Thank you very much, Madam Chair. I want to thank you, as well as the committee members, for inviting us to introduce l'Odyssée des Bâtisseurs this morning.
I will start with a short history of our institution.
In 2004, the Société d'histoire du Lac-Saint-Jean, which has been in existence since 1942, moved into the municipal building of a company town that has now been merged with Alma. Across from the building is a forested range with an old water tower. On the river next to us, the Isle-Maligne hydroelectric plant, built in the mid 1920s, is still in operation. It is a site that has played an important role in the development of major industry in the region. It is also the starting point for our museum, opened in 2004, l'Odyssée des Bâtisseurs.
Today, in our exhibits and in our interpretive elements on the outdoor range, our mission is to showcase Lac-Saint-Jean's industrial, cultural, built, intangible and natural heritage. Our permanent exhibit focuses on the influence of water on our regional territory, the development of the hydroelectric network, and the challenges involved in water management. Our museum is open year round, but the outdoor range is only accessible during the high tourist season, in the summer.
In addition to its museum, the Société d'histoire du Lac-Saint-Jean has an archive and genealogy program, as well as advisory services in heritage renovation. The management of those three elements helps us develop larger projects, which aim to promote heritage and land, but through different activities. Our museum operation is supported by the town of Alma and, since 2016, by Quebec's department of culture and communications.
We have partnerships with a number of public and private institutions.
For example, the students of the Lac-Saint-Jean school board visit for free thanks to the boards's grant and a Hydro-Québec sponsorship. That partnership is actually causing a lot of envy in our region, since the recent cuts to school budgets have ended educational visits to other museums. However, since the Quebec education program does not focus on local or regional history, our educational involvement is very important for students, as the promotion of history of their community is fundamental to developing their sense of belonging.
In addition, we get regular sponsorships from companies or foundations for special activities and site development. Since we promote hydroelectric heritage, we often receive donations of industrial artifacts from regional businesses.
We are members of the Réseau muséal et patrimonial du Saguenay Lac-Saint-Jean, which brings together some 15 museum institutions. The region has 276,000 people, 166,000 of whom live in Saguenay and 110,000 in Lac-Saint-Jean.
Regional museums have been working in a network since 1986 in order to share their expertise and development tools.
In order to draw a more regional picture, I will share with you some thoughts that were expressed in briefs submitted during the 2015 regional economic summit and in public consultations on the renewal of Quebec's cultural policy held in 2016.
Most of the region's museum institutions concern history. Exhibit themes are complementary, and we take care to respect everyone's niche, in order to inspire people to visit more than one institution. Since the region developed through agriculture and the development of natural resources for major industry, the areas most often covered by our regional museums are industrial and technological heritage, agriculture, forestry, agrifood, cultural history and science.
We also cover aboriginal history, since the region includes the Mashteuiatsch ilnu community, which has its museum and its historic site. Our museums are managed by professionals with degrees in a variety of higher education areas.
Through heritage conservation and the transmission of knowledge, and because they are the carriers of collective identity, museums are players in regional development. They are also tools for raising awareness and collective understanding, as they are rooted in the life of the communities they belong to. They help the public better understand its roots. They are also key places for welcoming newcomers and for transmitting local culture to them. They help everyone understand the land they live on, frequent or visit.
By fostering a sense of belonging and by stimulating citizen engagement, museums create pride and make community life more dynamic. Because they are a reflection of what is happening in the region, museums promote key economic sectors, in addition to explaining the past, the present and the future.
Museums constitute a major cultural sector in our region. They account for 60 permanent jobs and 240 seasonal job, and their total sales amounted to more than $13 billion in 2014. They generate autonomous revenue through their ticketing, their shop, their service contracts, as well as sponsorships and donations. In addition, most of them are supported by Quebec's department of culture and communications and by municipalities. Nearly all their revenue is reinvested in the local economy.
Over the past few years, the region has been experiencing an increase in tourism. That impacts museums, which are mostly experiencing an increase in visitation. From 2010 to 2015, visits to the region's institutions increased by 16%. Visitors from Quebec account for 85% of our clientele, but visitors from the rest of Canada account for only 4%. Foreign tourists account for about 10% of the visitors. The percentage is higher on the Saguenay side, especially since cruises have been more and more numerous since the Saguenay port of call was built. The vast majority of our tourists visit museums between June and October. Some institutions are actually only open to the public during that period.
In recent years, the Quebec government transferred to the municipalities many responsibilities related to culture and heritage. However, for museums to be seen by the entire regional community as key elements of local vibrancy, local elected representatives and local development stakeholders must first take ownership of them and recognize their value.
In Saguenay—Lac-Saint-Jean, tourism stakeholders have decided to focus on the draw of the landscape and nature to attract a variety of clientele. The aim of the adventure tourism and ecotourism niche of excellence is to position the region as a four-season tourist destination. However, in this context, museums are struggling to hold their head above water, and history and heritage are rarely mentioned by stakeholders.
In a marketing study carried out in 2017 solely on Lac-Saint-Jean museums—so excluding Saguenay—we noted that regional stakeholders were mostly satisfied with what was available at museums in terms of diversity and quality, but that they were not very familiar with them and considered them complementary to major attractions. In other words, they did not consider them to be tourist attractions.
So we are suffering from a lack of visibility among tourist stakeholders and other regional decision-makers. They are all very happy to have us, but do not really grasp the extent of our potential in terms of tourism, social matters and identity.
Over the past few years, various changes, including the review of funding programs and the disappearance of some regional consultation spaces, have weakened the region's museum institutions.
For visits to museums to continue, we need to constantly reinvent ourselves. Newness is a permanent challenge for us. Few museums in the region can perform all museum functions optimally, since they require significant human and financial resources. With limited resources, it is difficult to ensure the sustainability of heritage collections and goods while updating the tourism supply and offering new things every year.
In addition, being located in a region far from major centres makes it difficult to offer certain activities. Training, skills development or networking activities almost always require trips of a few days, involving considerable costs, and it is difficult to convince our associations to provide activities locally.
It is also less possible for us to meet with department officials. Of course, distance is much less of an obstacle than it used to be, thanks to digital technologies, but it still prevents us from speaking to decision makers as much as our colleagues from Montreal and Quebec City, for example.
The funding we are currently receiving from the federal government to support our activities helps us hire our summer guides and sometimes young professionals for a few months. It also helps institutions that have space for temporary exhibits—not all of them have the space—to develop and host travelling exhibits. They make it possible to develop special projects based on calls for projects and, finally, to maintain our infrastructure.
The Department of Canadian Heritage is often our first confirmed financial partner for a project we are relying on to seek out additional funding from public or private sources. So the support is greatly appreciated. Our experiences with the department are always positive.
However, the federal support does not enable us to maintain our regular activities, develop our expertise or strengthen our anchorage in the community.
We feel that programs that encourage working in partnership, including the strategic initiatives component, are a very interesting option for museums. That kind of work improves our clout with partners. Common projects also help share expertise and achieve complementarity. In addition, they help save money and break the isolation of museum professionals.