Mr. Speaker, I will not refer to my own name. Museums allow us to understand our past and to redefine our future. Canada is a relatively young country and we absolutely need to understand our past, and that is the role of museums.
We need to engage our young people to understand the past. Many of the immigrants who come into the country need to understand what has defined us in the past and how we could, together, reshape our future.
For example, the Art Gallery of Ontario is in my riding of Trinity—Spadina, and I have been on the board for many years. We have other small museums and big ones like the Royal Ontario Museum. We understand that museums are vital to our heritage and understanding of ourselves. They are vital to Toronto, to Canada, to education, to a civilized society, to our culture, to our different ethnic communities, to understanding multiculturalism and the arts and to a civilized life.
Therefore, I do not quite understand what possible justification could there be to savaging our own heritage and then trashing the past by slashing funding for such vital institutions like museums.