Canadian Heritage Committee on May 6th, 2013

[David Sweet, Conservative, Ancaster—Dundas—Flamborough—Westdale, ON]

Mr. Gregory, you mentioned that at the same time, they were giving away their rations. How impoverished were these people?

[Steve Gregory]

They were starving.

[David Sweet, Conservative, Ancaster—Dundas—Flamborough—Westdale, ON]

Was this a similar situation to the Netherlands, where our troops were going—

[Steve Gregory]

Absolutely.

The German and Italian troops had pretty much eaten everything there was to eat in Sicily. Sherry Atkinson, the lieutenant who took the surrender of Modica, told us two weeks ago at our fundraiser that when their trucks pulled in the soldiers didn't feel like they could eat. They just gave away their rations.

Charles Hunter, the bombardier who inspired this story, who is on his last legs like your old friend Jiggs—and I'll have the honour of carrying his ashes if he doesn't make it—tells a story.

He was looking up at an embankment and saw two children watching him. He realized they were looking for food. He went to the canteen, had a peanut butter sandwich, made one for each of the kids, and brought them to the two children. The little boy started to eat his sandwich, but the little girl carefully broke her sandwich in two, put half in her pocket, and ate the other half. Charles told her to go ahead and eat. The girl said, "No. Momma". They were starving.

It's not just my Canadian brethren who were this compassionate. What's unknown is that after they moved on, the Canadian ships arrived days later and brought in tonnes of food and fed the Sicilian population in the provinces of Syracuse and Enna.

As the Germans were retreating they salted the fields. That tactic was designed to destroy the society's ability to regenerate. The historians in our little book will hopefully prove that some of the basic strategies we use in peacekeeping today were applied back then in 1943, as the Sicilian population was engaged to support the Canadians and our allies.

[David Sweet, Conservative, Ancaster—Dundas—Flamborough—Westdale, ON]

So it was really a chemical scorched earth policy they were doing in this regard.

[Steve Gregory]

Specifically around Trapani.

[David Sweet, Conservative, Ancaster—Dundas—Flamborough—Westdale, ON]

I'll try to make this very concise. Without blaming anybody, particularly Operation Husky, there are a number of these battles, as one of the colleagues on the other side was mentioning, that historians haven't picked up on. How do we close the gap?

We're trying to do this study right now on the history of Canada. How do we close the gap so that we can make sure that these kinds of battles, these kinds of instances where Canadians go above and beyond the call of duty.... Particularly here where you would easily perish simply because of the environment, let alone being shot at by the enemy, how do we assure that those kinds of things are recorded for the future?

[LGen Michel Maisonneuve]

One of the things we do is exactly what you're doing now, and I commend the committee for calling us forward to talk about this particular campaign. I'm sure there are a number of initiatives, such as this one, and I encourage you to call witnesses, particularly Canadian historians. The interesting thing is that military historians in Canada are not well known. There are not that many of them, first of all, but there are a few who are extremely well known. At the Collège militaire royal de Saint-Jean I have a number of excellent military historians. We'd be happy to come or send a few of them here, so that's a good start.

[The Chair, Conservative, Rob Moore]

We're scheduled to go until half-past the hour. Mr. Cash, you'll have the last round of questions.

[Andrew Cash, NDP, Davenport, ON]

Thank you, Chair.

It is important to note that there are many reasons why we on this side in the NDP oppose this study, and a lot of it has to do with the wording and the fact that education is a provincial jurisdiction. Out of respect for your visit here, we will be tabling a motion, the second half that speaks to our position.

I had the opportunity during Remembrance Day to screen an episode of a phenomenal documentary series called War Story. In fact, the episode that we screened here in Ottawa was the Battle of Ortona. It was a phenomenal piece of work and there were eight or nine, maybe a dozen vets there. After the screening, each one of them—and this wasn't scripted, this wasn't planned—got up and they made a declaration. I'd say about halfway through from this group of vets, there wasn't a dry eye in the place. They were crying and we were crying. It was a phenomenal moment. For me, as a Canadian, it was a moment of profound importance.

It's important for us as we carry on with this study, and we carry on the debate about what we're actually doing here in the heritage committee, to remember that we're trying to do our jobs as parliamentarians. That job is an important job about democracy, transparency, and accountability, and these are the values that we asked young men and women to serve and to fight for. It's the same values that we're asking young men and women, and actually older men and women, too, to fight for today.

That's why it's important for us to get to the bottom of why we do what we do here in Ottawa, why it's important to have transparency and accountability and an open democracy. I wanted to make that clear. I'll ask you now because you've said, and it's true, that Canadians need to hear these stories and not enough of them are being told. You reference the public broadcaster as a key medium, and you also say that this isn't a role for government. This is a role for historians, and it's a role for artists and documentary filmmakers. So it's incumbent upon us, I would think, to fight as hard as we can to make sure those resources are there so that these stories can be told, and not only told but that we create a culture in Canada where they're watched, where the shows are watched.

I'm wondering if you agree with some of these comments.

[Steve Gregory]

I'm a business guy from Montreal. If you had called me six years ago and asked me for money for a cancer campaign, I would have given you money. I went to fundraisers. Operation Husky gave me a chance to contribute to my country in a different way. I'm very grateful for the chance I have to pay my respects to men greater than I who paid the ultimate sacrifice. That's all I know. I just want my fellow Canadians to stand with me.

You, sir, stand with us at the cemetery, cry at the cemetery with all of us, over the loss of these men.

I'm just a business guy. I've never been involved in any political movement or any other charity than this one. This one I think is a worthy mission. We have one shot at this. In my view it's this year, 2013.

[Andrew Cash, NDP, Davenport, ON]

Thank you for that. You have no argument from me. Your issue, your moment, and the thing that you're passionate about, I think you will find many Canadians as passionate about it as you are.

With respect, my preamble to this was not about your specific issue. It was about how we actually honour the story of Canada in a way that allows people to have open access to it. That's what I'm trying to get at.

[The Chair, Conservative, Rob Moore]

Thank you, Mr. Cash.

I want to thank both of our witnesses. Thank you, gentlemen, for being here with us today. Thanks as well for the pins and the medallions. Thank you for handing those out to our committee members.

I understand you put in a request to some members for some Canadian pins and flags. We've been able to gather up 3,000 pins and 500 flags, I'm told. They're here somewhere, so you make sure you grab them before you leave.

[Steve Gregory]

Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Rob Moore]

With that, we will suspend for a couple of minutes and bring in our next panel of witnesses.

[LGen Michel Maisonneuve]

Thank you very much.

[The Chair, Conservative, Rob Moore]

Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Rob Moore]

Good afternoon to our witnesses.

We'll resume our committee meeting.

Welcome to Chantal Amyot, from the Canadian Museum of Civilization, director of Canadian history hall project, research and exhibitions; as well as Xavier Gélinas, curator, Canadian political history.

Welcome to both of you. Thank you for taking part on shorter notice for our study.

You may not have been here for the previous witnesses, but we'll give you the floor for 10 minutes for your presentation. You can divide that up however you like for your opening remarks, and then we'll move to questions and answers.

With that, the floor is yours.

[Chantal Amyot, Director, Canadian History Hall Project, Research and Exhibitions, Canadian Museum of Civilization]

Thank you.

The Canadian Museum of Civilization—soon to become the Canadian Museum of History—is, with our sister institution, the Canadian War Museum, the country's national repository of historical knowledge. Last October the government announced a new name and mandate for the museum, which will enable us to better fulfill our role in researching and communicating Canadian history to the Canadian people and the world. It is a challenge we accept with excitement.

Chief among our plans is a major new exhibition hall dedicated to a comprehensive, narrative history of Canada. Historical knowledge is embodied in many things. We are a museum, so for us it includes, at the most basic level, our national collection of historic artifacts, including everything from Champlain's astrolabe to ancient stone arrowheads to Sir John A. Macdonald's desk. We have the country's only large and nationally representative historical collection. It is usually numbered at about 3.5 million objects, a figure that could easily mislead as many could be best considered as scientific samples rather than objets d'art.

Let's begin with a brief overview of best practices in acquiring, preserving, and protecting our historical collections. As museums change, so do the collections upon which they are based. New acquisitions bring different perspectives to existing collections, new areas of research and interpretation are initiated, and the capacity to represent a changing society is enhanced. At the same time, old collections can sometimes lose their meaning, as expertise shifts and the museum's role in a larger society evolves.

A major challenge for any museum is to determine what items it will collect and what items it will keep, how the collections will be organized, and how they will be preserved for future generations. The museums follow rigorous practices for selecting and accessioning material into the national collection. Relevance to the museums' mandates and documentary evidence to this are of primary importance. However, costs and capacity to preserve and protect are reality checks when weighing the merits of any acquisition. A responsible collection plan includes the careful comparative examination of existing holdings and the possible refinement of the collection, to ensure that only the most viable material is retained.

The Canadian Museum of Civilization is a cutting-edge preservation centre with a great capacity to control environments, and provide security access measures and accessibility to the collections for research and exhibitions. We have come a long way from the days of the substandard, warehouse-like, satellite repositories of the not-so-distant past. So, too, have our knowledge and techniques for ensuring the mitigation of risks associated with long-term storage, handling, exhibiting, and lending of the national collections.

As central to our mandate as they are, objects by themselves tell us nothing. We need to determine what they mean, and that is the museum's real job: we not only preserve and protect, we also research and communicate meaning. In other words, we use objects—and other assets like images, archival documents and sound recordings—to tell the story of our country. The museum employs about 25 research curators, normally with doctoral degrees in history, archeology and allied disciplines, to research the objects themselves and their historical contexts. These research curators then work with other specialists in interpreting and presenting this information to the public. We do this using a number of media and types of presentations.

As a museum, the most typical of these is the physical exhibition. They can be permanent exhibitions, which means they can last anywhere from 15 to 25 years, or temporary, for a few months.

As a key part of our recent name and mandate change from the government, the CMC is currently planning our biggest and most ambitious such exhibition since we opened at our present location 24 years ago. This is the new Canadian history hall. It will replace the current Canada Hall and Canadian Personalities Hall and encompass about 45,000 square feet of exhibition space. For the first time in Canadian museological history, we will tell the comprehensive story of Canada from beginning to now. Louis Riel will be there. The conscription crisis of 1917 will be there, Expo 67, Champlain, the first Viking visitors to our shores, and the arrival of the first human beings at the end of the last ice age.

We have put together research teams who are working on the storyline and finding and researching objects, images, and other exhibitable things. We have also engaged museologists and interpretive specialists to work with the curatorial team on messaging and thematic development to help make the content come alive. We want a result that will engage and enthrall our visitors, to communicate to Canadians and the world that Canadian history is vital and important.

At the heart of the development of these products are the various needs of the audience. Knowledge and understanding of these audiences helps determine the best means by which objects and research can be presented in an engaging and stimulating manner. Across a variety of projects, the museum regularly conducts audience research through surveys, interviews, product testing, and other visitor studies. The application of these studies combined with up-to-date learning theories help ensure that the museum delivers a powerful learning experience as part of the museum visit.

The new Canadian history hall project is an example of this principle in practice. In this case an extensive public engagement exercise has taken place across Canada and online, consulting thousands of Canadians about what they would like to see, experience, and access in the new Canadian Museum of History. Currently, the team responsible for the new permanent exhibition are collating and reviewing these findings, which will be applied directly to the development of the new museum. We are also consulting with history experts through various consultative committees and brainstorming sessions to ensure that we get the right content, that it is factual and balanced, and that it presents different perspectives on complicated issues.

In the 21st century, a great deal more is expected of museums than the traditional physical exhibition. But even that has changed. Where 50 years ago a history exhibition might consist of a group of important objects with some accompanying text, we now seek a much more ambitious storyline, something approaching three-dimensional journalism. For the new Canadian History Hall, we remain dedicated to the physical exhibition as still central to our mandate. Only here can a visitor see, directly and personally, the “real thing”. Not an image of the real thing, but the actual first Maple Leaf flag to fly over Parliament Hill in 1965, or the handgun that shot D'Arcy McGee.

Our dedication to the “real thing”, however, is not absolute, and in a digital age so much more is possible. With smart phones and apps like Augmented Reality, we can program in a great deal of additional information that the visitor can access at will. We are already experimenting with digital applications at the museum, and you can expect to see a great deal of them in the new Canadian History Hall.

For example, the museum owns a small wooden carving found in an Inuit archeological site on Baffin Island. Carved in a typical Inuit style, this artifact, which is approximately 650 years old, depicts what is evidently a European, presumably a Norseman or Viking, wearing a surcoat or robe, with a cross faintly incised on the chest. Therefore, it suggests that there was direct contact between the Inuit and Europeans.

Visually this object is extremely unimpressive, not much more than 2 inches tall. Some of its meaning, its significance, can be communicated through text, of course, but with digital applications we can now do so much more. We can program in a brief interview with a subject expert, insert a film clip, add a map to show where it was found, or photos of the archeological site. We can allow the visitor to digitally manipulate the object or the image of the object, flip it around and see what it looks like from every angle. We can also allow the visitor to log comments or email a photo of the object to herself at home. And that's just what we can do now. By the time we open the new History Hall in 2017, who knows what may be possible.

A slightly older medium of presentation that has become standard is the website. CMC has a large and ambitious website featuring all kinds of information, including archived exhibitions. We also host digital exhibitions that go straight to the web, of which the largest recent example is the “Virtual Museum of New France”. It is just being finished and encompasses about 45 sections or chapters and 300 images, generally in colour. Many of these offerings are produced with the support of the Virtual Museum of Canada project at Canadian Heritage.

Another Heritage ministry program we took maximum advantage of was Canadian culture online, which allowed us to make available online many thousands of historic objects from our collection. Much of our collection is now available online to scholars, first nations, and the general public.

For the new history hall project we anticipate a comprehensive and interactive supporting web program, although we must admit we haven't begun to plan it yet.

Cyberspace isn't our only frontier. We also send exhibitions to other public museums, particularly in Canada, but also around the world. At any given moment we usually have about a dozen exhibitions touring the country, the largest and most important travelling exhibition program in the country. We also share expertise and provide loans to Canadian museums and international partners, and are actively involved in developing the Heritage ministry network of Canadian history museums.

For the new history hall we will also be working with educators to develop and provide content for school curricula. The Canadian Museum of Civilization offers a wide range of school programs that meet provincial guidelines and curricula. They are available for students from preschool through secondary school and offer interactive educational experiences in fields of study ranging from geography and citizenship to history and cultural studies. The programs enable students to learn about the people, places, and events that helped shape our country and the world. Programs, tours, and special event days attract over 40,000 students to the museum each year.

This represents a very fast and basic overview of what the Canadian Museum of History is already doing and will continue to do to preserve, protect, and enhance Canadian history at the level of a national museum. Thank you for your attention

[The Chair, Conservative, Rob Moore]

Thank you for your presentation and now we will begin our questions and answers. For seven minutes, we have Mr. Richards.

[Blake Richards, Conservative, Wild Rose, AB]

Thanks, Mr. Chair. Thank you for being here today. I have several questions. I'll just throw the questions out and let the two of you decide who's best qualified to answer them.

I'm going to try to save about a minute of my time at the end to share with my friend, Mr. Calandra, so I'll try to get through my questions as quickly as I can and feel free to answer them in whatever detail you feel is necessary.

What I'd like to do first of all is ask you a little bit.... I know without doubt that you would have far more exhibits and artifacts in your possession than could ever be displayed at one time. I wonder if you could give me some idea in terms of what proportion of those artifacts are currently on display and how many of them are actually in storage somewhere?

[Chantal Amyot]

It's a difficult question to answer because of the 3.5 million artifacts that we have, the vast majority of them are archeological samples. So I would say we have half a million objects of different natures. So if you look at percentages, it would be a very low percentage for that reason.

What we're trying to do with the new hall is to put as many artifacts on display as possible.

[Blake Richards, Conservative, Wild Rose, AB]

I also understand the minister's expressed interest in sharing some of those exhibits and artifacts with other museums across Canada. I know there's going to be a lot of interest in that from museums all across Canada without question.

I wonder if you could tell me about plans that might be in place to increase the sharing of those artifacts and enable them to be displayed in other museums, and how you might be able to achieve that objective.

[Chantal Amyot]

Currently we're building a network of Canadian museums. We're reaching out to museums across the country and developing a memorandum of understanding with them for privileged access to our collection. It's going to be a vice versa thing too. They will be able to present exhibitions in our spaces. It's an exchange.

We are reaching out to other museums across the country right now to let them know this is our objective, to make the collections available to all Canadians.

[Blake Richards, Conservative, Wild Rose, AB]

Thank you.

We have the 150th anniversary celebration of our country coming up, I wonder if you could tell me what role the new Canadian Museum of History will play leading up to that celebration and during that celebration? Also what part will your sister museum, the Canadian War Museum, play in celebrating that special event?