Coming from Winnipeg you know what great institutions look like when they're well organized. Of course, there's the Manitoba Museum with its brilliant display of the Hudson's Bay Company, the new Canadian Museum for Human Rights, which will be opening very soon, and of course the Winnipeg Art Gallery is a brilliant building. Winnipeg, certainly for a city of its size, is host to some of the great cultural institutions of Canada.
You're quite right, as we go forward to our 150th birthday—and part of Digital Canada 150 is about that—once you build the infrastructure and you connect Canadians, once you make it more secure, once you take advantage of the economic opportunities, and once government is acting in a more digital way, which are the first four pillars, the fifth one, which to me is the most fun one, the more interesting one, is you fill all of that with Canadian culture, Canadian content, and Canadian stories going forward to our 150th birthday. It's the responsible thing to do.
We have created the Canadian Museum of History, which was formerly the Canadian Museum of Civilization, given it a new mandate, $25 million new dollars. They have three million items in their collection, and over 90% of them are sitting in storage. We want to get that stuff pulled out of there and moving all across the country through museum partnerships in all the museums of all sizes in all parts of this country, so that local museums can tell stories of either local or national history, develop their own narratives but have access to those three million items in the national collection that are sitting in storage, and get Canadians thinking about, talking about, and building thematics that make sense for local museums all across the country.
Again, contrary to the partisan attacks, it's not us telling museums but giving museums access so that they can tell whatever story that they want to tell and get things moving around this country.
In a digital context, here's one thing that I'm most proud of. I was told about the Memory Project early in 2008, when I became minister. I got very frustrated by the intransigence of, at that time, the Department of Heritage and what it was not doing to support this project. Here is the project in simple form. It makes brilliant sense when you think about it.
In 2011, I believe it was, we sadly lost the last surviving veteran of the First World War. The average age of a World War II veteran today is 91, and the generation is sadly passing away quickly. We failed with the World War I generation to properly catalogue and tell their stories and to treat them as the treasures that they are for future generations.
The Memory Project came from the Historica-Dominion Institute, now just Historica Canada, and they had a very simple, very cheap but very effective idea. They said they wanted to work with veterans organizations and legions all across the country and go to them and reach out to veterans of the Second World War and invite them to tell their stories. They would go to them and digitize their stories, with a video camera if they were comfortable, or just audio if they were comfortable with that. They could tell of whatever aspect of their time in service that they were comfortable with, if it was their training, their time in battle, their time after the war, or maybe they met the love of their life, maybe they experienced the most traumatic loss of their life of a friend.
Whatever aspect of their service that they wanted to share, in whatever format they wanted to share it, they would go to them and they would meet and share the story, digitize it, protect it forever, and house it at the Canadian War Museum, which is also part of the Canadian Museum of History. They've done that now, and we've provided extra funding for that to make sure it was complete. Now they're extending it as well to the Korean War generation, from 1950 to 1953, and that generation is also of course getting older as well. We want to digitize and protect, and for a very small amount of money we've been able to do that.
Digital Canada 150 is not just about cell towers and PIPEDA and intellectual property law, it's greater than that. You build the infrastructure and you connect Canadians together. Why? To take advantage of the economic opportunities, of course. But most importantly for me, the great task of any government is always to leave this country more united and prosperous than the way in which it found it. It's the forever challenge of Canada, making sure that this country stays united and strong going forward.
We can't stay united and strong when young Canadians don't know our history, when we can't name our previous prime ministers, when we don't know the sacrifices that people have made, and we don't appreciate our collective history, not just our individual history. We need to be able to tell our stories one to another. That's why we built the history museum, that's why its a central piece of the Digital Canada 150 policy, to make sure that we're telling our stories to one another in a comprehensive way.