Thank you, Mr. Chair. I didn't know I was next, but I'm ready to go.
Thank you, Mr. Chair and committee, for the opportunity to speak to you this morning about this very important piece of legislation.
I'm Rick Goodacre and I'm the executive director with Heritage B.C. We're a provincial non-profit association. We have about 160 member groups in our membership around the province. That means community heritage societies, historical societies, museums, local heritage committees, and things of that sort.
I'm not here as an expert on lighthouses and lighthouse history. This is what I do for a living. My expertise—and I've done this job for about 18 years now—is in the general business of heritage conservation. I'm not going to say a lot about lighthouses or their worth. I've been through the testimony from last week. I know the committee has heard a lot already from very authoritative personnel about why lighthouses are important. From reading through those minutes, I don't get the impression at all that there's really any resistance on the part of this committee to that notion. I think it's a kind of given; we're already there. We know these things are important. It's more a question of what to do about it.
I'll keep my opening remarks brief because I'd rather spend the time on discussion, which I think will be more useful. But I certainly can speak to the general business of what heritage conservation is and how it works. When I say “how it works”, I'm speaking very much as a pragmatist, because heritage conservation is a very pragmatic business, believe me. There's idealism, there are values at the root of it, and without the values, without the idealism, it doesn't make a lot of sense, but the business of doing heritage conservation on a day-to-day basis is very pragmatic.
Heritage conservation is really a continuing process, an ongoing process. It's a planning, implementation, review, and “plan and move on again” kind of cycle. It usually starts with identification. We have a notion that some things or some part of our life or our community have some historic heritage value and that we really need to identify those if we're going to understand them.
Identification usually gets into another stage, which is a kind of official recognition. The creation of a register, in British Columbia, is what you would usually see in a community heritage plan. You get onto the register, and it becomes officially adopted by council, for example.
You then have a conservation plan. You've identified these places, but then there are the “So what?” questions: “So these things are historic; so they're heritage; so what?” We think we care, but what are we going to do about it? You really need to move on to that next stage of it, a conservation plan, and that plan must be something that's workable.
Then you're dealing with the ongoing maintenance and repair of these places, because heritage always comes back to something physical. History is about ideas, things that happened. Heritage is invariably about something physical that you can get your hands on. It has an historic connection, but it's also about right now, today. This is a building. What are we going to do with it? What are we going to do with it tomorrow? How are we going to keep this building going? How are we going to keep it alive?
There has to be a legal framework to make all of this planning process happen, because we're always dealing with property, and property comes back to the law at some point.
There also has to be a financial framework. These things always have a cost factor. Or more to the point, rather than dwelling on the cost, there's always a choice factor, a resourcing factor. We only have so many resources; where are we going to allocate them? Where does heritage fit into this allocation process? What right does it have at the table to claim some of these resources? Or more importantly, in a lot of cases, does it even have a right to be at the table? Often, what we're doing is scrambling just to get to be at the table.
More importantly, I want to stress that there has to be a will to conserve. There has to be a desire, and that desire is always based on the understanding of values. I think you've heard a lot about that already at this committee concerning lighthouses, but you will always have to go back to it. If there's no will, if there's no real desire to make these things happen, regardless of the best framework planning process, legal framework, and what have you, nothing much will happen.
On the pragmatic side, the best guarantee that a place will survive is that it have a purpose. If you have a building that's identified as a heritage building, but it has no purpose—the owners don't want it, the owners leave it empty—it stands there empty and derelict for years, it goes into decline, and eventually you get demolition.
I work in the city of Victoria, live in that area, and work out of my house. I've been on the City of Victoria's heritage committee for a number of years. I'm not on it now—I've been cycled off—but I've been through that process of heritage building maintenance and conservation planning for many years there.
Right now we have a couple of historic buildings for which demolition permit requests have come forward. Why? Well, because the owners have let them sit literally for decades, and that's really been their plan--to do nothing. Now they're at the demolition stage, saying that things have come to this point--the roof is falling in--and they can't do anything else. So now the city and the owners are at loggerheads, and it's getting in the newspaper, and the whole process is kind of getting out of control.
The problem has been that those buildings have not had active use. Therefore, they're not making money for the owners. Therefore, there's no investment in them. That's the kind of cycle you get into, and that always spells doom for heritage.
This is an outline that applies to all heritage buildings and all heritage resources. But I think lighthouses and their history are unique. They are unique in the sense of their ownership. They are unique in the sense of their history and their function. What else is like a lighthouse? An office building is an office building, but it could be something else. A lighthouse is a lighthouse. I don't know what else it's going to be, except that its future use will have to evolve around its maritime reality and its very particular function.
Also, the situation is unique. These places are all on the water. They're usually in some remarkable outpost of our country and are often in very scenic places. I think that's why, in this case, special legislation is valuable and necessary. I don't believe the general blanket of federal policy for heritage buildings is sufficient to deal with our historic lighthouses.
I'd also say that these unique settings are a particular opportunity. Last year, about eighteen months ago, we had a case of a federally owned building in the control of the Canadian military. It was an historic building, an officers' mess, at Work Point in Esquimalt, near Victoria. The military didn't need this building. It sat empty for years and was falling apart. Eventually they decided to take it down.
There has been a hue and cry about this historic building being destroyed. The problem is that this building exists in the context of a very large complex of buildings. It's a secure area. It's within a complex of an institution that defends Canada. It's business; it's not heritage conservation, or at least the base commander doesn't see that as part of his job description. His job is defence of our country.
How do you deal with that building inside that large complex? Can you evolve that into another use, to turn it over to other hands? It's a very difficult situation.
You think of a lighthouse, and it's a completely different situation. You have a completely integrated system that's distinct, unique, and stands apart. It can be turned over from one set of hands to another, and a new process can be, I think, isolated or extracted from that overall context of our coastal waters.
So there are actually unique opportunities for each one of these sites. If we are going to evolve them into other uses, I think there are lots of things we can do with these sites.
I would just like to say, in conclusion, that if Bill S-215 is put into effect, Heritage B.C. will strive to see that it is implemented and that its intentions are realized. We'll do whatever we can to make this work.
Thank you.