Thank you.
We were very proud to be able to open the exhibition on New Brunswickers in war at the War Museum in December. This was the first time a provincial museum had an exhibition at the War Museum. It's a great opportunity for us to share stories of New Brunswickers not only with the broader population here in Ottawa but also with a national museum at the national capital.
The New Brunswick Museum is the provincial museum for the province. We have a very broad mandate, everything from billion-year-old fossils through the natural science stories, through human history and art and archives right up to contemporary art created six months ago. So it's a broad mandate. We are Canada's oldest continuing museum. We started in 1842 with a collection by Abraham Gesner and existed in several forms through to 1929, when we became the provincial museum. So 2017 is a really important year for us because we will be 175 years old. That's something we will take great pride in celebrating and sharing that year.
Today I'm here to talk about another important event—perhaps almost as important, if not more important—and that's Canada's 150th birthday. This is certainly a great opportunity for Canadians across the country to be able to understand more about how Canada came to be, how we came to be this country, how we have survived a number of different natural, economic, and other situations over the years, what we have achieved as Canadians, and where we can go in the future. It's an opportunity to learn and to understand. It's for those who have generations of roots here in Canada as well as for new Canadians. We see this as a really important opportunity for Canadians to come together as a group to understand more about where we came from and where we can go in the future.
Museums certainly have a role to play in that. Some people think museums are about things, about objects—the fossil, the plant, the piece of art, the hat sitting on a shelf somewhere. But we're really about stories. We're about the stories behind those things. Without a story, the thing is not important. It doesn't have any relevance. It's the story, the person who wore that hat, who then did something while wearing that hat.
That's what museums are about: we're about the stories. Our role is to collect, preserve, and understand those stories and to communicate them to the public in a variety of different ways, so we can take the past, we can bring it forward to the present, and we can also make sure it's there for the future. We link the past and the future together. In that role, it is certainly appropriate that we, the museum community—whether it's a provincial museum, a community museum, a regional museum, a museum of interest, or a national museum—are thinking about how we can participate in 2017.
There are a number of different ways museums can do that. Certainly, as Judy mentioned, museums will be doing exhibitions. We'll do larger exhibitions; we'll do smaller exhibitions. We'll find ways of connecting with the communities we serve on the stories of Canada—how Canada came to be and where it may be going in the future.
That's something we'll do, and certainly opportunities to facilitate that and encourage that would be very beneficial.
But I think there's another opportunity museums could be taking advantage of, and that's to connect Canadians. We work in our own communities, whatever that community is. But what's really important is that Canada is a large, geographically diverse country with a lot of different interests. Not just the scenery but the people, the work, and the activities in Canada differ from region to region. It's really important that Canadians understand the different regions and what is happening in those regions.
There are opportunities for museums to connect regions together, to connect communities together. It could be by a travelling exhibition like the one the New Brunswick Museum did in Ottawa, to be able to bring what looks like a New Brunswick story to the national capital and talk about it as part of the national picture. Or it could be through smaller scale showcases of special treasures. The New Brunswick Museum could send to Alberta several treasures that are important to New Brunswick and have Alberta museums exchange those. The links that are actually there now today, and have been there historically, are actually recognized and discussed around some really key stories. So, certainly showcase exhibitions, probably on smaller scale smaller than a larger travelling exhibition, are realistic and could link a variety of parts of Canada together and encourage some dialogue.
Certainly technology now offers us so many opportunities to connect.
The New Brunswick Museum could be looking at doing discussions with the Prince of Wales Northern Heritage Centre in Yellowknife, an opportunity for school kids or for senior citizens to connect with others about what life is like in a different environment, what is important to them, what their heritage is, and how we can share it. There are a lot of opportunities to link children and families, students, seniors, people who have been here for a long time and people who are new to Canada, across Canada so that they're sharing stories themselves and learning more about what Canada is and how we're going to go forward in the future.
There's the opportunity, as we look at 2017 itself and at that key period around Canada Day, to look at a program that might support museums across Canada offering free admission. June 21, National Aboriginal Day, through to July 1, Canada Day, would be a great opportunity for museums, with some financial support, to be able to offer free admission to encourage people not only to come in, learn about the past, and think about the future but also to encourage communities to use museums and other cultural and heritage centres as locations for celebrations. Museums are not actually supposed to be boring and dull. You're supposed to have fun and enjoy yourself when you go to a museum, and the opportunity to think of those as places of celebration and to encourage communities to build some of their activities around that and to be able to offer free admission I think would be a significant opportunity. It could be a great gift to the present activities of 2017 to be able to do that.
There's also the opportunity to look past 2017 and to ensure that what is being developed as we go towards 2017 and afterwards is something that will contribute to the longer term growth of Canada. I'm certainly in favour of opportunities that will enhance what already exists rather than building new. I think that the long-term sustainability of new opportunities may not be there, so we really have to make sure that whatever is done is something that can carry forward in the future. The idea of a matching program, which the Canadian Museums Association is in favour of, with a limited time period where private donations to museums or other cultural institutions are encouraged with matching funds from the federal government, would be a very important way of encouraging Canadians to think about how they will contribute to the future of Canada and preserve the past.
We all know that if something is right in your own community, quite often it's human nature not to think it's that important, that the museum down the road is not anything really special. When someone from elsewhere says that's important, that they want to ensure that it's there for the future, that they want to recognize it and assist us in doing that, that can be a significant improvement. It can mean that people will pay attention and start to think about how they're going to support the future, the future of an institution and the future of Canada. I think a matching program would be a long-lasting legacy to be able to leave as we go forward after 2017. It's important in what we're doing now that we think about how it's going to work later on. And for museums, we're both the past but we also know that we're here forever, so we have to think in terms of that long-term lifespan.
I would also like to think that we can look at how to take some of Canada's stories to the international stage by building on existing opportunities, using opportunities that are already there, whether they're international visits, trade shows, conferences, or all of those kinds of things. We really need to look at how we could layer in more of Canada's heritage into that. Again, when someone from away, from outside Canada, says, what a great story you have, that's an important thing that you're doing, it helps create pride in Canadians. We know it happens in a local community. It happens nationally as well, and I think there are existing opportunities that just need to be leveraged more to make sure that we can strengthen our international recognition as we go forward towards 2017.
My final comment would be that 2017 is not that far away. For us, this is the planning time if we want to build on what exists, if we want to take advantage of the upcoming commemorative activities. New Brunswick certainly is recognizing the War of 1812. We have a really important story to tell. Without us, Canada might not have existed in the way it does now. So we are looking in the next couple of years to talk about the War of 1812, but we also know there's 2014 and the beginning of World War I, and 2015, and the end of World War II. Some other significant anniversaries or commemorative activities are happening over the upcoming period. We need to think about how we can build those in, build toward 2017 and make sure that 2017 is a very strong year of activity. It's a year that we don't want to regret afterwards.
Individually, organizations and museums will do things, but together, with some support and perhaps some direction from the federal government, I think there are opportunities for us to do a lot more, to do it better and create a stronger series of events, a stronger year for 2017.
Thank you.