Mr. Chair, members of the committee, I want to thank you for this invitation to appear before you today.
The Historica-Dominion Institute is Canada's largest organization dedicated to making history and citizenship issues more well known.
Our board of directors includes some of the country's most respected representatives of the business, philanthropic, and arts communities, and a number of them are members of the Order of Canada.
Our programs range from our well-known Heritage Minutes to the Memory Project, which arranges visits by veterans to schools and videotapes the recollections of their war experiences. Passages to Canada brings Canadians from other countries and of different ethnicities and cultures to our schools and other public institutions to speak about their experiences. The Canadian Encyclopedia, which is in the process of being enhanced, is a definitive digital record of things Canadian, and Encounters with Canada each year for over 30 weeks hosts more than one thousand students from coast to coast to coast for a week of learning here in Ottawa.
We are non-partisan. With that in mind, we very much support this legislation.
Canadians can be divided into a variety of categories, but let's take two: those born here and those who come from elsewhere. Those Canadians born here are automatically citizens and are actually not required to know much about our country. Paradoxically, those who come here often know more about their chosen country because they have chosen it and because they have to in order to pass their citizenship test.
But they need and want more, and too often our schools are not the answer. As we know, only four of the thirteen provinces and territories make it mandatory to pass history in order to get out of high school.
History teaches us about what we have achieved as a nation and how, thus providing us with a road map for the future. We do not always agree on history's lessons, and that is not only acceptable, but even desirable. A good debate creates more clarity, introduces us to different points of view, prompts deeper reflection and thereby produces better results.
A national museum of history helps to kick-start that process. Of course, $25 million is a lot of money, and yet in some ways it's not. It's somewhere around 70¢ per Canadian to create a better debate and to discuss our national narrative. No institution is a more appropriate place to do so than one belonging to the federal government, as decided upon by the House of Commons, through which every Canadian has a voice.
At our institute we're proud of the work we do, but we don't presume or pretend to cover the sweep and scope of history. Our Heritage Minutes, more than 60 of them, offer snapshots of key moments in history. I'll make the point that this includes events involving so-called ordinary Canadians as well as bad news and sad and unfortunate chapters in our history. We presume those minutes educate and also engage the people who watch them—and those have been in the millions, of course, for more than 20 years now. We hope they create an appetite to learn more, and if they do, then Canadians need a place to satisfy that appetite.
History belongs to everyone.
Our national narrative should allow everyone to claim their right to see their own reflection in it. We know that a number of elements of the Canadian society do not seem to be sufficiently represented in our history books.
We expect those voices to be heard in this process and to be reflected back within a history museum.
My own background is largely in journalism, not history, and many of you might think journalism is the less well-behaved sibling of history. Journalism is sometimes described as the first, rough draft of history.
These days, with the great democratization of the information process created by the digital world, we hear many voices interpreting events in many different ways. Smart people understand that it's a good idea to read many different interpretations in order to get a better sense of an event's context and its ramifications, including the building and continuing development and evolution of the nation.
To get that process going, there has to be a leader, a gathering place, a trigger, to get the discussion under way.
Perfection, we often say, is the enemy of the good. Sometimes the reverse can be true: good can be an obstacle to perfection. Good can get to be very good; very good aims at perfection. So we shouldn't stop, saying that because something is very good right now, it can't possibly get better. In 2017, as we mark 150 years of being together in recognized form as Canadians, a federally run Canadian museum of history would serve our country appropriately and superbly.
Thank you. Merci beaucoup.