There are many museums in Canada. When I started 50 years ago, there were half as many as there are today. Many were created in the 1970s and 1980s, especially heritage sites or thematic museums that were developed mostly along tourist routes.
This is a natural phenomenon. If you look at statistics from other countries, you'll see that Sweden, for example, developed over 400 open-air museums in the 1920s. There were not even five million people in Sweden at the time. The Swedes museumize whatever becomes obsolete. They museumized agriculture in the 1920s, following the first one, Skansen, which was developed by Hazelias in the 1890s. Now they're museumizing their industry. They're making museums of glass, of crystal-blowing factories.
We don't have that reflex, but this did not prevent us from developing. The reflex is more for us to save what's local, what belongs to our roots and to our fibres, and try to keep them to show them to later generations.
Do we have too many museums? Yes, for the means we have to preserve and conserve their collections. As you know, most collections are not well preserved. Some objects are lost through bad storage.
What I proposed to the provincial government in Quebec was to create a conservation centre or places where the small museums could send their objects to be preserved, as they do in Norway. Then a change starts. Rather than being bogged down by their obsession with collection, the museums start to go into the subject of museology and the idea of museums. They start to develop more social goals for their museums, rather than just heritage conservation. That has helped.
For example, in Trondheim, Norway, it's unbelievable what they have done in the last 20 years in the museum once the state took away the responsibility of preserving their collection. Norway has only 5.5 million people. Okay, they have money. Oil is making a difference. Still, they have as many museums in Norway as we have in Quebec; in fact, I think they have more, and they're more pertinent than many of our museums.