want to pursue what Mr. Simms was talking about a little bit. I remember in the fifties—I had four brothers—we used to want to stay home from church Sunday night, even though we lived on church property. My dad was a minister. We wanted to watch Walt Disney. Walt Disney was fascinating because they made history come alive. Here we were, little Canadian kids, sending away for Davy Crockett hats. There was stuff on Paul Bunyan. They romanticized it. They were very good at telling these stories and building them in many cases to things...exaggerating them, we should say, but romanticizing their history.
Thank you for bringing up the story of William Peyton Hubbard. I love the story. I grew up in Toronto. It's a story that cries out to be told. His father was an escaped refugee slave from Virginia. There's a story there. He met future Father of Confederation George Brown and pulled him out of the Don River, became his driver, and they became good friends. He was re-elected 13 times and became acting mayor. The only time he lost was because he introduced the Toronto Hydro Electric Commission. That's a story in itself. He lived in the thirties. In the thirties, the reporters used to come around and see him every year. His nickname was Old Cicero because he was such a brilliant speaker. This isn't just a movie; it's a TV series. It would make a great TV series. I would love to see it. It might not be suitable for your company, but it should be told in film.
I want to ask you—maybe I could start with Mr. Sherwood—what ideas you have for making Canadian history live and telling Canadian stories on the stage, in film, TV, and even in opera. There's an opera commissioned in 2000 called the Iron Road, which is about how the Canadian railroad was built and how the Chinese contributed and suffered. How can we tell these stories and make it interesting? Teenagers are cynical. You take them into a history class and say, “Today is politically correct history day”, and they won't listen. But if you tell the story dynamically and tell the drama, they will listen, and even go to theatres and pay for it.
What ideas do you have for telling these stories leading up to 2017?