Presently the Department of Canadian Heritage offers a variety of programs, which are mostly individual, stand-alone programs. While re-profiling is an excellent word that you have used, our suggestion is that these programs need to be brought up to date. They are currently not meeting the needs of the museum community. The programs need to be refreshed and made more efficient. Many of them require great administrative burdens for reporting, let alone application processes. We believe there are opportunities to streamline the programs to make them more cost effective and efficient.
In addition, by bringing those together into a single portal, as it were, it will be much more user-friendly to museums and art galleries, and so on, across Canada.
We do make the recommendation for adding this new program to support private sector donations. Currently culture is at the very bottom of the heap of charitable giving in Canada. This is something we would actively like to change.
We think we can do it. Museums are well supported and looked to by Canadians. They are highly respected: 96% approval ratings.
We believe we have an opportunity that we would like to move on.
Thank you.