Yes, it's an important point. This is one thing we envision as well, that not just will local museums be able to draw down items from the national museum and host them locally; local museums can also take some of their collections and move them to other parts of the country, or to the national museum as well.
So the idea of a partnership isn't just stuff moving from the national museum to locally, but stuff locally moving up nationally, or moving to other parts of the country.
I've had the privilege—it's been an incredible privilege, I can tell you—to visit all kinds of museums across this country. We have thousands of museums across the country, I can tell you. I've gone through them in painstaking detail—sometimes with lots of boredom on the face of my wife as I go through some of these things—and aggravating some of the people who are with me by how much time I like to spend in museums. But the truth is that when you go to museums around the country, you realize there are some incredible gems out there. There are some incredible things and stories that should be told.
I think I told this committee this story about one of the catalysts that drew me to this idea of networking all of our museums together. It was when I visited the museum in Midway, British Columbia.
If you haven't been to Midway, it's a very small town. And it is where it sounds like: midway across the border between Alberta and the Pacific Ocean, on the southern border of British Columbia. It's a small little town, with a population of I think 2,500 persons. They have a small little museum there, and I went in. Against the back wall they had this display by the Japanese Canadians of Midway, British Columbia. It's a small association. This was a display of people of Japanese descent who still live in the south Okanagan, who decided, after having been displaced and put in internment camps in the Second World War, to stay in the south Okanagan and make lives for themselves.
There are all kinds of items there that talk about the hardships they faced, the racism they went through, the difficulties in establishing themselves, the pride they now feel in having gone through all that, and the successful lives they've made for themselves and their families.
It's not a big display, but it's very impactful. I looked at it and I thought, “This is really quite something.” I left the museum, and when I signed the guest book I was saddened to see that I was about the sixtieth person to visit that museum in the last two months. I thought, “What a waste. This is a great story to tell.” As I went on with the rest of my road trip, I thought to myself that there had to be some way....
I know that the Canadian Museums Association advocates for local museums, but they don't really have the capacity to do these things. I thought about it: what can we do so that people in other parts of the country can see this display and understand its impact, and maybe host something in an exchange? Maybe a national museum should see this display. Japanese internment is spoken about in the Canadian War Museum, but it's not talked about in that kind of personal way, with individual stories of people who talk about what they went through, how they came out the other end, and how they ended up being very successful and proud Canadians in spite of the suffering they went through. It's a great story.
So I started thinking about it, and where we arrived at is where we are today. I'm very proud of that. From those early moments of thinking about how we can tie these institutions together, here we are. We're now at—hopefully soon—report stage of Bill C-49 to create the Canadian Museum of History.
That little museum in Midway, British Columbia, can be a partner now. That little collection I saw those couple of years ago can now be hosted at the national museum, and those Japanese Canadians who are telling their story in the south Okanagan might now have the opportunity to share that story with other Canadians.
That's what we're doing.