Charlie Angus

[Committees of the House, October 23rd, 2006]

Too dumb to get it. That has been the message of the government.

[Committees of the House, October 23rd, 2006]

Yes, swipe it, take the money away and then slap them on the head and call them inefficient for not having known how to get to the money that the government got to first.

[Committees of the House, October 23rd, 2006]

Mr. Speaker, the hon. member has raised something that really needs to be pointed out and hammered home in this discussion.

We are not talking about organizations that were receiving adequate funds for years and are now having to make due with less. Year after year the problems facing museums were identified. Some museums have mould on the walls, some have leaks and some have no proper storage facilities in certain areas.

I want to refer back to the issue of the lack of research dollars. Museum curators do not have the funds to get out into the field and to create new exhibits. Museums have identified this problem year after year.

What we now have is a major cultural deficit in the country. We are at the point where we need investment. We needed the federal government to say that it was impossible for little municipalities to handle it and that it was too much for a single province. The federal government needed to make a national commitment to look at a cultural framework. When I hear members of the Conservative Party say that they want to see other forms of government step up to the plate, I say, what an insult.

I have to watch myself before I get ruled out of order but who does the government think is putting the money into our small museums across the country? It is the municipalities. I have seen small municipalities with hardly any budget at all and they are the ones who keep these museums open. They are the ones who do what they can with volunteers.

What we have asked for is a federal government that is at the table but it is not at the table on this because not only did it decide to cut the funds but the funds that were sitting there that it knew could have been utilized better it thought it could just--

[Committees of the House, October 23rd, 2006]

Mr. Speaker, I was also astounded that the government's position would be to challenge us to point out a museum that had suffered or that had complained. I thought it was fairly clear from the consensus across the country that the museums associations were led to believe that the government was finally willing to address the years of chronic underfunding. The perception was based of course on campaign commitments made by the government.

However, what the museums have seen instead is that their funds are being cut. Not only are they being cut but now they find out that there was money there all the time that was not being utilized and they are being blamed because the government programs did not respond to the ability of museums to meet them.

On top of that, some museums have met the requirements. They have gone through all the hoops that the government can think of to keep them from getting money and they are still not seeing any money being added to their operating budget now six and seven months into this operating year. I find the position of the government to be incredible.

[Committees of the House, October 23rd, 2006]

Mr. Speaker, I made sure I did not call anyone in particular a buzzard. I was referring to the general term. Would I call it a murder of crows or a flock but perhaps flock is not correct? I will not use that expression a second time, as long as I got it in the first two times I will be pleased.

I have been thrown off my discussion and I must get back to what we are talking about. We are talking about the fact that a government told an arts and cultural sector that it would be there for them. It told them that it would commit because it recognized that this was a sector that for years had been underfunded.

We are not talking about a sector that had received adequate funding. People understood that the museums across this country were having serious problems and that an infusion of cash was needed. Meanwhile, some of the cash was sitting there.

What the government could have easily done is it could have worked with the museum sector to ensure the money flowed. The government would not have needed to increase it because the money was there but it did not. It took the money back while it was sitting on a $13 billion surplus and then turned around and told this House and the public that the museums were not delivering value for money and that they were wasteful and inefficient.

It is the insult to the injury that has to be opposed here most strenuously. We also need to clarify the misinformation that is coming from the government that it has only cut 1% out of the $240 million. It has in fact cut 25% of the funding that goes to every regional museum across the country. In doing so, the government has undermined the ability of smaller regional museums to partake in a national conversation, to tour exhibits and to work together, a number of museums working together to create stories that are of national significance. Under the present government these stories will not matter. The government will put its money into two, three or four main urban museums and leave everyone on the sidelines. That is not acceptable.

What we need in this House is a commitment. We need to tell our cultural arts sector, not only that they are the ones who tell our stories and make of us a nation, but that they are also a serious industry. These museums are a serious player in the creation of jobs. If we go to any small town in Canada and ask people in the town about their tourism strategy, what do they point to? They point to their museum. Every small town knows that culture is what brings in tourists and tourists play a major role in the ability of our smaller communities to survive. Our regions understand the value of art and culture in terms of economic development but the government does not seem to have a clue.

The government does not seem to think that culture is anything other than some kind of soppy waste for the left wing socialists. I would argue that culture is an industry that needs a commitment and, if there ever was a time, we need it now.

In terms of the Canadian Television Fund, where is the government on its commitment to invest in the Canadian Television Fund? It is absent. Where is the government in terms of a mandate review on CBC? It is absent. Where is the government's review of its need to push art and culture internationally so we can sell our cultural voice and products abroad? It has been absent on every account. It has been missing in action.

I have to say that I am very sorry that the minister, who I had some great hope for as being someone who understood the issues of culture in this country, has instead turned into an absentee landlord on fundamental issues that are facing the cultural sector at this time.

[Committees of the House, October 23rd, 2006]

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to rise to discuss this issue today. I think it is a very important issue and I thank my colleague from the Bloc for bringing this forward today.

When we are talking about a commitment that was made to museums, we have to place it in context of the political rollout that has happened with these cuts. We have not heard from the government that tough decisions had to be made, that this is difficult, and that it wants to work with those in the museum sector who have lost a major share of their funding.

What we heard is ridicule. I was there when the President of the Treasury Board made his announcement. He was emphatic. In fact, he seemed almost gleeful. He said he was going after programs that were wasteful, inefficient, and completely out of touch with average Canadians. That is what he said.

He did not say that some of these programs needed to be tweaked and could be better if we got stakeholder interest. He attacked these programs. The program he attacked in heritage was our museums program. The finance minister followed up with the same sort of gleeful contempt saying that he did not mind saying no to what he considered a bad idea.

I have a question for these minister. Are the museums that we have in Canada a bad idea? Are they wasteful? Are they inefficient?

We had a colleague from the Conservatives who just left who said that in choosing where to cut they went after programs that did not deliver value for money. He used the example that some $240 million a year is spent on museums, so why are we trifling about 1% or 2% that is being taken out of the MAP?

That is a code word. That money is given to Ottawa and Toronto, to the three or four big museums. The government did not cut those. No, it cut every small museum in the country.

When the government says that these are not delivering value for money, it is sending a message to Gander, Newfoundland, to Moose Jaw, to Timmins and other small communities. That message is, “Buzz off. Your story is not part of our story. If we're going to fund something, it will be one, two or three of the large national centres. We will continue to put money in there, but for your museums you can continue to find ways to raise your own funding like bake sales”.

I think this discussion is very important now. We have had this discussion over and over again about where we need to go with the museums policy. We have looked at the problems with the MAP. One of the things that is very clear is how do the voices of the small regions of Canada fit into some sort of national voice? How is it part of a national significance? That is one of the criteria for federal funding. The museum, the story and the history has to be part of a national significance.

I have always found, as a writer of history and the arts, that we are arbitrary in what we consider nationally significant stories and what stories we consider absolutely not worth funding. This is an important issue for museums.

Across Canada, since 1990, we have seen a 40% drop in attendance at museums. Museums are struggling to reinvent themselves because history is not objective. History is not something that exists out there. History is reinterpreted all the time. For a museum to keep pace with changing demographics and changing cultural attitudes, it must change its own presentations and programs of study which requires research. It requires a commitment between museums and educational institutions. It requires funding in order to rediscover histories that have been erased and deliberately forgotten. We know of stories all across Canada where our histories have been forgotten.

I am from the mining community of Timmins. As a little boy growing up I always felt that the story of the people who came to work, the multi-ethnic families who worked in the hard rock mines of northern Ontario and northern Quebec, were not represented in any national story.

We did not fit the sort of two dimensional tableau by which we tell our stories: the prairie print dresses in Saskatchewan; the happy bûcheron; the roller piano player in the Klondike; the story of families who came over from Yugoslavia, Finland, and my own family who came from the slums of Dundee, Scotland. These families were sent underground, entire multi-ethnic communities, with men who died at age 41 of silicosis.

These stories were never part of a larger sense of history. I always had my own desire to find where this history was and who could tell the story. I spent many years doing oral histories, meeting people, and realizing that there is a much larger sense of history out there than the history that is often presented to us in schools. The museums recognize this and the need to be reinventing themselves.

When we talk about a museums policy, a lot of that work has been done. This work was laid out. The issues were brought forward. Last year I met with museums from across northern Ontario to talk about what we would need in terms of a museums policy that we could present to the government so we could get some action. What we are being told now by the government is that not only is it going to take the money, but it will give the vague promise of a new policy somewhere down the road. That is not good enough.

What we are seeing right across Canada is that museums are suffering now from years and years of underfunding in terms of their ability to maintain capital costs, collections and artifacts in carefully enclosed areas. The discussion that arose is that somehow this MAP was not delivering value for money. My colleague from Gander was saying that money was not spent and perhaps they did not know how to spend it.

What strikes me as amazing in this situation is that I have met with people from museum after museum who said they have tried to work with heritage officials. They tried to get a program that responded to the needs of museums across this country. What did we see? Since 1995-96, when the program was at $11.8 million, there was spending of only $8 million, $7.9 million, $8.3 million or $7.2 million. Year after year the program was not being utilized.

I asked the minister in the House this question. Why was it not utilized and was this part of what the government said was wasteful, inefficient and out of touch? Was it that the museums somehow did not bother to apply for this funding?

The minister's assistant said there was an issue of sophistication. The word used was “sophistication”, as if the museums all across Canada are just a bunch of country bumpkins that do not know how to fill out the forms properly. I would suggest that was not the case at all.

Unfortunately, under the former Liberal government there was a program in place that did not meet the needs of museums across this country. Year after year museums were asking for help and did not get it. Year after year the Liberal government was throwing that money into the surplus.

Now we come to this so-called new government. Canadian museums across this country needed a champion. They needed a government that was willing to fight for them and say that the museums were right, that year after year this program was not meeting their needs and the government will make it meet their needs.

However, no, they did not get a champion. What did they get? They got a pack of ideological buzzards who set upon them, feasted upon them and, not only that, crowed upon them when they were done. That is what we have seen here.

The government said it was taking the money back, money that the museums were never able to access. It said it was going to take the money back and give it to its buddies in tax cuts. That is an unacceptable situation. We needed a minister who was willing to sit down and make this program work. Unfortunately, she has been more like an absentee landlord.

Why are our museums not able to access these funds? I will give an example. I was speaking with an arts organization the other day that had successfully applied for the cultural spaces program. It is six months into the year and it has not seen a penny. It is waiting. The government committed, but no money has flowed.

In fact, one of the bureaucrats from the Department of Canadian Heritage wished the person good luck in using the money as the museum would need a full time staff person just to administer the amount of money it was receiving. We are not talking about a very large amount of money.

The Ontario Métis and Aboriginal Association has not received any money this year from the funding commitments of the government. In fact, it has not received money from last year. It has been running on empty halfway through the fiscal year because of the Department of Canadian Heritage.

I would say that culture is not the only “c” word that our government and our minister seems to have a problem with. I would say that contracts, commitments and capability might be other questions that need to be asked. When the minister was in opposition she heard the problems and she knew what the problems were. They were discussed, brought forth and she presented herself as a champion.

During the election, the Conservatives told our museums that they would support them by bringing forward increased funding. What we hear now is claptrap, another “c” word, claptrap from the government that the museums never bother to deliver good value for money. Why did the Conservatives not say that in the election? Why did they not have the guts to tell people?

Another fiction that is being thrust upon the House by the Conservative Party is that we will all be sitting around the heritage committee working with the government on a new museums policy. We do not need a new museums policy. Canadian museums do not need to hear the heritage committee talk for another year. They need some action. They need that money put into programs.

What we are seeing here are the 12 steps for doing nothing. The government has laid out a course of action in terms of our museums and our other arts programs, which is to do nothing.

I would like to read Sir Humphrey Appleby's twelve steps for doing nothing. Sir Appleby is on a well-known U.K. television show. He says, first, informal discussions; second, a draft proposal; third, preliminary study; fourth, a discussion document; fifth, an in-depth study; sixth, a revised proposal; seventh, a policy statement; eighth, a strategy statement; ninth, a discussion of strategy; tenth, circulation of an implementation plan; eleventh, the revision of the implementation plan; and twelfth, cabinet agreement. However, guess what? In a minority government, we will not even bother getting to step 12, so here we are at step 1 again.

The Conservatives have taken millions out of the program and we are back at step one. The Museums Association is supposed to come into the House and kiss the ring of the absentee landlord ministry and say “Thank you, Madam Minister, for not only taking our money, but putting us back to the first step out of the 12 step program when we thought we were at step 12. What a wonderful situation”. For me to be standing in the House and talking about it is an outrage.

I was told by one of our former members that we should be talking about important things in the House like terrorism rather than the fact that our cultural sector is going down the tubes.

It is incredible that we have put in place a minister who has basically sat back on issue after issue and done nothing. We are seeing major issues that are being brought before government right now that will forever change cultural policy in this country. The government is talking about its commitment to UNESCO, its commitment to cultural diversity and yet there is a complete undermining of our cultural industries, the people who create our notion of culture.

A series of issues are coming forward right now. The CRTC review of television will have profound implications. The government is over in Geneva right now pushing for the Telecom deregulations, Telecom, which is now our delivery system for our forms of culture. We need a mandate review of CBC and it is obviously not happening. The minister appears to have choked in Banff on her commitment to hold a mandate review.

In terms of the television sector, where so much of our culture is being delivered, serious decisions are being made right now and we have heard nothing from the government. We have heard lots from the industry minister. The industry minister has been on record. He is telling CRTC to let the market forces rule. If we talk about culture in the House we will hear members from the Conservative Party ask what business it is of Parliament to tell a private industry how to run its business.

Those private industries receive the right to the public airwaves. They do not have to compete. Those airwaves belong to the people of Canada and in belonging to the people of Canada, there are certain commitments and requirements that go along with it, which is the entire cornerstone of our cultural policy in this country. That policy is being undermined at this moment and we have no plan from the government other than to sit back, wait and watch it fall.

This brings me back to my earlier metaphor which is that we need a champion in culture but instead we have a pack of ideological buzzards.

I want to go back to the issue of museum policy in this country. This government told people it would make--

[Committees of the House, October 23rd, 2006]

Mr. Speaker, I listened to my hon. colleague's speech. It says in the good book to make yes mean yes and no mean no, so I would like a fairly straightforward answer.

When the President of the Treasury Board described the cuts, he said they were going after wasteful, inefficient programs that were completely out of touch with average Canadians. We looked at what Canadian Heritage was facing and it was a museums program. Now we hear that every year $3 million was not used by the museums. I asked the minister why that was and the minister's assistant said there was a lack of sophistication in local museums in that they did not know how to use the money.

I am asking him what he thinks the problem is and why there was this decision to take the $3 million out. Was it because the museums were inefficient and wasteful with the money and did not need it?

[Committees of the House, October 23rd, 2006]

Mr. Speaker, my hon. colleague has been a strong fighter for cultural issues in the House. We have sat together in the heritage committee, in which the issues of museums have been discussed for a number of years. It is my very clear understanding that the work on the issues toward new museum policy has been done, as has the input into it.

The fig leaf of credibility that the government hides behind is the fact it will take the money out of the budget that helps all small museums, but it will create a new policy. My sense is we already have what we need for a new policy.

Does my hon. colleague feel that we need to begin a whole new round of discussions that will draw out a conclusion long enough that the government will come back after another election and start over again? Do we or do we not have what we need now to bring forth a museums policy?

[Canadian Heritage, October 23rd, 2006]

Mr. Speaker, The Globe and Mail is reporting that the PMO has instructed our diplomats not to use the word “culture”. Instead, they have been given the bizarre instructions to use the phrase “acts of public diplomacy”.

Culture is a multi-billion dollar a year business in films, books and magazines. What we have instead of a champion for industry, these are being erased from their ideological dictionary.

First there was the word “Kyoto”, then it was the word “equality”, and now it is the word “culture”. I would like to ask the minister for public diplomacy what it is about these words that gives her government the heebie-jeebies.

[Softwood Lumber Products Export Charge Act, 2006, October 6th, 2006]

Mr.Speaker, what we have is a court decision that these tariffs were illegal and this government comes into this House and asks the members of Parliament to stand and vote on a new tariff to replace an illegal tariff that would add even more to that tariff. The government then puts in a predatory clause to go after the companies that continue to stand up for their legal rights and collect even more tariffs.

As well, we are being asked as members of Parliament to support the fact that the government has given away provincial resource rights to the United States.

As well, it has brought in clauses that would allow the government to go after individual companies for the finances if they stand up.

Has the member ever seen a deal that is so bad? Not only did the government sell us out but it is acting in a predatory fashion against our own companies?