Mr. Speaker, I am thankful for this opportunity to add a few thoughts in the closing minutes of debate on Bill C-36.
I wanted an opportunity to rise on behalf of our NDP heritage critic, the member for Dartmouth, to make a summary point as we close the debate on Bill C-36 today. Many members have spoken about the relative merits of the bill. It is my task today, in the few minutes I have left, to point out some observations on behalf of the member for Dartmouth.
In 1998 Dr. John English, a former Liberal member of Parliament, conducted a study regarding the fate and the future of the National Archives and the National Library. That study caused the member for Dartmouth to do some investigating. What she found has not been articulated clearly here today. It is that the sorry state of our National Archives and our National Library is due in large part to the budgetary cuts of the Liberal government during the 1990s. It cannot be ignored and we would be remiss if we left these facts out.
The National Archives budget went from $65 million to $44 million from 1993 to 1997. The library's budget went from $47 million to $27 million. These are huge cuts. The fat was already trimmed and we were cutting deep into the bone. All of a sudden archivists had to decide which historical collections of national significance were going into the blue box and which they could afford to preserve. At least the archivists had that flexibility; the National Library did not.
The National Library, by an act of Parliament, must collect two copies of every publication published in Canada. It has no option to cut its acquisitions or do away with some of its archives. We have told it to be the national repository of all of our books, reports and magazines.
Therefore, the only place it could cut was its physical plant. It wound up that it could not even afford to fix its leaky roof, as sad as that sounds. It could not afford to fix the bursting water pipes. It could only try to move its collections around so the water did not drip through the roof onto its valuable documents.
I point this out to illustrate that this is the manifestation of budget cuts that were so deep they were irresponsible because our national treasures suffered. Our national history suffered as a result of what I consider to be the cutting, hacking and slashing of budgets without consideration of how those cuts manifest themselves. It is more difficult to see in social programs, et cetera, when those cuts take place, although no less dramatic.
It is easy to see when a simple thing like fixing the roof was impossible and the water poured in on our National Library. Some 25,000 works were damaged to the point where they could not be used or had to be thrown out. Even the attempts to improve the plant by building a new preservation centre in Gatineau has been only a band-aid solution. These cuts have meant fewer archivists and without archivists no one takes care of our archives.
It was that point that I wanted to make in these final moments of the debate. The ruthless cutting, hacking and slashing during program review by the member for LaSalle—Émard, the former finance minister, is directly responsible for the crisis that our National Archives and National Library find themselves in today. The merger in Bill C-36 is being proposed originally by the Liberals as a cost saving measure. We support this bill only because it may lead to a better treatment of our national treasures in both these institutions.
