Our bake-sale heritage

Paul Gessell, The Ottawa Citizen
Published: Wednesday, July 26, 2006

The official name of the battle plan is The Summer Campaign. It might be better described as The Attack of the Artifacts.

The Ottawa-based Canadian Museums Association is spearheading an aggressive lobbying effort across the country this summer to convince the federal government, individual MPs, the news media and the public at large that the country's 2,500 museums need not just more money, but more importantly, stable funding. Otherwise much of Canada's heritage is going to disappear.

Auditor General Sheila Fraser said as much in a report in 2004, but that was a few elections ago, which, in political years, is at least a millennium. Besides, the residents of Parliament Hill were seized at the time only with her comments about another issue -- the Quebec sponsorship scandal. Consequently, Canada's crumbling heritage remained on the backburner.

The last Liberal government claimed it had a new museums policy ready to go last winter. But then came the election, which produced a Conservative government.

The lobbying and policy process had to start all over again, there being little institutional memory on Parliament Hill. Hence The Summer Campaign.

Traditionally most attention in government and media circles is focused on Canada's national museums, like the Canadian Museum of Nature and National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa or the Canadian Museum of Civilization in Gatineau. These are the institutions that tabled reports in Parliament before the summer recess pleading with the government to sweeten their budgets by many millions of dollars, in some cases so light bulbs could be changed and roofs repaired.

The far more numerous smaller museums across the Dominion also need to change light bulbs and reshingle roofs. But they don't think in millions of dollars. They would, in many cases, be happy with a few thousand more to augment their remarkably small budgets pried out of governments, bake sales and donations.

Consider the Arnprior and District Museum, which managed to land a $1,500 grant to hire a student for the summer to do some database work. Then the database began to self-combust. Another $1,500 was needed to fix that problem. No one jumped in immediately with the cash. The entire project was jeopardized.

The Canadian Museums Association has filing cabinets filled with horror stories of this type from across the country.

There are museums with no funds for security, so artifacts go missing, no funds to conserve artifacts properly, so these precious pieces of our history turn into dust, no money to pay the hydro bill or repaint the siding.

Most small museums suffer chronic staff shortages. First of all there is an inability to pay many employees. And it is difficult to retain the few employees that can be hired because top-notch people have a tendency to accept job offers and higher salaries at larger, better-financed institutions.

That staffing situation is particularly problematic for Ottawa's small museums, where talent is constantly lost to places like the National Gallery or Museum of Civilization just down the street. Big museums offer better wages and public-service benefits. And they don't ask curators and conservators to scrub the toilets, as they are often required to do at small museums.