Madam Speaker, it is my pleasure to speak to Bill C-36 regarding the wisdom of the merger between the national archives and the national library. These are two cultural institutions that mean a great deal to me and also to Canadians and Canadian culture.
Within my first year of being an MP, and as our new culture critic, I was asked to comment on the consultation by Dr. John English on this subject. In 1998, to prepare a submission for Dr. English, I looked into the background of the library and the archives and frankly was not happy with what I found.
It was obvious that because of the serious cuts of the 1990s the archives and the library were both placed under stress and were in peril. The parliamentary allocation for the national archives in 1990 was $65 million and the allocation for the library was $40 million. By 1998 both institutions saw an actual cut of one-third and a real dollar or inflation adjusted cut amounting to one-half of their budgets. Suddenly archivists had to decide which historical collections of national significance were going into the blue box. The cuts meant that the papers of labour leaders, business leaders, politicians, feminists and journalists, plus aboriginal histories and the stories of new Canadians, were lost to historians forever because the collections were not being accepted and processed by an archive that was struggling to exist. This has meant that historians will look to our national collections for the stories of our ancestors and will find some of them missing.
Some Liberals have said that the cuts of the former finance minister were historic. In the case of the archives, I think the cuts have been anti-history. The archives were at least able to cope with the draconian cuts by trimming collections, but the library did not have this option because of the nature of their mandate. Parliament has dictated by law that the national library must collect two copies of every publication in Canada. It has no option about its acquisitions. We have told them to be the national repository of all our books, papers and magazines. This chamber has said that the national library is our collective meeting place for writers, poets, journalists and other muses. It represents the central coordinator for our greatest national literary network, our public libraries.
For the national library, those cuts meant that its physical plants deteriorated. There were staff cuts, there were roof leaks, the pipes burst and new books had to be put into boxes and then put into warehouses. The greatest enemy to preserving paper is water. A book does not survive when the roof leaks. Old paper copies of documents do not survive when the water pipes burst. Old diaries disintegrate when they are kept in cardboard boxes due to a lack of space and staff.
News reports say that there have been more 45 incidents in the last decade where water damage has threatened the national library and Archives collections housed at 395 Wellington Avenue. This has caused the damage and loss of over 25,000 works. Even attempts to improve the capital plant by building a new preservation centre in Gatineau have been a band-aid solution, for the cuts have meant a lot fewer archivists and without archivists no one takes care of the archives.
The report from Dr. English in the year 2000 called for greater administrative coordination between the two institutions, a coordinating committee of both institutions and the department and more record sharing to allow clients to access records from both institutions in one place. It said that the collection should focus only on Canadian content and that a general merger of everything but the management of the two institutions would be acceptable. However, he stopped short of recommending a complete merger. I will quote from his report. It said:
No brief from any major stakeholding organization recommended that the national archives and the national library be merged. Major archival and library organizations recommended that the positions of National Librarian and National Archivist be maintained as separate positions.
He also strongly supported the view that our archives should continue to be an archive for all Canadians, collecting records of national importance across the country, not just an archive for government records, a view that I strongly support.
The institutions crept along for years. The funding levels evened off at their reduced levels and did not really climb to match inflation. The good news, I guess, is that the Liberals have stopped making things worse, but the funding has not yet been restored.
A couple of interesting things have happened at the library over the last few years, the most exciting being the appointment of Roch Carrier as the national librarian. Mr. Carrier has been successful in raising the profile of the library and the problems at the library within the context of the importance of our national library to our national library system as a whole.
In 2000, in an address to the heritage committee on the book publishing industry, Roch Carrier said:
As national librarian, I must say bluntly, that I do not have the tools in some areas to fulfill our mandate to preserve the published heritage of Canada. The national treasure of original Canadian newspapers, for example, is sitting in horrendous conditions out in an industrial area of Ottawa--with bare, hot light bulbs dangling from the ceiling not far from very brittle, dry newsprint...This is a disaster waiting to happen.
This resulted in heritage committee recommendation 5.2, which stated:
The Committee recommends that in conjunction with the National Librarian and the National Archivist, the Department of Canadian Heritage immediately initiate a planning process to examine the long-term space and preservation needs of both the national archives and the national library.
Sadly, these three year old recommendations have not been acted on. Instead we have seen a continuation of the underfunding, no new building, and this bill calling for a formal merger. Bill C-36 says that the merger is not a cost saving exercise, but given the government's track record it is hard to trust that. I have no philosophical objection to merging these two institutions. I even think there is a strong case to be made that our beloved Library of Parliament should be looked at as an additional partner for merging with the new library and archives of Canada so the research and parliamentary capacity of the proposed institution would be increased and so parliamentarians would have easier access to the broader resources of the national library and Archives.
My quandary with Bill C-36 is not philosophical but is based on the fact that the most obvious and long-standing problems with these two important institutions, funding and mandate, are not being dealt with.
What I am prepared to do today is support the bill in principle, but I give the government warning that the following things need to be dealt with at committee for our support to continue: that the protection of the collection of the archives and library be the first priority in funding and mandate discussions; that no current employees will lose their jobs due to the merger; that the replacement of the roof of the building at 395 Wellington will be only the first step in upgrading and replacing the new institution; that the plans to upgrade and replace be presented to the committee during the bill's study; and that the long term possibility of also including the Library of Parliament in a real, full archival research and repository institution for the history of the country be considered.
I hope we will see for Bill C-36 that there will be a serious consideration within the heritage committee of some of these important factors and an opportunity for us to discuss these important institutions. I warn the government that my tenuous support for the bill will evaporate if I see that the rationale for this bill becomes simply a continuation of the Liberal policy of neglect of our cultural repositories.
