Good morning. Thank you very much for the warm welcome.
I'm the executive director of the heritage group at the Department of Canadian Heritage, and with me today are Guylain Thorne, who is the senior director of heritage policy and programs, and Kathryn Zedde, who is the senior analyst and manager of policy and legislation.
Thank you for the opportunity to inform the committee on the state of local Canadian museums. We would first like to place museums in the context of other Canadian heritage institutions.
We had planned a longer presentation, so we're going to just go through the first part of our presentation, which gives you some context and some factual information. The second part of the presentation is really focused on the programs and services that we provide. You have this information here, and we're happy to answer any questions that you have about our programs, but I won't focus on that this morning.
If we may, we would first like to situate museums in the context of heritage institutions more broadly.
If you turn to the second page of your deck, you'll see the breakdown of non-profit heritage institutions in Canada. When we speak of heritage institutions, we're referring to 2,600 archives, art galleries, historic sites, museums, and zoos and botanical gardens. We will focus mainly on museums, which make up about 55% of those institutions, and not-for-profit art galleries, which make up about 10%. Together they make up about two-thirds of the heritage institutions in Canada.
I'd like to clarify that many institutions have more than one function. For example, many museums are also archives. When we survey them—and we'll speak a bit more about survey in a moment—we ask them to identify their primary purpose, and that is the basis on which we classify them.
On slide 4, you'll see a portrait of where the heritage institutions, and more specifically the galleries and museums, are located across Canada, and how they're spread. As is typical with other parts of the world of culture in Canada, we are challenged by a massive amount of land and a relatively sparse population. You can see from this map that the heritage institutions are noted in black, and the red figure is the percentage of the total of museums and galleries across the country.
As you can see, in some cases there are significant regional differences in terms of the population of Canada, and in some cases it's quite close. In our department we look at everything in terms of the regions, because this is how we distribute our programming. British Columbia and Alberta, for example, make up together about 25% of the population, but they comprise about 25.4% of museums and galleries. The situation elsewhere in the country, though, varies quite a bit.
The slide on the following page looks at visible and non-visible activities of museums.
Only the part of this iceberg that you see above the water is what is visible to the public: public participation, presentation of collections, the celebration and commemoration aspects of museums and galleries, and the physical and digital infrastructure that you might see, for example, in the facility or on the website.
There is a great deal of work that goes on behind the scenes in terms of the protection and preservation of the existing collections, knowledge transfer and expert training, research and policy development, developing exhibits, and so on. Those are the non-visible aspects for the public. Generally speaking, we find that museums tell us that it's more difficult to raise money for the kind of activity that you see below that waterline.
Of course, there are all the administrative aspects of running museums as well—managing human resources, both paid and volunteer—and all of the issues relating to building maintenance.
On the eighth slide, you will see some general information about our second Government of Canada survey of heritage institutions. This survey was conducted in 2015, and it's based on data that is from the 2013 year. Before launching our own survey, there was very little in the way of comprehensive information about heritage institutions in Canada. We had been relying on Statistics Canada's annual survey of heritage institutions; however, it did not capture institutions with revenues below $50,000. That comprises quite a significant number of museums in Canada, so it was not capturing a wide swath of small museums.
We have conducted two of these surveys to date.
This survey has become an important tool to inform our program planning and policy work. The survey also provides individual heritage institutions with information about the context in which they operate.
It's become a very important tool to inform our policy and planning work, and it serves other levels of government; national, provincial, and territorial museums; and museum professionals, academics, and others. It provides individual heritage institutions with information that can situate them in the context of their peers.
Page 7 outlines a selection of data about museums and galleries specifically taken from the survey. We have taken the data from the heritage survey, which I believe you have seen and been briefed on, and we have done a special report on the situation facing museums and art galleries in Canada.
We can provide that survey to you. It's not yet available publicly on our website, but we have made it available to museum associations. We're happy to provide you with copies of it. It will refine the data a little bit for you and will help you to look at the situation in each province and territory. If you're interested in that, we can provide it.
Concerning the figures you see here, because it's our second survey, we're asking a bunch of quite standard questions coupled with some new questions with each iteration. The survey has a very high participation rate, so we're quite happy with the reliability of the data. It's significantly better than what we had from Statistics Canada. It's all done in-house.
We know, for example, that museums and galleries in Canada are protecting nearly 51 million artifacts. Visits in person are up 21.6% from the last reporting period; that's an additional 7.6 million people. Online, visits are also up, almost 32% from the last survey.
Volunteers have also increased 10%; however, we know that while the numbers are up, volunteers are providing slightly fewer hours. Museums tell us that there is a trend and that this is because their volunteer workforce, which outnumbers their paid or contracting workforce by about three to one, is an aging volunteer workforce. That's a challenge for them.