Canadian Heritage Committee on March 22nd, 2018

[Lydie Olga Ntap]

I will use these 30 seconds and will talk quickly.

Yes, we are collaborating with museums such as Château Ramezay. We are loaning items. There was an exhibit with the McCord Museum. We loaned items from the women's museum. Other institutions have had exhibits. For example, Loto-Québec had an exhibit on Michel Tremblay's Les Belles-soeurs. We loaned items and helped with set designs.

Yes, we collaborate with both universities and museum institutions and local women's organizations, which make it a duty to visit the women's museum. We participate in women's groups' round tables, like the one in Montérégie, and we work with the Fédération des femmes du Québec. We are really rooted in the community and institutional academia. We are not operating in a vacuum. We are really not only focused on the local aspect.

[The Chair, Liberal, Julie Dabrusin]

That's a good note for us to end on with this panel.

Thank you very much to all of the witnesses for your testimony. It was very helpful.

I'm going to suspend, but I'm going to ask you to suspend very briefly because we need to catch up a little and be on time.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Julie Dabrusin]

We will continue the meeting.

We are hearing from a group of three witnesses.

Joining us are Anne-Julie Néron, from the Société d'histoire du Lac-Saint-Jean, and Guylaine Perron, from Musée Louis-Hémon.

In British Columbia, we have Jack Lohman from the Royal British Columbia Museum. Thank you so much for the early morning visit.

For the sake of technology, why don't we start with you, Mr. Lohman. You have 10 minutes for your presentation.

[Professor Jack Lohman, Chief Executive Officer, Royal British Columbia Museum]

Good morning.

Good morning, everyone.

I speak to you from Victoria, British Columbia. My name is Jack Lohman. I'm the Chief Executive Officer of the Royal British Columbia Museum, but I'm also Vice-President of the Canadian Museums Association.

The mission of the Royal British Columbia Museum was drafted by the citizens of British Columbia back in 1886 when they petitioned the lieutenant-governor that a museum be created. It is the only case in Canada where citizens have demanded a museum, and one of the very few in the world where the patriotic culture of citizenship leads the formation of a museum and its mission. The mission states that the museum should protect, interpret, and preserve the living cultures and landscapes of British Columbia.

In 2003, that mission was reinforced when, through the provincial Museum Act, the museum was merged with the BC Archives. It is as if you merged the ROM with the Archives of Ontario. It is a unique merging of functions that only appears in one other location in our country, and that's in Newfoundland at The Rooms.

The Royal British Columbia Museum is home to some of the most pre-eminent, important, and best-loved artifacts, treasures, and paintings. Indeed, two of its collections are the pre-Confederation Douglas treaties and the Ida Halpern collection, the earliest audio recordings anywhere in the world of indigenous people. These collections are so important that they are being inscribed on the Canada and UNESCO memory of the world registers.

We are open to the public 362 days a year. We welcome 750,000 visitors. Educational and learning outreach touches 35,000 pupils on site. Our learning portal and website is used by over seven million users.

The museum exists as a crown corporation. Each year it receives $11.9 million in support from the province, and it makes up the other $8.7 million itself through admissions revenue, commercial activities, gifts, grants, and investments.

The museum, I should say, is also a research institute that employs 12 scientists and curators, and its first nations and repatriation department is headed up by Lucy Bell of the Haida Nation. It is currently assisting with 75 calls for repatriation and assisting in the repatriation of 778 ancestral remains back to their community.

Allow me to touch and highlight three key issues that directly affect my museum and, by extension, smaller museums across our province here. Each issue, in a way, points to a broader issue, and I offer a recommendation for each.

The first issue is how do we future-proof our smaller museums? How do we provide future generations with sustainable and resilient museums that can serve all our publics better?

As you are aware from my initial remarks, the provincial government funds the Royal British Columbia Museum to protect and provide public access to collections and archives, and to preserve them in perpetuity. Since 2003, successive provincial governments have reduced their support of the museum from 67% 10 years ago to 47% today. That's a reduction in funding of 20%, which when adjusted for inflation, etc., is more like 24% in real terms.

The museum has always responded to such cuts by reducing its back of house, reducing its specialist knowledge, and reducing its specialists who actually know something about the collections in order to keep the front of house, the visitor operations, going on.

My point here is not to moan, but to propose that we become clearer about what income these institutions require, why, and what the alternatives are, so that we do not sleepwalk into the future.

Funding reviews are not something we're familiar with in Canada when it comes to museums. We don't even peer-review our own institutions. We do not even have a robust set of indicators to measure our institutions. We have no baselines to measure their performance. We have standards developed in the 1990s, but no one has ever thought of looking at issues that affect us today when it comes to measuring performance, for example, looking at underused collections.

We need to take an interest in strengthening our museums and challenging them to move with the times. I would recommend that, as an urgent priority, the museums assistance program be overhauled and that we consider creating a series of networked museum hubs; that we move away from this tiered system of museums with nationals at the top, provincials somewhere in the middle, and smaller museums somewhere down at the bottom and create a series of strengthened hubs and strengthened core funding.

Let me turn to a second related issue that affects our museums. It relates to the quality of our leadership and management, which I would argue is insufficient to deliver on the expectations of our publics. I think we have a malaise of averageness that is leaching away able but disillusioned people. For senior museum leaders and for indigenous staff, we need more exposure to external thinking. We need to update leadership practice and create more opportunities for learning from our peers. I would urge government to consider supporting all initiatives for cultural leadership training, and looking at museum training in particular.

My last issue concerns the slow progress being made toward reconciliation. Our museum displays are still riddled with stereotypical display information, displays of indigenous life emphasizing and privileging white history over indigenous history. Repatriation is inadequately funded. Our museum culture is still predominantly white.

In another life I should say that I ran the national museums of South Africa. The government of Mr. Mandela gave me just 12 months to update and clean up all the displays across 15 national museums. The Employment Equity Act insisted that I measure my performance then in terms of how many black people came through the doors and what percentage of black people I was employing. Change happened, and I think Izeko Museums of South Africa now is seen as a pioneer.

All three issues point to one thing that I would urge government to consider, namely a national policy for museums, a framework that outlines why we have museums, what they do for us, the learning, the education, the regeneration, the issues of identity and reconciliation. I would start holding culture ministers across our country accountable for their implementation, if that were possible.

We do need to promote access and inclusion. We do need to champion learning and education, and we do need to ensure excellence in the delivery of all our museum services.

Thank you very much for listening.

[The Chair, Liberal, Julie Dabrusin]

Thank you very much for that presentation.

Now, we will go to Anne-Julie Néron, from the Société d'histoire du Lac-Saint-Jean.

[Anne-Julie Néron, Executive Director, L’Odyssée des Bâtisseurs, Société d'histoire du Lac-Saint-Jean]

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.

[The Chair, Liberal, Julie Dabrusin]

Thank you very much.

We are now going to hear from Mrs. Guylaine Perron, who is the Executive Director of the Musée Louis-Hémon.

[Guylaine Perron, Executive Director, Louis-Hémon Museum]

Thank you, Madam Chair.

My Saguenay—Lac-Saint-Jean colleague presented a very accurate picture of the reality for the institutions in our region, and spoke at length about their importance. For my part, I am going to present our museum, the Louis-Hémon Museum, which is located in Péribonka of the north shore of Lac Saint-Jean. Péribonka is a small municipality of about 500 residents. It has for several years counted on tourism to diversify its economy, which depends on potato cultivation.

The Museum was founded in 1938, which makes it the oldest museum in the region. It was created to commemorate the Breton author Louis Hémon. When he visited the region in 1912 and 1913, he was inspired by Péribonka and the Bédard family with whom he stayed in the summer of 1912 and wrote his novel Maria Chapdelaine. The book was very popular in France and in Quebec, following its publication in France in 1921, and it was then translated into about 20 languages and thus went around the world. It is a tragic love story, and it realistically depicts the life of colonial settlers in the beginning of the 20th century, and it contributed to making our area, and Quebec, known the world over. From its inception, the museum occupied the Samuel-Bédard house, where Louis Hémon stayed, which is depicted in the novel, as are the living conditions of the settlers at the time.

The Museum has, of course, evolved and now includes two buildings.

The first is the contemporary pavilion which houses a permanent exhibition entitled Maria Chapdelaine, vérités et mensonges, and relates the incredible journey the Maria Chapdelaine novel, as well as the life story of author Louis Hémon, and the consequences of the popularity of his work, which continues to be studied today. In that same building, every year we present a new temporary or travelling exhibition.

The second building is, of course, the Samuel-Bédard house, of which I spoke, which is hosted and receives visitors during the summer. This historic house is heritage-listed by the Ministry of Culture and Communications of Quebec under the Cultural Heritage Act.

To complete our programming, we offer various activities and an educational program which aligns with our mission. Our mission has three parts. The first part is to preserve and transmit the quest of Louis Hémon to future generations. The second is to promote the country of Maria Chapdelaine. Since our museum is the only one in the RCM, it has an important role to play in preserving and showcasing this area. The third part is to offer a creative space that can facilitate discussions and favours the spoken word, and reading and writing in the French language.

To our knowledge, our museum is the only one in Quebec which exploits a literary theme. Obviously, it is based on the Maria Chapdelaine novel; this approach is interesting, but is perceived as being more urban than rural.

The Louis-Hémon Museum is recognized and supported financially by the Ministry of Culture and Communications of Quebec. For its operations, the Museum counts on the financial support of the municipality of Péribonka, and it is considered a supra-local infrastructure by the Maria-Chapdelaine RCM, which recognizes its unique character in our region.

For its summer jobs, the museum benefits from assistance from the Canada Summer Jobs and Young Canada Works initiatives of the Government of Canada. Over the past five years, the museum also received support from the Canada Cultural Spaces Fund and the Exhibition Circulation Fund of the Museums Assistance Program.

After the revision of the Quebec museums assistance program, the Aide au fonctionnement pour les institutions muséales program of the Ministry of Culture and Communications of Quebec, the Louis-Hémon Museum, just like 33 other Quebec institutions, experienced a decline in its financial assistance; we lost close to $30,000 over three years, out of a total yearly operational budget of $230,000. That loss, which may worsen over the next triennial cycle, presents a considerable challenge to our institution, whose resources were already quite limited.

The financial assistance from the municipality of Péribonka is precious, but a small municipality of 500 residents clearly does not have the same financial resources as a larger city to sustain its cultural and heritage environment.

In addition, attendance has stagnated for several years, as the annual number of visitors to the museum has not gone beyond 2,500. A study carried out by our region's tourist association in 2016 showed that the northern road around the lake, where our museum is located, was the one that is used the least by tourists who visit the area.

Of course, the low population numbers in our sector also constitute a considerable challenge for attendance, and that is also a challenge when it comes to looking for private sponsorship and donations, which are more difficult to find in small rural areas. We think that there is real benefit in working with other museum institutions of the area on that front and in pooling our efforts to attract more potential sponsorships, and thus be able to find ways of increasing our sources of private funding.

As for human resources, it is difficult to find people to occupy the more specialized positions. Most of this training is given in large centres, and there are very few young people who want to experience rural life, and those who do are generally looking for a one-time temporary experience, which does not provide stability for our institution. Moreover, small museums like ours have trouble offering competitive salaries and working conditions. For instance, in our case, we do not provide any insurance to our employees, and that includes the executive director.

The seasonal nature of several frontline jobs is another problem. We can guarantee our seasonal employees between 17 and 20 weeks of work a year. Even with their accumulated hours, it's difficult for them to qualify for employment insurance, and when they do, they can't receive benefits to cover the rest of the year, which of course makes it difficult for us to recruit.

Given the fragility and precariousness of our financial and human resources, it is difficult for us to fully discharge our conservation mandate, and our mandate to showcase, do outreach and educate. I consider that we really perform miracles with the few resources we do have, but it is currently impossible for us to renew what we offer in any meaningful way so as to increase the number of visitors to our institution.

In addition, maintaining our buildings, including the Samuel-Bédard house, is a constant challenge. Since its construction in 1986, the contemporary building has not had any major repairs, and today there are problems with water leakage, air conditioning and heating. We made the decision recently to pack up our collection objects in order to protect them against humidity in the museum reserve, as it is difficult to control that environment. In addition, last year we had to make the decision to close one of our buildings permanently because it was in an advanced state of decrepitude.

As you have heard, our little institution is facing many challenges. Despite all of the difficulties, we are sure that our institution has its place in our milieu and that it plays an important role in the culture and heritage of the region. Fortunately, we have the good fortune of being able to count on the crucial support of the elected representatives of the Maria-Chapdelaine RCM.

In order to ensure a better future and the sustainability of our institution, we are currently working in close co-operation with the Péribonka municipality on an important development project for which we have high hopes. This is an innovative and defining project for our municipality which will give us leverage to attract more tourists, in addition to maintaining services for the community, consolidating the Louis-Hémon Museum and preserving the parish church.

In summary, the project consists in giving the municipality of Péribonka a new city hall with spaces that will be shared by the museum and other community organizations. The museum is currently six kilometres away from the village, and this would allow us to redeploy it in the core of the village, and its permanent exhibition would be set up in the Péribonka church. This would echo the Maria Chapdelaine novel, which actually begins on the steps of the Péribonka church.

To us, the two options are clear: either this project comes to fruition and we survive, or we maintain the status quo and we close.

And in closing, I would like to point out that I share my colleague's ideas concerning the assistance and support the Canadian government can offer regional museums.

Thank you for your attention.

[The Chair, Liberal, Julie Dabrusin]

We will now begin our question and answer period.

Mr. Hébert, you have the floor.

[Richard Hébert, Liberal, Lac-Saint-Jean, QC]

Thank you very much, Madam Chair.

I want to congratulate the three witnesses, Mr. Lohman, Ms. Néron and Ms. Perron.

I am going to ask my questions quickly so that you have more time to explain your points of view.

Ms. Perron, you undoubtedly know that museums must constantly adapt so as to maintain their clientele. Moreover, there are only 500 inhabitants in the town of Péribonka, and your museum receives 2,500 visitors yearly. This means that the majority of your clientele does not come from the area.

Can you tell us how your museum is adapting or will adapt to constant changes, given its rural location?

How are you maintaining a constant flow of visitors, despite the small population of Péribonka and the fact that your museum is far from the larger cities and also from the village centre?

[Guylaine Perron]

As I mentioned in my presentation, we are working on a project which we hope will come to fruition. It's a matter of survival. We hope to achieve economies of scale by sharing resources and services with the municipality of Péribonka. We also want to share certain operational costs. There are savings to be made regarding heating and electricity, certainly. The project really consists in giving a new dynamic impetus to the whole village core, and in offering an important lever in order to attract a larger clientele.

Péribonka is located on the shores of the Péribonka River, at the mouth of Lac Saint-Jean. The landscapes and vistas are magnificent. The idea is to amalgamate culture and nature, as well as encourage people to visit and discover the area. That is the general idea underlying the project, which as I mentioned is a defining project for our municipality.

We believe that by reducing certain costs we will have greater means, and that that will allow us to showcase certain achievements. We want to have a greater presence, not only in Péribonka, but also in the RCM—the regional county municipality—of Maria-Chapdelaine. As I said before, our museum is the only museum institution in the area. Given the resources at our disposal, it is difficult for the time being to play our role in the entire area. That is what we hope to achieve through this project.

Of course, we also want to offer new projects and create a new image. Since our permanent exhibition goes back to 2002, it goes without saying that the time has come to renew it. That is also what we hope to achieve in the context of this project.

We do a lot of co-operative work with the other museum institutions. The Louis-Hémon Museum is also part of the Saguenay—Lac-Saint-Jean Museum and Heritage Network. Over the past two or three years, we have tried to form an alliance with the other museums in the Lac Saint-Jean area in order to pool some resources and marketing strategies. We also want our offer to be better integrated so that there is more complementarity and to make it possible to achieve joint projects in order to...

[Richard Hébert, Liberal, Lac-Saint-Jean, QC]

Unfortunately, Ms. Perron, we are a bit pressed for time. In his very eloquent look about Quebeckers, Louis Hémon talked about a race that does not know how to die. From that perspective, I hope that you will continue your mission, and that is my wish for you.

[Guylaine Perron]

Thank you.

[Richard Hébert, Liberal, Lac-Saint-Jean, QC]

Ms. Néron, in 2012 at the Grands Prix du tourisme québécois, your museum won the gold medal for the Odyssée des Bâtisseurs exhibition in the category of tourist attractions for fewer than 25,000 visitors. I congratulate you.

As you mentioned in your 2016 annual report, the Société d'histoire du Lac-Saint-Jean ended its year with a surplus. I have two questions about that.

First, which of your museum projects allowed you to win that prize? Can your recipes be exported to the rest of the country, especially to regional museums?

Secondly, what measures have you taken to make your institution dynamic?

[Anne-Julie Néron]

In fact, the prize we received in 2012 was in connection with the renewal of our permanent exhibition, and our multimedia film, which was projected on the water tower outside.

As for our surpluses, they were due to the fact that in 2016, we were eligible for the renewal of a subsidy from the Ministry of Culture and Communications of Quebec. Since the early 2000s, there had been a provincial moratorium on operational subsidies. Since our institution was created into 2004, we had not had the opportunity of accessing that funding before. In 2016, the department revised its eligibility criteria and provided more objective funding criteria. At that point, out of 90 museums that did not receive support, six new museums became eligible for operational subsidies. On the other hand, 21 Quebec museums lost their funding, and as Ms. Perron was saying, 33 museums had their funding reduced.

Our museum was among the six lucky ones that finally received an operational subsidy. This was a recognition of our work. Since it was announced in August 2016, the tourist season was almost over. In fact, we prepare our tourist seasons from January to April. Since we received the funding in August, this explains the large surplus we had in 2016.

This financial support will allow us to breathe a little easier over the next years. Previously, we kept the museum going without operational subsidies from the department. So, our exhibitions were a little dated. Thanks to the operational subsidy, we were able to join the 21st century, and this allows us to have better museography.

We also have a role to play as cultural mediator. We were not always able to play that role because we did not have enough employees. Now, we provide more activities, for children, for instance, but we also have some intergenerational projects. All of that has allowed us to be more dynamic.

You asked me if our recipe could be exported. In our case, it's simple: we had access to new financial support, which allowed us to create new projects.

[The Chair, Liberal, Julie Dabrusin]

Thank you very much.

Now we are going to Mr. Eglinski, please.

[Jim Eglinski, Conservative, Yellowhead, AB]

Thank you, Madam Chair.

Thank you to the witnesses who are here today.

I just want to read our motion:

That the Committee undertake a study to review the state of Canadian museums, with a focus on local and community museums as opposed to major national or provincial museums. That the committee report the findings to the House and...this motion be studied....

We have so much time and yet almost all of our witnesses have come from large provincial museums, large or major urban museums, with just a very small portion from smaller museums, the museums federation, such as from the Maritimes. I'm glad to see the witnesses we have here today.

To me, I really see two studies here. We can't compare the small museums, like those represented by two witnesses here, with the Royal British Columbia Museum, which I've been to many times. I appreciate what you do there. I'm mostly aware of the museums in the province of British Columbia, and I'll just use a comparison. In a sense, the Royal British Columbia Museum in no way compares to, say, the museums at Fort St. John, Dawson Creek, or Fort Nelson, which attract thousands of visitors each year who are travelling through on the Alaska Highway.

I think we need to focus on where we're supposed to be, and we're spreading it out a lot further.

To Mr. Lohman, I noticed that the RBCM receives $11.86 million in funding from the B.C. government, and you have a number of other funding methods. Do you assist in training programs or providing assistance to the smaller museums, such as Dawson Creek, Fort St. John, Fort Nelson, the Chilcotin museum, and so on? Does any of your money from the province go there?

[Prof. Jack Lohman]

We invited the British Columbia Museums Association to nest within our museum and to assist them directly because, in a way, they have tentacles across the entire province, a very deep and close partnership.

Obviously, one of the issues is aboriginal museums. You mentioned in your catalogue various typologies. What we seem to have left out altogether is the aboriginal museums, because they're not museums, but cultural centres. The whole definition of museum becomes quite an interesting challenge.

Of course, a critical part of being a provincial museum is that you act. We push outward each exhibition that we create, with the help of the Department of Canadian Heritage. You've been very good at supporting the pushing out of these smaller exhibitions, lecture programs, and so on. We push out all our experts, but obviously it's a challenge.

As we heard at the Chapdelaine, we have problems with our infrastructure and so on. You've been to the museum. You know that the only way into the gallery is via escalators. Those escalators were put in however many years ago and are breaking down all the time, etc. etc.

[Jim Eglinski, Conservative, Yellowhead, AB]

Do you see a need, sir, for a specific kind of federal funding program for the smaller museums, outside the of the funding for larger urban or provincial ones?

[Prof. Jack Lohman]

I wouldn't distinguish. I would say that what we need to do is get museums to work together. We heard from the other witnesses that there's a need to collaborate far more and, by the way, for the nationals to step up to being nationals. They should not just offer services that they want to sell particularly, but actually find out what smaller museums need and act as a midwife or a homing opportunity.

I think it should be strategic challenge funding where partners need to come together for a joint project that enables a collection of museums...or to look at different distribution methods. I don't think the distribution method for these grants really responds well to the needs of smaller museums.

[Jim Eglinski, Conservative, Yellowhead, AB]

Thank you, sir.

Go ahead.

[Martin Shields, Conservative, Bow River, AB]

Thank you.

I'd really like to follow up on that. You mentioned something specifically about creating hubs rather than tiers. I have an idea that you must have some experience in your background that would tend you towards making that kind of statement.

Could you expand on that?

[Prof. Jack Lohman]

I have to say that when I was director of the Museum of London, we brought 35 smaller museums together into a group. We created a very close knit.... Government had funding available to bring in. You had to apply for this funding, but it was significant for a museum. As you can appreciate, two million British pounds goes a long way in a museum. They had that type of funding available, but you had to have a minimum four or five partners.

We created special interest groups around technology, around joint promotion. We started seeing how we could procure things together. Could we collapse various departments together? Even though some of us were urban museums, some were university museums, and some were local authority museums, it didn't matter when we came together.

I know that in South Africa, the law simply said, “These national museums that have never worked together will now be put into one hub,” and off you go.

Because of the size of the country, there's something about having to create clusters of museums where you can have centres of excellence. We don't have to have everything in the Royal BC Museum. We can push out conservation, for example, to Prince George or somewhere, where there may be a greater call for it, or there may be a greater call for our archives.

I think there's a different way of looking at our heritage that needs to happen.

[The Chair, Liberal, Julie Dabrusin]

Thank you.

Mr. Nantel, you have the floor for seven minutes.

[Pierre Nantel, NDP, Longueuil—Saint-Hubert, QC]

Thank you, Madam Chair.

I have to commend Mr. Eglinski for his remark. I think it's a good reminder of the mission of this study.

The mission of the committee is to find support, particularly for small regional museums.

Mr. Lohman, I won't put any questions to you, but I just want to say that I understand that you were an advocate for the museum federation. You seem to want the large national museums to act as big brothers—you even spoke of midwives. I thank you for your very relevant comments. In fact, I note that you are also part of a network that offers its members a 20% discount when they visit other museums in the region, which is a very good thing.

I think Ms. Perron offers a perfect example of an organization that is trying to find a way to keep things afloat, because there is an inherent danger—and not in Louis Hémon's house, but in the house of the family that welcomed him. I only learned this morning that Louis Hémon was not a Quebecker; I apologize. But in my opinion, any proud Breton who visits Lac-Saint-Jean will be happy to go and visit the house where a great novelist from his area lived, one who spoke so elegantly about our country.

That being said, I would like to hear more from you about the idea that the Canadian government could institute a program to support museum admissions. I think this idea has already been raised. We quite understand that projects become wearying for museums because they are not recurrent, and you always have to jump through hoops to get them approved.

Personnaly, the only trip I ever made with my father was around Lac Saint-Jean. Isn't there some way of having a Lac Saint-Jean map that would direct visitors to the museums, hotels and restaurants in the area?