Finance committee  Yes, archives are at the heart of accountability. We are extremely positive on that. The difficulty is that when these sorts of strategic reviews are done, archives and similar groups are the entities from which the money is taken to give to other groups. All of these things th

Finance committee  The budget cuts of the 1990s reduced the amount of money available for archives to hire students and do other project work to make records accessible, so that present-day records that would have been accessible are not accessible. Also, as we go into the future, records that are

Finance committee  It is a member because it's an archives in Canada. But it's really the federal government entity that we deal with.

Finance committee  All the archives across the country. There are approximately 800 in the archives community.

Finance committee  Private archives as well as government and community-based archives and university archives.

Finance committee  In fact, we have a system that is probably unique in the country. All the archives in the country and all the jurisdictions have agreed to the breakdown of any funding we receive from the federal government. It's broken down by province and territory. Currently, Ontario and Quebe

Finance committee  That $2 million is additional, because the program for digitization of archival materials for archives has been cancelled by the Department of Canadian Heritage. They've seen fit to go in new directions. Although those new directions will all depend on access to archival material

Finance committee  We'll survive the same the way as oftentimes in the past we've survived. We still bring in materials, although many institutions will slow down their rate of acquisition. We put those materials on the shelf and they sit there inaccessible for the next two or three decades, waitin

Finance committee  Thank you. Good morning. I'm always hesitant to speak in such forums when I see the gravity of the issues that each of the other presenters is addressing here today, but experience in my day job at the Provincial Archives of New Brunswick tells me that each group present today