Thank you very much again for the question.
We believe that the museum's history network will allow us an opportunity to reach Canadians where they live in a more concerted way than we have ever done before.
I just want to give you a sample of some of the institutions that immediately signed on and didn't hesitate to become part of this cooperative form of network: The Royal British Columbia Museum in Victoria, several months ago; The Rooms in Newfoundland, which also agreed to sign on; the Museum of Man in Winnipeg, which became part of this partnership just last week; and many smaller museums across the country. I have a list of about a dozen or so other museums that are hoping to participate—the McCord Museum in Montreal, for example—and many others.
What this will allow us to do is to collaborate on museological projects over the long term, which has not happened before for our museum corporation. Things like research projects, joint public programming, all of which do not have to be in the National Capital Region, we will be able to do with new partners across the country in ways that we haven't been able to do before.
We're also looking at partnering with institutions that are not necessarily museums—centres of excellence in one region, and perhaps community federations in another. We're attempting to build all of these relationships.
We want to expand the national footprint of our museums—the War Museum and the Museum of Civilization—so they really are national as opposed to federal in scope. We have a lot of work to do in that regard and we think that the network is a strategic opportunity for us to do this by building ongoing, long-term relationships that are reciprocal and do not exist now.