Thank you very much.
I would like to start by saying it's a real honour to be here. As old as your museum is, Mark, our museum is one year and three days old today. We are very excited about this. Concurrent with our formation, the government started to talk about work for 2017. So although we're relatively small, with our subject matter and the fact that most of us in here can trace our roots back through immigration and not through our founding nations, we feel that we have a broad reach across the country and we are very excited by this opportunity.
When I first spoke to the team about 2017, at the same time we were talking about our first-ever travelling exhibit going across the country, and it just seemed right to tie them together. So we have, and we've just started the process of planning for our first exhibit, which will be known as Canada: Day 1. It will travel, starting in 2014, across the country. In the next two years we will be collecting the information for that, including oral histories, stories, and research, based on Confederation until the current day as well as people's first impressions and first memories of that day.
I will tell you what it stemmed from--and Stuart and I didn't compare notes or talk about this before. When we were all sitting there on the east coast, watching the Olympic opening ceremonies at about one o'clock in the morning, and John Furlong said that on his first day in Canada, the first words said to him by an immigration officer were “Welcome to Canada; make us better”, there was a collective cheer in the suburbs of Halifax as we all felt that this was exactly what our purpose was. Then, when somehow in that opening ceremony there was a quote from Joe Schlesinger, which was taken from the wall in our little Pier 21 museum at the time, and it had his reminiscences of the day he came here, we knew that was a day that, for so many people, is remembered and passed down from generation to generation and becomes part of family lore about when they first came here.
When Joe Schlesinger came to speak at Pier 21 many years ago in that wonderful Joe Schlesinger voice of his, he talked about coming to Canada as being the neck of an hourglass. I know my colleague Judith back there has seen the hourglass in my office, and I talk about this a lot. Joe Schlesinger talked about people coming from places scattered all over the world, and how for that one moment they have the common experience of coming to Canada, experiencing that first sound, taste, and impression. Some of it's good, as our colleagues have said, and some of it isn't, but it's memorable. It never leaves your family.
Then again, you're scattered throughout the country to start a life somewhere else. But that first moment binds so many people. Whether they came last week by air or they walked across the border--or as Joe Schlesinger said, he necked his way to safety across a river in the Czech Republic with his girlfriend at the time to avoid soldiers, and then when he arrived said that to the immigration officer, who didn't seem to take kindly to that story--people have those memories.
What we want to do with our first travelling exhibit is to go across the country and collect those memories and those reminiscences, and then reflect them back in the exhibit, and continue that along in 2014, 2015, and 2016, to see the exhibit grow and change. Because it's an exhibit of stories and of people's stories, it can be reflected in many platforms.
We have learned from our colleagues--thank you to Mark and to Jean-Marc--about multiple platforms and about really employing them, whether they're our mobile technologies, our website, or our ongoing conversations through that time, so that when the exhibit comes back to the Canadian Museum of Immigration at Pier 21 in 2017, it will look dramatically different from the way it did when it left. It will continue along those conversations.
In our past iteration as a smaller charitable institution, we went across to a few points and had open houses and collected some of those stories and artifacts as we went. It was beyond our wildest dreams. At Liuna Station in Hamilton, in one afternoon in three hours we had over 400 people show up with artifacts, photos, boarding passes, meal cards, and tickets from their ships, as well as stories of walking across the prairies and getting to a home. We knew we were on to something. So when this opportunity arose and we were starting to plan our first travelling exhibit in concert with that 150th celebration, we thought there could not be a better way to mirror back those years and to talk about those roots and what brings us together, and the common parts of that: the fear, the hope, and the unfamiliarity, as well as the small kindnesses and sometimes small cruelties.
As Stuart said--and we might have stolen a few words from one of his annual reports--we will be courageous and we will tell the hard stories too, but they bind us together and they continue to make us grow. I think that's the really important thing about all of us as colleagues: we want to help shape that future and to make people feel very proud to be here.
I can tell you that our logo was designed by a young woman from Tehran named Azam Chadeganipour, who works with us now. When I spoke to Azam about our 150th, she said, “You know, I'm from Tehran, where we're thousands of years old, and I think it's so exciting to be celebrating something as young as Canada”. So I can tell you that for new Canadians there's a different perspective, but a really exciting one. From the snapshot of people in our shop—and we have people from eight different countries represented—I know that right now there's a feeling of that excitement.
I think I would close by echoing Stuart a bit, except that I was actually born in 1967, so I don't remember the song--