Globe and Mail public affairs columnist Jeffrey Simpson delivered a powerful call to action to Canada’s museums. They have an important role to play in helping Canadians to understand their place in an increasingly global world. According to him, “Canada will succeed better if it knows itself more. But it will also succeed if it is connected more integrally with the rest of the world.”
Simpson identified three specific reasons he thought Canadians had a greater sense of identity now than they did 30 years ago. First, the military and its history have greater prominence today. Secondly, provincial museums like The Rooms are brining relevance and prominence to Canadian culture internationally as well as within our communities. Finally, our tendency to compare ourselves to the U.S. is waning. (Although he couldn’t resist puzzling over why most Canadian national conferences still look for prominent American speakers to headline them.)
Leadership today he contends, rests on the ability to explain the future in the present; helping Canadians to understand how this global shift will affect them, and to heighten awareness for “how much of what we do and struggle with is now intrinsically linked by influences beyond our own borders. “
Although he lamented the lack of shelf space for Canadian non-fiction title in stores, and the diminishing opportunities to discuss them across all media, he said the Chapters Indigo slogan had it wrong – “The world does not need more Canada; Canada needs more of the world. Better understanding, deeper contacts, to learn more of their languages, and to better appreciate more about different cultures and morays.”
He also took a shot at Library and Archives Canada for their “glacial speed” at executing the mandate they originally had to install a National Portrait Gallery in Ottawa and laid blame squarely on their shoulders for the current situation where there was no Portrait Gallery, never mind one located in the national capital where he says it belongs.
He reaffirmed a few themes underlying this conference. Public sources of funding are going to be tighter for years to come. The best cultural institutions can hope for is for budgets to be maintained. International tourism, which accounts for a significant portion of admission revenues at Canada’s largest museums, will weaken in the short term because of the strength of the Canadian dollar. And private investments, from gift of stock and bequests were being encouraged by government as a means to encouraging more cultural investment from private sources.
Seizing the opportunities we have seemed to be his agenda, reminding us that our relative ease in integrating newcomers to Canada provides us with a wealth of resources to meet the challenges we face --as a country, and as cultural institutions.
By bringing the world to our cultural institutions, in management,, and program development, we can in turn remind Canadians of the relevance of cultural investments and that we ought not to “run down the assets we need to be in the world.”