[Recorded by Electronic Apparatus]
Tuesday, May 7, 1996
.1106 
[English]
The Vice-Chairman (Mr. O'Brien (London - Middlesex)): Order.
It is my pleasure on behalf of the Canadian heritage committee to now welcome, from the National Archives of Canada, Jean-Pierre Wallot, Michael D. Swift and Lilly Koltun.
Welcome to our committee. We'll be pleased to hear your presentation.
[Translation]
Mr. Jean-Pierre Wallot (National Archivist of Canada): Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Mr. Chairman, members of the committee, ladies and gentlemen, you have received a package containing the text of my statement as well as some documents. I believe that they were distributed very recently. Among others, you have a green document which will serve as an introduction to the exhibit on the creation of Canada which I will talk about a little later on.
I will begin with a few words on archives in general and the National Archives of Canada, and on the great challenges and priorities of the day.
Author Khalil Gibran truly understood the intrinsic duality of archives in history. He said that today embraces the past with memories and the future with hope. This invokes the Latin god Janus, who is the symbol of the archives and is represented with two faces, one looking back, and the other looking ahead.
How, indeed, can we fully understand the geography of the future if we ignore the traces and the routes of the past. Without memories and without the past, there can be no understanding of the present, nor the future. All that exists is ignorance, fear, withdrawal, and narrow mindedness.
[English]
People need to know where they come from, not only as individuals but also as organized groups that have evolved gradually over centuries with a particular architecture of institutions, habits, customs and cultural traits. Archives are at the root of this awareness. They provide the evidence, the information and testimony that enable citizens to document their rights and obligations, to obtain an accounting from their government and civil servants, to understand the milestones in their historical journey and to embrace the complexity of the forces and factors at play in their society. Without those traces, they do not exist, so to speak, as the movie The Net - actually, I've seen it - illustrated in fiction.
The importance of a memorial role of archives arises from the threefold social functions they serve. First, they have probative value. That is, they confirm treaties, legal codes or contracts entered into, individual and collective rights; in short, the rules of the game in society.
Second, they have information value, and as such they are an inexhaustible source of information on a vast area of topics, often through use of secondary sources such as exhibitions, TV programs, movies, articles, books and so on.
Finally, archives have evidential value. That is, they document actions taken. They reflect the intensity and the complexity of the discussions and debates in society.
In brief, archives trace the development of organizations, groups and the paths of individuals as well as reveal their basic values, convictions, beliefs and ideals.
[Translation]
In modern governmental jurisdictions, public archives represent an essential component of "governance", to use good English jargon, of democracy, the performance of government tasks, the protection of citizens' rights and the accountability of elected officials and public officials alike. Public archives are like government registers, supporting government activities and meeting citizens' essential needs. There is never a week, nor a day that goes by without the media referring to various issues with implications for archives.
.1110
Just think about the Somalia or the contaminated blood enquiries, or the claims made by the Japanese for compensation for their losses during the war, or the First Nations land claims; these are recent examples, among many others, which show why sound management of archival records is necessary. Without records, there are no memories. And without memories, there can be no identity.
It is not a coincidence if the National Archives, founded in 1872, is the oldest federal cultural institution. To fulfil its mandate of preserving the collective memory of the nation, the Archives plays a threefold role which is detailed in writing: first of all, it is a cultural agency, and this is its most well-known role, which obtains public and private documents of national importance in all mediums and makes them available; secondly, it provides the federal government with administrative support to soundly manage its volumes of documentary resources, from the time they are created until they are eliminated or sent to their final destination; this helps the federal government save roughly $10 million per year; finally, it supports the national and international archival community.
[English]
But in these times, as I asserted earlier, archives lie at the very foundation of our collective identity as Canadians. Identity depends upon an individual understanding of who we are and where we come from, and collectively, upon an understanding of what we share, what makes us similar and different and how each of us fits in the larger context. Thus the connection between identity and archives, the latter being at the source of knowledge and understanding about ourselves. They are essential elements of Canada's collective memory, revealing how, over many generations, we evolved into a nation.
Today the National Archives faces many challenges. One of them is the explosion of information and technology, which makes it harder to maintain and protect information as well as to appraise the vast holdings to extract the small percentage of permanent value. Another is, of course, fiscal restraint, with a budget reduction of 26% between 1994 and 1998 and another 3.5% in program review two, 1998-99.
In order to survive as a vibrant cultural institution and an effective administrative arm of government, the National Archives has developed a few strategic priorities for the coming years.
First, recognizing that the budget reductions have a significant impact on people at the National Archives, our first priority is a focus on people; that is, we seek to offer all staff, as far as possible, new training and development and employment opportunities. As well, we have been developing over the past two years participatory management. Sadly, however, we will be losing by 1999 about 200 highly skilled people over the five years of program review.
Our second priority has remained obtaining adequate accommodation as we look forward finally to taking occupancy of our long-needed storage and conservation laboratory in Gatineau this fall. We continue to pursue plans for the renovation of the West Memorial building as our main access point for public service, administration and archival processing operations.
A third priority is the delivery of archival programs and services. This will stress the use of alternate sources of funding, such as private sector partnerships, and new methods of delivering our services and programs, including an increased use of technology. I will come back to this in a moment.
Finally, we have a commitment to our unique role in facilitating the management of government information, reaffirmed through the guidance given to government departments, for instance, on electronic records management or on transitory records, through also the storage of inactive records at our federal records centres and a planned approach to the disposition of government information.
We anticipate a profound impact on these latter two programs in particular and, ironically, an increased demand on our services as cross-government downsizing results in an influx of records from defunct or devoluted programs. In other words, there will be more, not less, records coming to the National Archives over the next few years.
It remains, however, that the severe reductions to our budget simply imply some risk, risk that, for example, some private sector records will not be preserved, and risk also to other federal departments, which will be expected to share more responsibility and costs for managing their information. The consequences, of course, will reverberate across the whole Canadian archival community, as a recent symposium with the national, provincial and territorial archives has shown.
.1115
I would now like to say a few words about some of our specific initiatives as we face this new fiscal reality.
[Translation]
First of all, let's talk about serving Canadians. At the National Archives, a key strategy is to conserve our longstanding tradition of providing excellent service to Canadians by working to improve and broaden access to our archival heritage.
Each year, our institution responds to more than 130,000 information requests from a host of Canadians, not only historians or academics, but for the most part, average Canadians, lawyers, and representatives of various groups who have requests for the government and others.
Recently, we consolidated the reference service personnel to create a single point of service and ensure equitable service for all our clients, whether they be on site or off site.
We often forget that although the National Archives is a modest department, it ranks third in the federal government in terms of requests under the Access to Information Act and the Privacy Act.
Although the National Archives are set up in Ottawa, they serve all Canadians to decentralized access points set up in conjunction with the archives in certain provinces or universities.
We have access points in Winnipeg, in the provincial archives in Vancouver, at the University of British Columbia, and in Halifax at the Nova Scotia provincial archives. In mid April, we opened the most recent access point in Montreal, at the Quebec National Archives. At each site, our clients can use computerized work stations to access research instruments, primarily CD-ROM, which contain all types of information, such as the most recent one here, which covers the archives of the French regime and the British colonial regime.
In December, the inauguration of a World Wide Web site put the National Archives within reach of Canadians who have access to Internet. During the month of March alone, more than 262,000 documentary hits were registered at the National Archives' site, or twice as many as last December, which indicates that we're reaching a lot more people than in the past.
For the time being, the site provides basic information on the National Archives, and gradually, we will add additional information on our holdings. Then, of course, if need be, we will add documents which are very costly however to digitize. For example, the National Archives in the United States has just received $4.5 million to implement this kind of pilot project and the Library of Congress has received $60 million to digitize a number of documents that it holds. It is of course a very costly system and we'll have to proceed gradually.
We also want to establish contact with young people, by using the Industry Canada program to help school children in Canada familiarize themselves with new technology, to digitize documents. We have joint projects with Industry Canada throughout the country. We also want to use the SchoolNet to distribute documents electronically, such as CD-ROMs on the treaties signed with Natives, on Franklin's expeditions in the Arctic and on portraits of Canadians as well as an educational kit on the prime ministers of Canada which was completed with the help of Kodak Canada.
[English]
The National Archives is but one institution in a network of over 600 regional, local, and private archives in this country, all with the common goal of preserving our documentary heritage and making it available to Canadians.
Contact with a larger archival community through means such as our diffusion program - diffusion of microfilm, for instance - has been an important aspect of our work for many decades. In addition, through financial assistance to the Canadian Council of Archives, the National Archives supports the realization of projects that have developed archives in a number of small communities across Canada. These are shared-cost projects, so for each dollar that is put in from the federal government, local governments must put in as much.
.1120
I have provided a copy of a map showing the Canada-wide distribution of the CCA funds from 1992 to 1996. You will find it in the documentation that has been distributed to you. It's a map that shows essentially where most of the funds have been spent in the past few years.
Partnership is a theme that runs through many of our activities, thanks to our development office, which is specifically tasked to find owners and sponsors that might assist the National Archives in fulfilling its mission.
Since the creation of this office, we have raised some funds and important gifts in kind, which have allowed the institution to undertake projects that would not otherwise have been possible. For instance, there's the Kodak support I have mentioned; the sponsorship of the Roloff Beny portrait exhibition, which will travel across the world; support from the Ford Motor Co. of Canada; and the collaboration with the Friends of the National Archives and Corel Corporation for the distribution of a series of CD-ROMs on different aspects of our history.
I have one here on historic Canadian scenery. One will be on Indians and another on portraits. These are not exclusive. They take these pictures, distribute them, and sell them across the world, but Canadians still have the right to see them or buy them or come to the Archives at any time they want.
We have also received donations from Moviepix, an Astral Communications network, to support the preservation of Canadian film. It will be many hundreds of thousands of dollars over seven years. In particular it's to copy or redo films from 100 turn-of-the-century film clips that had been lost but paper copies of which have been found in the Library of Congress.
National Archives has also turned beyond the archival community to other stakeholders and the preservation of Canada's audio-visual heritage. In the future - even now, but in the future even more so - we will know the Canada of today and the Canada of the immediate past through audio-visuals. That's what most people would want to look at.
These evanescent heritages are really at great, great risk, so we have been involved in more than a year of study with all the stakeholders - creators, distributors, actors, etc. - in making a report to the Minister of Heritage on this. We are now in the process of creating a consortium, which is provisionally called ``The Alliance for Canada's Audio-Visual Heritage'' to organize the strategy, to coordinate the activities to try to save this heritage, which is the most threatened right now and the most evanescent.
Just to give you an example, out of the twenty-first feature length films made in Canada, only one is left. All the rest have disappeared.
I should emphasize that our partners are not always big business or the private sector. The Friends of the National Archives are often ordinary citizens, ordinary researchers who come to look at their family roots and then send us a cheque and become friends of the National Archives. They've helped us tremendously over the past year.
[Translation]
Finally, I would like to mention that the National Archives plans to set up a permanent exhibit of original documents covering the great moments in the history of Canada.
Apart from the Gatineau building, which is almost complete, we're in the process of implementing plans to reorganize the West Memorial Building where our exhibit rooms will be located. That is where we would like to put these fundamental documents of Canadian history which we would also like to digitize and put on the Internet or other communication systems. That will enable all Canadians to have access to them.
Unlike the Americans, we do not have a Declaration of Independence or one constitution and we do not have the Magma Carta like they do in Great Britain, but we do have a certain number of fundamental documents, whether they be treaties with the Natives, or maps showing Canada for the first time or another series of fundamental documents. More specifically, I am referring to John A. Macdonald's hand written version of the Act of 1867. We have those kinds of fundamental documents that we could display in a place which would become a sight for pilgrimages, if you'll pardon the expression. With interactive technological displays, citizens will be able to get a better understanding of their past and get their own vision of our country.
We've have baptized this exhibit "Canada Gathers/Un Canada à découvrir". You have a brochure which provides you with an example of what it might contain. We hope that it will become a physical and virtual destination.
In conclusion, I would say that with the year 2000 rapidly approaching and with Canadians seeing their economic and political future with more uncertainty, I feel that it is essential to reaffirm the investment devoted to the memory of our collective past.
.1125
It is through the archives that each generation will find concrete proof of the experiences, the people and the events that have shaped our identity.
At the National Archives, we are continuing to fulfil our mission and our vision which is "to make the documentary memory of the nation available to all the Canadians for their use, well-being and enjoyment".
In closing, I would like to invite the members of the committee to visit the National Archives, either at its headquarters on Wellington Street or at our Internet site.
Thank you for taking the time to hear my comments. If you have any questions, not only now, but after having read our material, do not hesitate to write to me and I will respond as quickly as possible.
[English]
The Vice-Chairman (Mr. O'Brien): Thank you, Mr. Wallot.
Are there additional comments from either of your colleagues before we go to the committee? No? Thank you, then.
We'll start with 10 minutes from Mr. Hanrahan of the opposition.
Mr. Hanrahan (Edmonton - Strathcona): Thank you, and thank you for your presentation, sir.
You mentioned that your budget will be reduced by 26% by the year 2000, did you not?
Mr. Wallot: No. It's 26% between 1994 and 1998 and another 3.5% in 1998-99, which makes it 29.5% or 30%.
Mr. Hanrahan: Is this going to result in the loss of 200 employees?
Mr. Wallot: Yes. In 1993 we had about 800 employees and by 1999 we'll have slightly less than 600 - 580 or 590.
Mr. Hanrahan: The other thing you spoke about was your relationship with the private sector and their increased funding for partnership projects. Could you spend some time expanding on that and telling us what you will be doing as an organization in order to raise funds yourself to reduce some of these 200 people who are going to be unemployed?
Mr. Wallot: I'll start perhaps with the last part.
We are not putting anybody on the street. We are not a designated department. People will leave because they retire or they find jobs somewhere else. However, it really means for us the loss of a great amount of experience. Those who leave are sometimes some of our best people, who have acquired a lot of experience and can be very useful to the National Archives for a long time.
I don't think the government can raise money to support what we call its normal activities, so the National Archives cannot ask the private sector to pay the salaries of its employees. What it can do and what it has been doing, and will be doing more and more, is involve the private sector in specific initiatives whereby there is some visibility for the private sector and there is an impact on the whole of the nation.
I'll give you some examples of the things that have been done. For the Prime Minister's exhibition and kit that has been distributed across the country in the schools, we've had support from Kodak, Horsham company, and a series of other companies that have made it possible for us to do this; otherwise, we would not have the funds to do so. We received quite an important gift from Hoechst Celanese Canada to buy the journal of George Back, who accompanied Franklin on his journeys to map the north of this country. These are absolutely beautiful little watercolors, in which he's described the country he saw, the people, the first nations, and so on. We acquired these with help from Hoechst Celanese.
.1130
The Ford Co. of Canada is willing to give us a certain amount of money to send across the world an exhibition of Roloff Beny, who was a well-known Canadian photographer in the 1950s, 1960s mostly, the 1970s, and early 1980s. He lived and photographed in something like 60 different countries. These exhibitions will run through Europe and most major countries where Ford has plants.
The Roloff Beny foundation, a Canadian foundation, has given us some money to organize exhibitions here in Canada, which we have done.
I could go on. There are partnerships like that.
I also mentioned Moviepix, which will give us over seven years close to $400,000 or slightly more to... It's very complicated.
In the old days when you made a film, if you wanted a copyright you made contact prints on paper and deposited them at the Library of Congress. This is why we didn't know they existed. Now we know they exist. We've got about 100 short films on paper in Washington. What we have to do is photograph them image by image and reconstitute the films.
We showed ten of them at the Toronto Film Festival last autumn, and they were very, very popular. In fact, they've been shown on TV many times, but only ten out of perhaps slightly more than a hundred. These are the kinds of partnerships, things we couldn't do or have enough resources to do, but with the help of the private sector or sometimes interested partners, we'll probably be doing some exhibitions.
I'll give you another example. We printed in 1992 a marvellous book entitled Treasures of the National Archives. It's a very beautiful book. We didn't do it alone. We did it with the University of Toronto Press. They bore the cost of printing and we bore the cost of preparing the book. This book has been sold out and is now in its second printing. It's going out very soon. The English version has sold out once and it's about to be sold out twice. The French version has been selling pretty well actually. It's not been sold out yet, but it's quite a good seller, too.
So these are examples of partnerships. There are many others, but these are the kinds we try to do.
Mr. Hanrahan: I congratulate you on your efforts. Do these in any way, if increased, reduce the number of people who are going to be without employment?
Mr. Wallot: No, it does not affect the person. However, in some cases we've had to hire people on contract to do the work and pay them with private sector money. These contracts are sometimes former employees. We've had a few former employees used in these cases because they know the material. They're very experienced, so we have given them some contracts in some cases.
Mr. Hanrahan: Now, you handed out a large number of documents this morning. What form of evaluation do you have for your expenses? When you're going to develop a project, what criteria do you use to select that project and what criteria do you use to evaluate its success or failure as to whether or not you've spent the money wisely?
Mr. Wallot: We've of course got an internal evaluation and audit system. As for a specific project, we will look at what is the purpose of the National Archives' mission. What is its mission? Acquire, preserve, and make available records of national significance. That's what we must do. Is it related to our mission? Does it reinforce it? Is it at a better cost if we do this than if we do that? For instance, the CD-ROMs we have done reduce the costs and address our mission, because they make it possible for people all across Canada to have access to information about our holdings without having to come to Ottawa, which is a very costly proposition if you come from B.C., Halifax, the prairies, or even from central Canada. It's quite far away.
Now with the CD-ROMs they have access directly in any library or university that has a CD-ROM reader, or even from home if they want. These are the kinds of questions we will ask. Of course, depending on the nature of the project, how much it costs, whether it is justified, whether we can do it more cheaply...we go through the usual government processes to find the lowest bidder and the best quality for price, if you want. So we do the normal approaches also.
.1135
Mr. Hanrahan: You mentioned that you had just distributed one of these articles or a similar article to schools throughout Canada.
Mr. Wallot: Yes, the Prime Minister's kit.
Mr. Hanrahan: Do you ever evaluate whether or not students look at these?
Mr. Wallot: Yes. Before distributing the kit, we had a pilot through all the schools in the regions here, from both the Ontario side and the Quebec side. We tested them on over 6,000 children and then we refined the product. Of course we didn't do it ourselves; we worked with teachers and all kinds of people. When we found that it was working, that it was used by teachers and the students understood it, we distributed it across the country - not directly, of course. The federal government doesn't have authority over education and we didn't want to get involved in this. We distributed it through the daily newspaper associations, which made presentations to all schools in the country. So in this way we tested these things. Otherwise they're not useful.
We have other products we worked on with Industry Canada, like putting digitized images of documents on-line, on SchoolNet, so that schools across the country can have access to the 1982 Constitution or to an Indian treaty, for instance. If you come from Manitoba, you might want a specific treaty. If you digitize them, the students in school can know what a treaty with an Indian band is. They don't know what it is. Very few people have seen them. Actually they are very beautiful documents apart from the content. The Indians didn't sign their names; they signed with pictographs. They would make a design that would represent them. It's very interesting.
This is how we want to interest schoolchildren in their past, and thus they can understand better their society. Today we have problems, but nobody knows exactly how they arrived. If I open a door and get into this room and I don't know what this room is, I don't know who you are and you don't know who I am, it would be very difficult to get anywhere. This is why I think it's important to give the young people of this country chances to get to know their past better.
Mind you, I must say that the teaching of history across the country, not only in some parts but all across the country, has been abysmal in the past decades. It's time that we furnished some tools to make it better.
Mr. Hanrahan: I would like again to thank you and congratulate you on your office and department. Whenever we as MPs have had to use your facilities, it has been fantastic. You've been doing a good job.
Mr. Wallot: Thank you, sir.
The Vice-Chairman (Mr. O'Brien): Thank you very much. Mr. Peric is next.
Mr. Peric (Cambridge): Mr. Wallot, I understand there were some concerns in the 1994 report of the Auditor General regarding the West Memorial Building and Gatineau. Could you brief us on whether you have overcome those concerns, especially the transportation of valuable things from West Memorial to the Gatineau buildings?
Mr. Wallot: If I recall correctly, the criticisms of the Auditor General were of three kinds. One was about money. One, he said, was about the danger of documents being transported. The third was that the accommodations of the National Archives family were not solved after the spending of $100 million or slightly more - $89 million plus $18.2 million, which makes $107.2 million.
The first one is about the cost. The Auditor General at the time calculated the amount of money it cost to build the new building for the National Archives and records administration in the United States, which is about six times the size of Gatineau. It's nearly a mile long. He calculated the cost of everything, and he calculated the cost here at the National Archives of the Gatineau building. He said the Gatineau building cost more than the Americans', so there must be some overspending.
.1140
But in the following year, the people from the Auditor General and our staff went to NARA and looked at things more closely. They wrote in their report - they did not publish it, unfortunately - that finally there were many reasons why the costs of Gatineau were higher, and that they were justified.
For instance, the climate was one very good reason. Second, the Americans received their ground free from the University of Maryland. Third, it's a building that comprises a lot of offices. It's a complete archive. It's not just a repository for records. They also have offices. The part that is a public place is much less costly to build because it takes less rigorous environmental controls, and so on and so on.
He also said that in the United States, NARA had the authority - which of course here we don't have - to contract itself directly. It got an amount of money and contracted out so that it didn't have to go through different layers of people who would control this. They saved a lot of money that way.
So in the end, they admitted that the costs were not overly high in Gatineau.
The transportation issue is a real issue. For the last 25 years we've been transporting documents to National Archives, because we have not had enough space there since 1971. We've had documents in 11 buildings at one point in time. Some of them were leaking, some had floods and so on. At least we'll have our documents in two major buildings, in Gatineau and in Renfrew. Gatineau is not enough to answer all our needs, so we'll keep Renfrew.
This will make only two sites, Renfrew being the less used one, because we'll try to put in Renfrew documents that are perhaps less required, or documents that are still closed or secret or whatever, while in Gatineau we'll have the more used one.
It takes 12 to 15 minutes from 395 Wellington to the Gatineau building site. We built into the trucks special containers that go into the buildings, come out of the buildings and into the trucks, which are air-conditioned. So there is a fair amount of protection.
In all countries, even the United States, national archives necessarily become two, three or more buildings over time because of the accumulation of records. There is simply no space in which to build a single accommodation building. That was the decision made by the government in 1989, based on a very practical issue. The only way you could build enough space for the National Archives - and it would have been good for perhaps 30 or 40 years - would have been to use all the grounds west of the Supreme Court. It would have looked ugly, huge, massive - and it might not have been as practical as it might have seemed at first sight.
So this was why the transportation was used. In a sense, this criticism has some validity, but it has validity all across the developed world that I know of. Whether you're in Germany or whether you're in England, they all have two, three or four campuses.
Finally, he said we have not really answered the needs of the National Archives, which is true only in part. The government said in 1989 that we need a two-pronged solution. The first and most urgent one was to save the documents. Build Gatineau first: that was done. It's going to be ready pretty soon. The official opening to the public will be in June 1997. We will start moving in by autumn 1996.
The second prong is to unite all the staff, spread all across many different buildings, in a single building, the West Memorial building. There we will of course ensure public service and have a public façade for people to see some of the founding documents of this nation so that they can better understand their history.
I'm taking an aside here, but I visited Parliament not long ago. They told us how many tonnes the Peace Tower weighed. Well, people do other things in Parliament than look at the weight of the Peace Tower. You do laws, you decide all kinds of policies. To know how this came about, there has to be documents, so this is the place to go.
This is still to come to fruition, but we now have a project for approval in front of the Treasury Board. We hope they're going to tell us to go ahead. In fact, the decision was made in 1989 or 1990 to go ahead, but there was a freeze, if you recall, of two years on all capital expenditures, except for Gatineau and, I guess, the CSIS building and a couple of others.
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Since then, we've had to redo all our calculations. We've now come up with a figure of $61 million or $62 million for the West Memorial building, which is $10 million less than what we had figured out it would cost in 1989. From that time we've learned a few things. We've downsized and we've learned perhaps to reorganize our work better than we used to, so it will be less costly.
But I cannot tell you whether it's going to be built or not...well, not built but rebuilt, because you have to rebuild from the inside. They will do it by stages.
Mr. Peric: The final question is, what information are you going to have on CD-ROM? I'm really impressed...and I encourage you to pursue and develop that even further. But what would be the reason for me to come here to visit either centre if that's going to be available on CD-ROM?
Mr. Wallot: CD-ROM exists in the United States, too, and every day you can see thousands... In fact, more people go every day to see the American constitution and the Declaration of Independence than all of the visitors in all the museums along the mall there, all the Smithsonian...
The reason is very simple. People need to have what I would call ``personal contact'' with the real thing at least once in their lives - not necessarily touch it, but at least see it and know it's the real thing. It's not a copy. It's not an image. There will always be a need for that.
The CD-ROM makes it easy for students or for people to get access to some documents -
Mr. Peric: Not all of them.
Mr. Wallot: - from a distance and perhaps use them for their own research or for teaching purposes, or for whatever. Otherwise, they will have to come here, and it's impossible for most Canadians to travel what can be a fair distance to Ottawa.
Mr. Peric: Thank you.
The Vice-Chairman (Mr. O'Brien): Thank you.
Mr. Bélanger.
[Translation]
Mr. Bélanger (Ottawa - Vanier): I'd like to come back to finances for a moment. How much does 26% plus 3.5%, or 29% represent?
Mr. Wallot: This percentage represents roughly $8.8 million between 1994-1995 and 1997-1998 and another $1.5 million in 1998-99. Our budget fluctuates considerably. However, some of these fluctuations are not due to cuts. Our budget has decreased considerably over the past three years in particular, and the reason is that more than $18 million was set aside to help the National Archives prepare for the move to Gatineau.
Mr. Bélanger: For construction?
Mr. Wallot: In part, but not only for construction. The construction budget fell under Public Works. Our budget was more for preparing the collections, the boxes, buying shelving to hold the boxes, and the likes.
But as the date of the move to Gatineau approaches, we're receiving a lot less money. So there is a drop on that side which is such that the real cuts are more like roughly $10 million... I apologize, I'm mistaken: the total is $13.2 million, primarily because of phase I of program review and also because of phase II. So we're talking about an amount between $10 and $13 million over five years.
Mr. Bélanger: It would be better if it were a little more specific, but I'm going to move to... If we're going to make a value judgement on the state of the archives today and on what the archives are capable of doing with the resources it receives from the government, could we say that the archives are worse off, the same, or that they can still do better?
Mr. Wallot: We can always do better, there is no doubt about that. Look, the situation is not...
Mr. Bélanger: I mean with the resources available. I know that we can always do better.
Mr. Wallot: I was not talking from the point of view of resources. I would even say that with fewer resources, we're doing better than we did in the past. We're doing less, but we are doing better than in the past. Facing the situation where budgetary constraints were considerable, we had to develop a number of mechanisms.
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For example, we considerably reduced the response time to people who sent in information requests, because we found ways to simplify the responses and so on. We spend less time with each person individually. In the past, we might have devoted five hours to a request, whereas today, it is two or three hours, depending on the case.
Mr. Bélanger: Were these improvement brought about as a result of program review?
Mr. Wallot: They were the result of program review and also because we were forced to cut back our services. We reduced our hours of service. In the past, the National Archives were opened 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. Now, we close every day between 11:00 p.m. and 7:00 a.m. Some researchers are affected by that, but not very many, because it was primarily PHD students that worked at night.
There are certainly disadvantages in terms of acquisitions, primarily private ones. We had to considerably restrict the range of private documents we acquire. We are now focusing on documents that are more or less linked to government or national organizations. For example, I'm thinking of political parties; I'm also thinking of papers from prime ministers and ministers that we continue to acquire.
In the past, however, we acquired a lot of documents belonging to prominent Canadians. Now, we have to leave more and more of them out. In the past, we obtained the archives from certain organizations, and certain Crown corporations which were privatized. For example, I'm thinking of Air Canada, Canadian National and so on. Today we have to withdraw from a number of services.
Mr. Bélanger: I have here the Corel CD-ROM, which is essentially made up of images. The package is labelled in English only. Is there a French equivalent?
Mr. Wallot: I cannot answer that question, because I am not aware of Corel's distribution; it is a private company. They pay...
Mr. Bélanger: Yes, but it is done in cooperation with the National Archives.
Mr. Wallot: With the friends of the National Archives of Canada, and not with the National Archives.
Mr. Bélanger: But the friends have access to the Archives?
Mr. Wallot: Yes.
Mr. Bélanger: So you're not sure whether it's available in French?
Mr. Wallot: I do not know. I cannot answer your question, but I can send you a response later. It's something I will have to check.
Mr. Bélanger: That would be interesting.
Mr. Wallot: Yes.
Mr. Bélanger: Finally, Mr. Wallot, I'll ask you a question which is a bit more delicate. Could you tell us a bit about the policies, the customs or the practices that exist internationally regarding the recovery of archives by one country from another? In the past, have we in Canada had to remit our national treasures to other countries? And conversely, have other countries returned national treasures to us? I imagine this is more the other way around, but...
Mr. Wallot: It can happen that another country gives another country a specific document, generally when there are several copies of it. For example, a charter can be written in two, three or four copies. For symbolic reason or out of friendship, a country can give another country a specific document which is perhaps less at the heart of his own history.
In general, the principle used internationally for archives is origin. The author, who may be an individual, a group or a government, the one who creates the document, remains the owner of these documents an must keep them.
Separating holdings of documents is the worse thing that can happen internationally, nationally or locally, because the parts only make sense when taken as part of a set of documents. You cannot understand a document that has been separated from the context that lead to its creation.
For example, that what explains why documents that were created by the French administration for new France, by the British administration under the British regime, prior to Canada's independence, remain in London and we have made copies of them on microfilm.
The English did not transfer their documents on the colonial administration. The same is true in Africa with regard to France, to Germany and to Belgium. The mother countries never transfer documents from their own administration. I'm not talking about documents from a local administration. I'll give you a concrete example. In Quebec...
Mr. Bélanger: I would like to ask another question first.
Mr. Wallot: Okay, go ahead.
Mr. Bélanger: What do I tell my constituents in Ottawa - Vanier who ask me what would happen, in the event of Quebec's separation - something that should never happen and I hope will never happen - to the archives, and the national treasures which are in Quebec at the time? What agreement do we have? What guaranties do we have that there treasures will be returned to us?
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Mr. Wallot: Unless you assume that people are thieves, I imagine that the documents would belong to the National Archives of Canada until the authority of the federal government ceases. It is possible that the federal government will enter into agreements. That happens in similar cases at present. When the government devolves powers to native governments or other regions, the documents created by the federal government, under its authority, remain with us if they are deemed to be of national importance. If they are not important, the government can transfer them if it so desires.
Some of these documents are needed to ensure the transition. We lend them or make copies of them, but they must be sent back.
These are mutual agreements among governments.
Mr. Bélanger: So you have no concerns whatsoever?
Mr. Wallot: We cannot say that we have no concerns, unless there is a total state of anarchy. I think there would be normal negotiations between governments and that well established legal principles would be followed.
Mr. Bélanger: Thank you.
The Vice-Chairman (Mr. O'Brien): Thank you, Mr. Bélanger.
[English]
We certainly hope that question remains hypothetical, but it's an interesting one to propose.
Mr. Wallot: My answer is hypothetical, sir.
The Vice-Chairman (Mr. O'Brien): Yes, sir. We don't have our full representation, but most of us hope it remains so.
We can go to a second round of questioning.
Mr. Bélanger: Mr. Chairman, on a point of order, do we have the National Library also?
The Vice-Chairman (Mr. O'Brien): Yes, we do.
Mr. Bélanger: Are we splitting the time in half?
The Vice-Chairman (Mr. O'Brien): We have five minutes. We can allow a few more questions from Mrs. Payne.
Mrs. Payne (St. John's West): I have a very short question, Mr. Chairman. Thank you for indulging me. I'm a new member here.
Along the lines of what Mr. Bélanger was asking, my coming from the oldest city in North America is I guess what prompts my question. Who decides what documents you want in the National Archives? What happened in the case of Newfoundland pre-Confederation documents? Are some of these in the National Archives or are some of them ones that you would still look to have in there? How would you go about doing that?
Mr. Wallot: I cannot directly answer your question about Newfoundland. My colleague here might be able to answer you more directly. But I would expect that the documents that relate to Newfoundland, those that were there at the moment of entrance into Confederation, are still there now. I presume that the others would be in England. Am I correct, Mike?
Mr. Michael D. Swift (Assistant National Archivist, National Archives of Canada): Yes.
Mr. Wallot: They would have been created either by the Newfoundland government or -
Mrs. Payne: Quite a lot are not in England. Quite a lot are in fact in the archives in Newfoundland. My question was more to the point of which pre-Confederation documents might be of interest to the National Archives.
Mr. Wallot: If we felt that some of these documents would be of interest to the National Archives for research or whatever purpose, we could, and in the past we did, have programs of microfilming. We made agreements with different jurisdictions to microfilm certain parts of their collection. In fact, we ourselves had a very strong program of diffusion. We diffused thousands and thousands of reels of microfilm of the French period, the British period and after Confederation to the different provincial archives depending on the kinds of documents they were interested in. This ceased many years ago because of budgetary restrictions, but there is always that way.
Also, we should not forget that there is a community that's building the Canadian archival system. Through finding aids we now have standards across the country to describe records, so pretty soon you'll be able to know through Internet or through CD-ROMs what exists on a specific subject, where it is, where the finding aid is, whether it is available, by whom and by what. If Newfoundland has some of these documents microfilmed, as I presume it does, you could borrow them through interlibrary loans.
So there are many means for getting access to these documents without necessarily having either a copy or an original inside the National Archives.
Mrs. Payne: My concern is not so much in the area of viewing these documents as it is with the preservation.
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Mr. Wallot: I am sure the Government of Newfoundland is providing... I think there is a project to build a new archival repository, at least a storage area for the documents in Newfoundland. There is a project to build a big building there, from what I heard last summer.
Mrs. Payne: Mr. Chairman, I'd love to pursue this but I won't. Thank you very much, sir. There are a lot of questions still on my mind about this matter.
The Vice-Chairman (Mr. O'Brien): I'm sure Mr. Wallot is available for our one-to-one questions at any point.
Mr. Wallot: Yes.
The Vice-Chairman (Mr. O'Brien): Thank you very much, Mr. Wallot. Mr. Swift and Ms Koltun, we appreciate your attendance here today.
I now call forward Marianne Scott, the national librarian, to address the committee members. Welcome, Ms Scott. Do you have some colleagues with you?
Ms Marianne Scott (National Librarian, National Library of Canada): Yes, I have two.
The Vice-Chairman (Mr. O'Brien): Colleagues, with Marianne Scott is Ingrid Parent, who is the director general of acquisitions and bibliographic services.
Ms Scott, perhaps you could introduce your other colleague.
Ms Scott: Tom Delsey is director general of corporate policy and communications.
The Vice-Chairman (Mr. O'Brien): Welcome to our committee. We'd love to hear your comments.
Ms Scott: Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman, hon. members. I've been asked to address this morning the mandate and budget of the National Library, and I'll try to do that in as brief a way as possible. I'd like to start with the mandate.
[Translation]
If we look at mandate in terms of statutory authority, we will find that the National Library Act is rather cut-and-dry in what it says about the Library's mandate. There is in fact no overall statement of purpose for the Library in the Act. There is instead a fairly succinct list of "powers" that give the National Librarian the authority to develop a collection, to compile and publish a bibliography, to lend books, to compile and maintain a union catalogue listing the holdings of other Canadian libraries, to coordinate library services within federal departments and agencies, and to enter into agreement with other libraries and institutions. There is also a very important provision in the Act that requires all Canadian publishers to deposit copies of newly released publications with the National Library, free of charge.
That is pretty much the sum and substance of what I might call the "paper version" of the National Library. What I would like to give you is some sense of how the National Library has developed as an institution since that Act was first proclaimed in 1953.
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[English]
Over a period of less than 50 years, the National Library has built a collection of more than15 million items. The core of the collection is made up of Canadian publications and covers a broad range of formats: books, periodicals, newspapers, music scores, sound recordings, audio-visual materials, and CD-ROMs. Of course, we now have on-line journals.
The materials in the collection have been acquired through legal deposit, as gifts, through exchanges with other libraries, through arrangements with provincial governments and of course through purchase.
It is the most comprehensive collection of Canadian publications held anywhere in the country, and it serves as an unparalleled source for research in all fields of relevance to Canada's development as a nation: historical, political, social, economic and cultural.
Since 1950, the Canadiana materials acquired from the National Library's collection, and even some of which we have not managed to obtain copies, have been catalogued and listed in the national bibliography. Today those records form the core of a database that is accessible on-line to users right across Canada.
The database contains well over 1 million Canadiana records and is the authoritative source for bibliographic information and materials published in Canada as well as on works by Canadian authors and works about Canada published outside the country.
Records for current materials are used to generate both print and electronic product that help Canadian publishers and record producers promote their new titles and enable libraries to add copies of Canadiana materials to their own collections without, of course, having the expense of cataloguing the items on their own.
Collections and databases are obviously key components of the resource the National Library provides to Canadians interested in studying and understanding their country and how it is developed. But equally important are the knowledge and the skills that the library staff bring to the job of assisting clients in using the collections and in finding sources relevant to their information needs.
The staff includes specialists in the areas such as Canadian literature, music and history; librarians who are experts in finding their way through a maze of government publications; and staff who are proficient at handling the tens of thousands of reference questions and hundreds of thousands of requests for documents that come to us each year from all corners of our country.
The knowledge our staff have of the collections and of the various fields of Canadian interest is also used to develop exhibits and a program of cultural events that serve to make the collections more accessible to a broad public audience and to showcase Canadian talent that's reflected in those collections.
The Canadiana collections and databases and the services and programming that have been developed around them are central to the library's effort to develop a strong national resource for the study, understanding and appreciation of Canada's cultural heritage and its development as a nation.
There is another dimension to the library's mandate that is centred on facilitating access, not just to its own collections and things Canadian, but to the collective resources of libraries right across the country and to information networks that are both national and international in scope.
It was actually for this second purpose that the National Library was given the mandate when it was first established to compile and maintain a national union catalogue. You might be interested to know that originally that catalogue was put together by interfiling duplicates of catalogue cards from Canada's major libraries in a huge set of catalogue drawers at the National Library.
Today the union catalogue is a database of more than 5 million computerized records identifying Canadian libraries from which copies of the items described can be borrowed. Hundreds of thousands of holdings are reported each year by libraries located in every province and territory.
The database, which has holdings of some 500 Canadian libraries, is accessed directly by more than 600 libraries that search it regularly to find user-requested materials that are not in their own collections in order for us to obtain them for other users on an interlibrary loan. National Library staff also use the database to answer 200,000 requests we receive each year by phone, fax or e-mail from libraries looking for materials on behalf of their users.
In recent years, our efforts to facilitate networking among Canadian libraries have extended well beyond the compilation and maintenance of the union catalogue. The National Library is working with individual libraries, groups of libraries from various sectors and regions, and provincial agencies to develop strategies for more effective resource sharing on a national scale. It's looking at interlibrary loan policies, promoting regional cooperation and testing and putting in place the information and communications technology that's needed to support a more cost-effective, resource-sharing infrastructure.
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The National Library has played an important role not only nationally but internationally in developing the standards and protocols that will enable libraries to use the information highway as a vehicle for drawing on each other's resources to meet the information needs of their users.
The National Library has also been instrumental in promoting awareness of the special needs of persons with perceptual disabilities and assisting libraries across Canada to make use of adaptive technologies to better serve those users.
If I may, let me turn to the National Library's budget, which is probably not quite such a cheery recitation.
As a result of program review decisions announced by the government in the February 1995 budget, the library's base appropriation is being cut by about $5 million over the three-year period 1995-96 to 1997-98. The second phase of program review cuts announced in this year's budget will reduce the library's base appropriation by another $1 million in 1998-99.
When combined with the continuing roll-out of cuts announced in earlier budgets, the total cut over four years amounts to a reduction of more than 20%, bringing the library's base appropriation down from its 1994-95 level of more than $35 million to just over $28 million by 1998-99.
I have to say that the impact of these budget reductions is significant. We are cutting our collections budget by about 30%. The deepest cuts are being made in funds allocated to the purchase of non-Canadiana. But significant cuts are also being made to funds allocated for the purchase of retrospective Canadiana and for the purchase of works by Canadian authors and works about Canada published outside the country.
We've also had to cut back radically on our expenditures on preservation activities, most notably our mass de-acidification system. Our public programs, exhibitions, readings, lectures and musical events have been substantially reduced in number.
But I think you'll agree with me that the most significant impact of the budget cuts is the loss of more than 80 staff positions that will have to be eliminated over four years, bringing the library's full-time complement down from 500, as it stood in 1994-95, to less than 420 by 1998-99.
The loss of these positions will affect the level of service we're able to provide in a wide range of areas: the national bibliography, reference and research services, the union catalogue, and interlibrary loan and location services.
The National Library faces three major challenges over the next several years. The first, as I've already noted, of course, is the challenge of sustaining the library's ability to fulfil its mandate in the face of a major reduction in resource levels. The second is the urgent need to obtain adequate, secure accommodations for our collections. The third is the continuing challenge of adapting to technological change.
Apart from the budget cuts, one of my biggest concerns today is safeguarding the collection. It's not only because of the investment that's been made over the past 40 years or so in acquiring, cataloguing and maintaining the materials, but more importantly because of its irreplaceable value as a resource for study and research on Canada and all things Canadian.
A growing portion of the collection is at risk because of deterioration in paper, film, magnetic tape and other media that are the physical stores for that information.
We have made some progress in recent years in stemming the rate of deterioration of paper documents through mass de-acidification. There's a huge amount of retrospective material in the collection that has not yet been treated. Due to the budget cuts, we've had to scale back the operations of our de-acidification unit. As a result, we'll be unable to make much headway at all in treating our retrospective materials.
What we most urgently need is adequate environmentally controlled space to store the collection. We have to get material out from the various basements and warehouses around Ottawa in which important parts of the collection are currently stored and move it into secure, climate-controlled facilities where it will be at minimal risk of damage from water leaks and erratic fluctuations in temperature and humidity.
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My other major preoccupation - I'm sure that sometimes it must be yours - is with technology. Technology has been a major driver of change in the National Library for at least25 years.
At the beginning of the 1970s, the library began adapting computer technology to assist in the production of catalogue cards and the national bibliography. We now have progressed through several generations of computer systems and have expanded our applications portfolio to support other operations, such as acquisitions, circulation, and the management of interlibrary loan requests.
We went on-line coast to coast in 1978, offering hundreds of libraries the opportunity to access our databases directly. In the past few years, with the emergence of the Internet and services such as the World Wide Web, virtually all areas of the library, from reference services through to marketing and publishing, have mainstreamed the new technologies into their work processes.
The library is now at a stage at which technological innovation is beginning to have significant impacts not just on internal work process but, more broadly, on the external environment within which the library operates. The use of new information and communication technologies by those who create, produce, and disseminate the products that serve as the library's raw material, as well as by the users of the library services, is beginning to alter significantly how the library interacts with its suppliers and clients.
The rules of the game are shifting. The publishing industry is experimenting with new forms of information dissemination. Users are quickly adapting to new modes of accessing information. The traditional patterns of interaction between libraries and their users are changing. The National Library, like other libraries, is being challenged to rethink in a substantial way its relationships both on the supply side and on the demand side.
We are also faced with a major challenge in adapting to the management of electronic documents. We're actually in the middle of a learning process that requires us to re-examine many of the things we've taken for granted, from the legal deposit mechanism to storage and access. Not the least of our challenges will be to determine more precisely what it is we require in the way of systems to support the management electronic documents and of course to find a way of funding the acquisition and installation of the required systems.
Finally, I want to say that my overriding personal concern with respect to the new technologies is the potential that exists for us somehow to lose sight of the fundamental principles that have been the underpinning of this country's public policy on access to information, communications, and culture for many years. We have to ensure that technological innovation and the growth of the information and communications industries do not distract us from our commitment to equitable access to information for all Canadians and to ensuring an important place for Canadian cultural content in public communications and our public institutions.
Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. Those are my formal remarks. I think you will all be given what turns out to be a rather heavy kit, but I hope you will have the opportunity to glance through it. The estimates you know about. There's our new legal deposit law and multiple brochures on our various services. We have these brochures and things of that nature because we distribute them, of course, to libraries across the country so that they're all aware of our services.
The Vice-Chairman (Mr. O'Brien): Ms Scott, thank you very much. We'll go to the committee for some questions from Mr. Hanrahan first.
Mr. Hanrahan: I'd like to first of all thank you for your presentation. I'd like to explore the budget end of it in a little more detail.
Again, as we saw with our previous witness, we're losing 80 experienced people from the library staff over the next period of time. I assume that will also be done through attrition.
Ms Scott: We hope so. Certainly all but one of the people who left this year have either taken early retirement, were retiring, or we've relocated them. We're hoping that each year we're going to be able to do this, but it becomes increasingly difficult because you don't always have the place where you're trying to cut back... For example, if you're trying to cut back on some clerical services you may have automated, the people are not necessarily able to be put into the information technology branch.
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We've actually undertaken to do this coming year a major inventory of skills within the National Library. We've had an internal training program for about seven years, besides the courses staff take within and without the government. We're going to review that to see how we can retrain people who do not want to take any kind of buyout package. But each year it's going to become increasingly difficult.
Mr. Hanrahan: Out of these 80, how many would be in the administrative end of the library?
Ms Scott: It's hard to say. Actually, we've done a lot of delayering over the last four years as part of other budget cuts. This is not the first budget cut. We have practically eliminated one level of management.
In dealing with the public programming area, we took one branch, the communications branch, and spread the activities over other branches. So we have eliminated a director general and the support staff, that sort of thing.
It is hard to tell you exactly. We're keeping our administration at the minimal level.
Mr. Hanrahan: I don't know if the concern I have is a valid one, but do you see the possibility of losing people who are actually involved in the day-to-day activities, the front-line workers, if you will, the secretaries, the...?
Ms Scott: Actually, Madame Parent is head of acquisitions and bibliographic services, which happens to be one of our largest branches. She has done a total workplace re-engineering, trying to reorganize. She has been cutting staff out, but they've been at various levels.
Ms Ingrid Parent (Director, Acquisitions and Bibliographic Services Branch, National Library of Canada): I think there's a range of levels, from managers right down to the working level. We've looked at all the activities to see where we could absorb the cuts. It cuts across all levels of staff.
Mr. Hanrahan: Would you say it's basically on an equal proportion?
Ms Parent: I think people who take buyout packages, who retire early, are probably more at the working level. There are a few managers as well. In my branch I would say it probably would be two-thirds working level to one-third administration.
Mr. Hanrahan: With these budget cuts of 20%, from $35 million to $28 million, if I recall your figures, you've obviously had this experience before, have it now, and will in the future. Is there a group within the library that's concerned with trying to find ways to raise capital moneys for substituting some of this budget cut? Are you looking specifically at how the library can increase its revenue so that some of these cuts may not have to happen?
Ms Scott: Actually, there are several things. I think I'll have to say a somewhat similar thing to what Dr. Wallot said in the sense that it is very difficult to raise private sector money to pay indeterminate staff. That, I think, is not on. I can give you an example of what we are trying to do.
We have a program, which we started about five or six years ago, that is extremely popular. It's called the Read Up On It program, and it's one where we promote reading amongst Canadian children, particularly schoolchildren. We've developed excellent reading lists each year on a particular theme, and we now distribute well over 25,000 of these kits to schools and libraries across Canada.
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That program is going to have to be cut unless I can get private sector money. I think the program cost us about $85,000. Last year we raised about $15,000 from one or two sectors. We have gone to a private corporation and made a proposal, which is sitting on their desk now waiting to see whether or not they will fund it for us.
We don't have a development officer. We're looking at how we will find the resources to...because I know you have to spend money to make money. We're looking at that option as well.
There is an interesting thing. The library is a department of government, and going out and raising private sector money is quite a challenge. You can perhaps raise it for things like CD-ROMs. You can sometimes raise money to buy a particular item. We're hoping a program as attractive as the Read Up On It program will elicit private sector funding. We also have been very active in raising money to try to keep some of our public programming alive - that is, small sponsorships of local agencies and some restaurants and hotels and things like that.
Mr. Hanrahan: When you distribute these kits to high schools or whatever, is there any evaluation of their success? Are they being used or are they being left on a library shelf somewhere?
Ms Scott: I can appreciate your question. I really don't believe so. We have evaluated it. We sent out evaluation letters and gained quite good evaluation experience, which we would be pleased to make available to you. From the input we get from teachers and librarians, they are using it and they find it very useful.
Mr. Hanrahan: Is there no specific committee or group that meets regularly to try to come up with new ways of raising money?
Ms Scott: The committee that meets regularly is sitting here - the policy and communications director and me. We're the ones who are most concerned about the budget and the finance. We work on it on an ongoing basis. I do not have a development officer. As I said, this is a new thing for us and we are working at it and trying to gain more experience. We take the advice -
Mr. Hanrahan: Do you see this becoming increasingly more important?
Ms Scott: Very important - for these things that are extremely important in promoting the Canadian culture and Canadian materials.
[Translation]
The Vice-Chairman (Mr. O'Brien): Mr. Bélanger, please.
Mr. Bélanger: Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
[English]
Ms Scott, I love books. I'm a hopeless romantic and I hope we'll always have them around.
Ms Scott: Well, I happen to be a believer. I know there are some people who think the book is dead.
Mr. Bélanger: Nonsense.
Ms Scott: It's nonsense; there's no question about that.
Mr. Bélanger: I want to focus on your collection and how to preserve it, the needs of the library, and where your plans are, if you have any, in terms of a facility.
Ms Scott: There has been quite a laborious process of getting Treasury Board approval for our space needs.
Mr. Bélanger: Anything to do with Treasury Board is laborious.
Ms Scott: Nevertheless, it has been a challenge. We believe we are close to getting final space approval.
We are looking at some interim things. We're trying to get hold of one particular building in Ottawa that would allow us to bring collections together. We have been doing some serious negotiating with another department whose name would be quite familiar to you a few minutes ago, which is opening a brand-new facility in Gatineau. We're trying to negotiate the lending of some of that space to us for a period. This means that the government has to accept the fact that in the long term, for the next 25 years, we are going to need storage space almost equivalent to the first module that was built for the National Archives in Gatineau.
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Mr. Bélanger: What size space are we talking about here?
Mr. Tom Delsey (Director General, Corporate Policy and Communications, National Library of Canada): The facility that was just built is about 24,000 usable square metres. Our projection is that with the overflow from our current building on Wellington Street, which is already stored in basements and warehouses, plus the projected growth at the current rate, tomorrow we would be able to fill about one-fifth of that facility. Over 25 years it would be full to the brim. That's 24,000 or 25,000 square metres.
Mr. Bélanger: Is it not in the capital plan anywhere at the current time?
Ms Scott: No, because to get into the capital plan you have to get space needs approval from Treasury Board. As I said, we've been working on that for five or six years.
Mr. Bélanger: That is laborious.
Ms Scott: We believe that within the next year this will be finalized, and then we will be able to make the official moves to get -
Mr. Bélanger: I was reading your annual report and I congratulate you on it. It's not glossy. It's rather straightforward. Good for you. But you had an incident last year, I gather, where some 6,000 books -
Ms Scott: Actually, there were some early Canadian government documents and pamphlets. That year was dreadful. We had about four water incidents in the best building we have, which is395 Wellington Street. I will say that Treasury Board did give us resources to restore those materials. Where we could buy replacement copies we did, but with some of the early Canadian material we couldn't.
Mr. Bélanger: Four incidents last year - how often does this happen?
Ms Scott: It's declining in frequency. We went through a spate, first of all, when the roof leaked atrociously, but then they put on a new roof. Because we have to take it out of our own funds, we have now installed water sensors. We now have water sensors in all the basement areas and we've even gone up on some of the other floors. So we're getting a better handle on whether there is some. You can't prevent some kinds of...unless you have a really ultramodern facility like Gatineau, which is a building within a building -
Mr. Bélanger: You're sounding envious here.
Ms Scott: I am. This is my green suit.
Mr. Bélanger: I am not trying to sideswipe you here, but have you considered a temporary user fee on some of the services? I know that temporary fees have a tendency to become a little more than temporary, like income tax, but have you considered that avenue?
Ms Scott: We do have some user fees. Searching our database -
Mr. Bélanger: Dedicated to a facility.
Ms Scott: Oh, to a facility.
Mr. Bélanger: Yes, calling on the goodwill of your users to build a facility or acquire one and retrofit it... I share your concern that this has to be done.
Ms Scott: I don't know. I think that would be...
Mr. Delsey: I am afraid that under Treasury Board policy you can impose user fees only for direct services to individuals. A fee to offset the cost of either acquiring a collection or maintaining it -
Mr. Bélanger: Is there enough goodwill - and I think there might be - for the library to impose a fee on the services it provides, an additional fee in some cases, and to use that fee for the purpose of acquiring or building a facility to house our collection? Has that been considered?
Mr. Delsey: We do now charge fees and we generate about $1.5 million a year in revenue. That all goes to the consolidated revenue fund. It does not come back to us. We have some proposals on the table to add new user fees, which hopefully will add another $0.5 million or so to that amount, but we would not be allowed under the current Financial Administration Act -
Mr. Bélanger: You may want to revisit that. My understanding is that as the government is trying to deal with the deficit, there may be more flexibility in that field than there was before. I gather that some other agencies within the same department might already have found that flexibility.
Ms Scott: It's certainly something we can pursue.
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Mr. Bélanger: Well, I don't want to pit department against department, but Parks Canada is putting fees on and they will recover them.
My last comment is for my colleague who had to leave, but she tells me that her constituents tell her that they love the National Library.
Ms Scott: Thank you.
The Vice-Chairman (Mr. O'Brien): Thank you, Mr. Bélanger. We have a few minutes left for the government side if there are other questions from colleagues. No? All right, then.
In that case, I would like to thank you very much, Ms Scott, and your colleagues, for your presentation today. It was very interesting.
Ms Scott: Thank you. It's a nice opportunity to come. Sometimes the National Library is a little bit like the silent service, and we're there. It's nice to have the opportunity to come and tell you a little bit about what we're doing.
The Vice-Chairman (Mr. O'Brien): We appreciate it. Thank you.
For the committee members before we adjourn, I have a couple of announcements or points of information.
On Tuesday of next week we'll likely begin Bill C-216, which is the negative billing bill,Mr. Gallaway's bill. We should have Mr. Gallaway, Mr. Spicer, and some consumer groups.
This is to remind all MPs of the environmental forum to be held here in Ottawa next Tuesday and Wednesday, to which we're all invited. A memo has been sent to your offices.
We shall adjourn.