The Canadian Museums Association has been urging, for the last five or six years, the federal government to establish an endowment fund for Canadians supporting their museums, the idea being that it will match public donations from Canadians dollar for dollar with federal dollars. There's always been a quietly warm response from members of Parliament when they've been approached on the subject, but we've never seen any real traction.
The observation is that there are similar endowments in place for the arts, but museums are very specifically excluded from participating in those opportunities. I think nationally we do need to address that. We all speak about federal funding and the importance of federal funding, which can be linchpin funding, but the museums need to be able to stand on their own two feet as well, and things like endowment funds help them to do that.
When we were developing the museum evaluation program, and we were really talking to Nova Scotians about their understanding of standards and so forth, one of the things that really came forward to us was the absolute confidence of Nova Scotians—and I would suggest most Canadians—that their government dollars—municipal, provincial, and federal—are actually holding all of these institutions together. Canadians think their tax dollars are doing that job, and their tax dollars are not. We need a way to constructively address that situation. I think an endowment fund is a very positive way of doing that.