Canadian Heritage committee  It's my pleasure.

Canadian Heritage committee  That's a challenge. We don't use the term “local” to describe museums when we talk about them because, as you said, the Art Gallery of Ontario or ROM might be your local museum. We were looking at it by size of museums. For the purposes of the data that we've assembled for you

Canadian Heritage committee  They have to connect with their local community and be a centre for other activity. They're generally appealing to the local story or something special from that community, such as a person or an event that happened there.

Canadian Heritage committee  We could provide you with a list of provincial and national museums, but most museums receive some significant part of their operating funding from the province or the municipality or both, so it's very difficult to define it that way. I interpreted from the description of the s

Canadian Heritage committee  Yes. We'll see what we can pull out from our summer survey.

Canadian Heritage committee  We don't provide a huge amount of direct services, except through the Canadian Conservation Institute. That organization has about 60 scientists and professional conservators and so on. What we do fund, for example, is the Canadian Museums Association. We fund a significant part

Canadian Heritage committee  That program actually isn't run out of the heritage branch, though it does serve heritage organizations; it is run out of our arts policy branch in our regional offices. In terms of priorities, one clear priority will be aboriginal organizations. As part of the government's obj

Canadian Heritage committee  We look at our eligibility criteria. We don't make a distinction between whether they have budgets of, say, $70,000 or $170,000 or $570,000. We're looking at whether they meet the core eligibility criteria and whether they are proposing a project that is in line with the program

Canadian Heritage committee  I will start by answering your first question. You asked which of our programs best serve the small and local museums, did you? Young Canada Works certainly does. The museums assistance program does, especially the exhibition circulation fund, is a very useful program for the

Canadian Heritage committee  The budget of that program is typically about $25 million a year. It can fluctuate from year to year because of the multi-year nature of some of the projects. Sometimes with construction you have variables, and something might slow down. The additional investment announced in t

Canadian Heritage committee  We always make sure that the funding is distributed as fairly as possible.

Canadian Heritage committee  In the department, we always try to make sure that there is a good spread of projects across the country. It's a challenge when you have big amounts in one year, though, because you need things that are shovel ready.

Canadian Heritage committee  But the ceiling has been raised to $15 million.

Canadian Heritage committee  No. I think you would really need to speak to museums. I think most museums would say that they're in need. Most of the smallest museums are found in the most rural areas, of course, but there is a significant spread across the country. Newfoundland, for example, has a huge num

Canadian Heritage committee  Well, we don't accredit museums.