Thank you, Mr. Chairman and the members of the committee, for the opportunity to appear before you today on behalf of the Canadian Anthropology Society, an organization that represents professional and academic anthropologists throughout Canada.
I do have prepared remarks, but on the walk over here today I was thinking about the bill and an image popped into my mind, a picture of my uncle back in the thirties on the farm in Saskatchewan with a sedan he had converted into a pickup truck so that we could haul boulders out of the fields. I thought that is what Bill C-49 is. Unfortunately, it's more than that. You're taking a Rolls-Royce and you're chopping the roof and tearing out the back seats so that you can turn it into a pickup truck. Canadians deserve an excellent Canadian history museum, and the Canadian Anthropology Society supports the creation of a museum of Canadian history, but we do not support the gutting of, as has already been said, the crown jewel in our collection of museums. It would be a terrible mistake with long-term consequences.
I'd like to start my remarks by noting that we are also concerned about the consultation process as it has gone forward to this point. We feel there was a lack of extensive or systematic engagement of the professional community of historians, anthropologists, and archeologists in the CMC's planning for the proposed Canadian Museum of History.
The meetings on the new museum that have been convened to date do not meet the definition of true consultation, a formal discussion between groups of people before a decision is made. The public meetings held last fall were brainstorming or awareness sessions, but not actual consultations. The museum's representatives did not undertake to provide participants with a synthesis of comments, a formal response to their concerns, or any specific indication as to how the museum would seek to integrate the received feedback in the research or implementation of the new exhibits. Only a minority of professional practitioners of the historical disciplines was invited to participate in these meetings.
I'm pretty confident that everyone in this room has had the privilege of appreciating the Canadian Museum of Civilization, this national monument to the cultural heritage and living present of all who have peopled these lands, most notably the first nations, Inuit, and Métis, as curated, researched, and shared publicly by a cadre of expert and dedicated scholars for more than a century. This history can be traced to the founding of the anthropology division of the Geological Survey of Canada in 1910. In those early years, and later as the National Museum of Canada and then the National Museum of Man, the focus and collections remained predominantly focused on Canadian aboriginal peoples. As established in 1990, and still in effect today, the vision of the then-renamed Canadian Museum of Civilization was expressed in the mandate of the Museums Act:
to increase, throughout Canada and internationally, interest in, knowledge and critical understanding of and appreciation and respect for human cultural achievements and human behaviour by establishing, maintaining and developing for research and posterity a collection of objects of historical or cultural interest, with special but not exclusive reference to Canada.
In this process, the museum was empowered to undertake and sponsor any research, including fundamental or basic research and theoretical and applied research related to its purpose and to museology, and communicate the results of that research.
On this basis the Canadian Museum of Civilization has been dedicated to publicly supported scholarship on core issues in the Canadian and the human experience, and is internationally renowned for its work. Upon a substantive research basis, public exhibitions, both permanent and temporary, have been rigorously created to be offered, critiqued, and constantly renewed as a trust to the Canadian people. This work has been largely, but not exclusively, anthropological in character and has depended on the sustained and sometimes lifelong work of specialist curators in ethnology, cultural studies, archeology, and history.
However, in May 2012 the Canadian Museum of Civilization's administrative structure was readjusted to no longer include a vice-president for Research and Collections. Research and Collections is now placed under the former vice-president, who is now a director general of Exhibitions and Programs. Furthermore, the current executive of the museum includes no member with research or collections expertise. It is unclear what the future of research will be at the museum, despite the substantive need for research both in itself and as the basis for exhibitions and programs of quality.
Bill C-49 provides a new and significantly reduced purpose: “to enhance Canadians’ knowledge, understanding and appreciation of events, experiences, people and objects that reflect and have shaped Canada’s history and identity, and also to enhance their awareness of world history and cultures”. It also has a narrower empowerment to “undertake or sponsor any research related to its purpose or to museology”. This language renders even research within the reduced mandate optional. It would be possible under this language for there to be no research undertaken within the museum itself, and it appears planned that research may become an adjunct to exhibitions, once they are decided upon, rather than the informed and critical basis from which they arise.
Some of the consequences are immediately clear. The First Peoples Hall, a signature creation of the Canadian Museum of Civilization, is 10 years old. It cannot maintain or renew itself, and it requires continuing research and collaboration to ensure that it is current with contemporary aboriginal life and engages with emerging issues regarding the past and present of Canada's first peoples.
This anticipated new Museum of Canadian History will, according to Dr. Mark O'Neill, include “aspects of the aboriginal experience” but shift toward other still-unspecified Canadian historical themes. Here a very considerable amount of research and enhancements of collections will be required, as this has not been hitherto a focus of the museum. The museum's collections are currently, depending on definition, 70% to 80% aboriginal, as has been the established curatorial expertise of the museum. Elements of material culture cannot simply be borrowed from other collections and placed on display. There are major issues of cost, access, time, research, and vision.
Apparently, there will be a one-time-only provision of $25 million for the transformation of the museum, but this will not be new money. These funds are designated for a renovation of half of the museum's 100,000 square feet and other costs. Given current costs to meet curatorial standards at this level of roughly $1,000 per square foot, this generates an underfunding of at least 50%.
The plan for the museum is due to culminate at the time of the 150th anniversary of Confederation and presents a view of Canadian history as “settler history”. In the words of Mark O'Neill, “Canada's history from the fur trade to the Northwest Rebellion to Confederation, through two world wars and the quiet revolution to Canada in the world will come to life”.
So Canada's history started with the fur trade. The frame has clearly and decisively shifted. The frame now is the imported imaginings of the modern European nation state and its transplantation to a new territory. This history enshrines a much-diminished vision, compared with the collaborative one that recognizes our shared occupancy of these lands and the fundamental character of all Canadians as treaty people.
Canada's history truly began long before there was any thought of Canada, and we all benefit from the living legacy of the first nations, Inuit, and Métis fashioning vibrant societies and cultures, and maintaining relationships with their neighbours. Those who arrived later, the French and British as well as successive waves of newer arrivals from all corners of the world, have brought with them an abundance of linkages with larger and new global realities. Canadians are outward-looking and cosmopolitan by their very definition. Canadians deserve a museum that reflects that. The Canadian experience has never been limited in time and space and is intrinsically part of the larger human experience.
We are concerned that the government's decision to transform the CMC into the CMH fits into a pattern of a politically charged heritage policy that has been emerging in the past few years. Alongside the substantial public funds that were directed into the celebration of the bicentennial of the War of 1812, this initiative appears to reflect a new use of history to support the government's political agenda, that is, the highlighting of particular features of our past favoured by leading ministers of the current government.
If so, this would be a highly inappropriate use of our national cultural institutions, which should stand apart from any particular government agenda and should instead be run according to sound professional standards and principles of non-partisanship.
Once again, I applaud the government's initiative to establish a Canadian museum of history. I deplore the government's decision to convert the Canadian Museum of Civilization into a pickup truck.
Thank you.