Mr. Speaker, it was perhaps nine months ago when we talked about museums and the mandates of the national museums here in Ottawa. One of the things that struck me as a concern to a lot of people was that many of the national museums do not really involve themselves with the rest of the museums across the country. Certainly there is a yearning to do a lot more of that. There has been a great degree of co-operation, no doubt, but there should be a greater degree of co-operation in the fulfillment of the mandates of each and every museum across the country.
I say this because I want to follow up on a comment from the hon. member for Wild Rose. He talked about how this is a key part of the bill, and I wholeheartedly agree with him. It is a key element of taking this institution and sharing it with the country, especially now that we are just a few years away from celebrating our sesquicentennial anniversary. I practised saying that word for 20 minutes.
This is a model that is going to present itself to other museums across this country, those national scope, certainly, but also as local as they go, such as the Manitoba Museum, which was announced just a few days ago, and The Rooms in St. John's, Newfoundland, which is a good example in my province.
I thought that this was a key point of the proposed legislation. However, as the hon. member, the leader of the Green Party, pointed out, $25 million really is not going to cut it. The capacity that can be created with just $25 million is just not going to be sufficient. If the bill is going to create a model by which smaller museums could take advantage of it down the road, then that is fine, but it would certainly take a larger investment than $25 million.
I will go back to the issue of why we are doing this, which has to do with branding, a name change, tweaking the mandate and that sort of thing. A lot of the fundamentals from the Museum of Civilization would remain, as the government has said, but then we have to ask ourselves what was wrong with the original plan for the Museum of Civilization going out the next five to 10 years. What was so wrong with it that it needed a name change?
The question then becomes how much greater we can make this institution in the lead-up to 2017, the 150th anniversary of Canada, by changing its name. How much greater would this institution present itself to the entire nation and even to the world?
Let us go back to its base degrees for a moment.
We do not have an equivalent, as has been said, to what is happening with the national museum in the United States and in nations like Germany and other nations. They have their own museums based on their own history, but there is one specific museum. Now we have this.
Let us just leave the Museum of Civilization out of this for just a moment. Let us say that we do not have a Canadian museum of history, but a museum of Canadian history. This is something that actually makes a little more sense if we want to celebrate things like the institutions we have in Maurice Richard's hockey sweater, Jacques Villeneuve's racing suit or the first microphone ever held by Céline Dion. I am just making this up, but members get the idea.
These are icons of this country, like the first hockey stick of Wayne Gretzky. It is not that I am important, but maybe it could be my first school jacket or something like that. Someone just yelled out a very good example. I am a huge fan of Bonhomme Carnaval. Why can we not have his story brought to the country? To do that, we would create a museum of Canadian history.
There were a couple of renditions of this idea when some people talked about converting the conference centre to a museum of Canadian history. However, if we have that, and all the Conservatives are talking about these sweaters and jerseys and this artifact and that, then eventually that museum would probably look more like the West Edmonton Mall than anything else.
That is fine if that is what we want, but we should not fuse that element into what is a fantastic national and international institution like the Museum of Civilization.
At committee Victor Rabinovitch, the former president of the Museum of Civilization, was very concerned about the level of research that was going to be missed out on under this new mandate because some things have been changed and some of the language has been tweaked. For instance, there was talk about an understanding of a Canadian artifact and all things Canadian when it comes to representing our history, but the government omitted the word “critical”. It is no longer a “critical” understanding.
One might think what the difference is with that; well, there is a difference when one is involved in any museum as a curator or an archivist, because for those people to have their work exposed to the general public and get a critical understanding, it has to be opened up to the experts to say what history meant. The interpretation of history will change over time, because people have different interpretations. We have to accept that.
This past weekend I was listening to two historians talking on a CBC radio program. One historian feared that we are now launching into a study of history already knowing the answers, whereas we should be looking at history to change what the understanding was prior to today. Maybe we should use a more critical lens in how we view our history; then we would get a common understanding.
All these nations, all these places that have great national museums go through this process, but the language of the bill dictates that we are slowly getting away from that. Some of the buzzwords like “research” and “independence of the curators” are there, but some of it is missing. The fear is that we are turning this into just a display of artifacts, and that is it.
A museum is a living, breathing mechanism through which we understand ourselves, but that can only be useful to us in the future if it is willing to change, if it is able to look at things and say that this is no longer a static display, this is something that we have to look at again, whether technology dictates it or whether it is some other type of information elsewhere that tells us to go back and revisit how we used to look at history.
When Mr. Rabinovitch talked about this, he was wondering why the government would do this, given the fact that the Museum of Civilization carries with it a tremendous international name. European countries and Asian countries marvel at what the Museum of Civilization has done. It is pretty good for a country with fewer than 40 million people. We have punched above our weight, as the saying goes, when it comes to museums, especially this museum.
He proposed what I thought was a reasonable way of looking at this. He proposed to call it the Canadian museum of history and civilization. It is a good compromise. It recognizes the fact that we have a rich history, as young a country as we are compared to other countries in the world, but it also recognizes the great work that we have done. The name says that we are willing to keep that tradition of having the Museum of Civilization, but enshrined within a context of what it is to be Canadian: the Canadian museum of history and civilization.
To a great extent I understand why we would want to have something that is labelled as Canadian. It shows who we are. It gives a critical understanding of who we are, and that way it attracts more people.
Some people said they came to Ottawa when they were younger and did not know what civilization was, but they realized that it was more about Canadian history. That is a valid point. As far as the marketing goes, we can attract more people that way.
Already some of our national museums find themselves in a financial bind. The Science and Technology Museum needs $3.4 million to handle major structural repairs. The 50-year-old building on St. Laurent Boulevard needs work. Every museum has to find ways of generating more revenue, and this could be one of them. Could a name change do that? To a certain degree it could. It is not the ultimate solution for getting more revenue, but it probably could go in that direction.
I wish we had kept to the theme of putting more Canadian culture within the context of the Museum of Civilization, as opposed to changing some of the language in this legislation and ultimately the corporation. I think that does a disservice to the people who keep updating our artifacts and turning this museum into the international icon that it is.
