I will answer the first question, and let my colleague answer the second.
The specific funding we got for the work done on the Parliament of the United Province of Canada came from the Ville de Montréal and the ministère de la Culture et des Communications du Québec, but mostly from the Ville de Montréal. Last year, we did the last major excavation campaign. This was a massive project, costing $6 million dollars. The visitors got access to the site throughout the whole summer. More than 25,000 people visited the archaeological site. It was a great success.
Unfortunately, we did not receive assistance from the federal government. However, we see this project as being phase 3. It is a development project in which we want to make the site accessible, and put a new pavilion on top of it. It is a huge site that is 100 metres long. It is probably Montreal's last, still intact, major archaeological site. It is extremely rich.
In terms of infrastructure, we have started talking with the federal government. Our director, Francine Lelièvre, has many contacts who work with federal programs. Things are going very smoothly. The same goes for our talks with the ministère de la Culture et des Communications du Québec.
As you know, we have a new municipal administration. Therefore, we will resume, with the new administration, the talks we started with the previous one. The project itself is going along quite well. We hope that the issues with funding will be solved this year. This project will cost more than $100 million. The problem isn't so much our infrastructure as it is our operating budget.
With that amount, we could acquire additional equipment that would, in my opinion, reach out to all Canadians. This is about a piece of political history that took place in Old Montreal, on the grounds of the Parliament at the time when Montreal was the capital of United Canada, also referred to as the Province of Canada.
Operations are a major issue. As practically all the witnesses have said, operations are museums' main Achilles heel. The budget we receive annually allows us to carry out our operations smoothly for now, but, if we add the equivalent of the third of our museum, we will need more resources. Of course, we are not expecting our operating budget to be increased by one-third.
That being said, there will be needs, whether for operations, potential projects, guides we need on-site, educational programs, and exhibits that will take place in this new pavilion. It goes without saying that we will need to prepare an operating budget. As we said earlier, the Ville de Montréal is the only partner the museum has to fund its operations. We have no partnerships with either the Quebec or the Canadian government.
The site of the Parliament of the United Province of Canada is a great example. It has all the necessary qualities to become a national historic site. It could then receive funding from the federal government. In this case, I'm not talking about the construction project, just the operations. The question is how do we proceed, given that we are working on a municipal site. We are open to the idea of talking about innovative solutions with you.
Could existing federal agencies such as Parks Canada and the Canadian Museum of History have a role to play in this? Would an entity be created specifically for this purpose? Everything is on the table, and we hope to have good discussions with you on this issue.
