Thank you.
I would like to agree with everything Mary Ann said. I have to point out that heritage and tourism work hand in hand. We like our customers in the museum, our patrons in the museum, and they're mostly tourists. Yes, I agree with everything she said, and perhaps I can add to that specifically from a heritage point of view.
First, I should say that my personal pursuit is fixing boats, old boats in particular. A couple of weeks ago I was working on one with my son, who is a mechanical engineer, or almost a mechanical engineer. We couldn't get it going. I finally diagnosed it as something the matter with the distributor, and from that, the points. He looked at me as though I was from outer space and asked what points are. I said, “You're a mechanical engineer.” He said to me, “Doesn't it have an electronic ignition?” Well, in 1932, no, it didn't. It came home to me that was an example of a skill I had simply because of my age that he didn't because of his age. And it applies here.
For instance, they have plenty of spoken word recordings in the archives, but nothing to play them on, no cassette players, no reel-to-reels, no cart machines, no eight-tracks, no turntables. They actually have these things, but they break down from time to time. What they don't have is analogue technicians in a digital world. These are skills that need to be taught today.
Other museums around the territory.... For instance, the Dawson City Firefighters Museum need somebody to fix or rather reassemble a steam engine fire pump. They need log buildings rebuilt. They need log constructors who are familiar with older methods. We have found recently that something called HPI funding--heritage properties initiative funding through Parks Canada--has done remarkably well in training people, sending them out for courses and what have you, in terms of creating the skills we need to maintain the material we have in the museums, to maintain the knowledge we must have that goes with some of our material in the museums. HPI runs out this year and we in the museum sectors need it and need it very much to be reinstated this year. HPI is but one fund available to the heritage group, and its demise is, to say the least, worrisome.
In a nutshell, the barrier to economic development in the heritage sector is funding or lack of it, and the solution is perhaps, simply put, more accessible funding. For instance, CHIP, the commercial heritage investment program, was a pilot program designed to increase heritage preservation, particularly in the private sector. I know of several projects that leveraged this program to create significant economic development--none of them were in the Yukon: hotels, restaurants, small businesses that refurbished old buildings to operate within those buildings. The payback was remarkable. They preserved their heritage as a byproduct, if you will, of creating economic development.
The fund is being discontinued. Whether it comes back as a direct federal investment in heritage or maybe in terms of tax incentives or some other incentive, the operative word is incentive. I think the federal heritage department has facts and figures on the success of that program in terms of economic development created as a direct result of heritage investment.
Heritage museums or private preservations create economic development, especially in the Yukon. Heritage is a backbone of tourism, or maybe it's the other way around. Without visitors the museums would wither, and without museums, the preservation of our heritage, the tourists would be less likely to come. We know of the Klondike as a brand. People use the word Klondike all over North America, if not the world, because they relate it to the Klondike right here and all the branding that goes with that word.
So barriers to tourism are also barriers to heritage, things like accessibility to the north. My compatriots have just gone through this.
Expensive infrastructure, gas prices, passport requirements—all these are barriers to the preservation and conservation initiatives. These issues are addressed through different federal departments, but they affect day-to-day lives as well as museum and heritage pursuits. It is simply more expensive to live and work in the north.
Museums are mostly non-profit societies who rely on federal funding. I find it a little awkward here, because almost our entire industry of heritage relies one way or another on federal funding, so cuts to funding hurt, specifically cuts to MAP funding, the museum acquisition fund. Cuts to any program hurt the museums, but these cuts also hurt tourism, and tourism is our number one industry.
As for solutions, I don't know. A national museums policy would help. We have aboriginal working groups; we have cultural centres; we have the museums that come under the YHMA, the Yukon Historical Museum Association; and we have private museums. All of them are running on proposal-driven initiatives. It would be very handy if there were some sort of program that would allow all these museums to operate independently and together at the same time.
I also sit on the working group of Heritage Canada, representing the Yukon. They are heavily involved in the creation of a national trust, something we don't have, something we've talked about, something that people would agree with. There was at one point $5 million in the federal budget put aside for the creation of the heritage trust, or a national trust of some sort. What happened to it, I don't know. Speaking as a member of that working group, they don't know either. It was there in the budget and disappeared. Certainly it would be helpful in a number of projects that would fit into the national trust category.
I would like to point out that all of this funding relates to job creation. There are a lot of people in the museum sector here in the Yukon who take training to work on heritage material. Sometimes they do this through Parks Canada, sometimes they do it through HPI. It is a very strong specialty concept to work on heritage material. You can't just build a log cabin. If it's a heritage log cabin, you need to do it the same way they did it a hundred years ago, and that takes special training. We have those people here, but we don't really have the work for them, because we don't have the money to employ them.