OTTAWA – It’s a major milestone in Canada’s history that’s still nearly five years away, but the approaching 150th anniversary of Confederation — a national birthday bash that will culminate on July 1, 2017, touch every corner of the country and cost hundreds of millions of dollars — has already inspired one showcase sesquicentennial project and, just as quickly, sparked the event’s first controversy: the Conservative government’s decision not to appoint an independent commission to oversee what promises to be the biggest cross-Canada celebration since 1967.
When Heritage Minister James Moore stepped to a podium in October to announce the renaming and restructuring of the Canadian Museum of Civilization as the new “Canadian Museum of History” — then cast the $25-million makeover as a key Conservative government initiative for the coming 150th anniversary of Confederation — opposition MPs were astonished. Months of non-partisan brainstorming by the House of Commons heritage committee about “150” planning and projects seemed to be swept aside in an instant.
“We spent the better part of a year looking into this at the heritage committee, and while we’re looking into it, the government clearly was planning an announcement — a major announcement for them — around reshaping and rebranding the Museum of Civilization within the context of Canada’s 150th birthday,” said New Democrat MP Andrew Cash, his party’s deputy heritage critic. “None of that was mentioned, discussed, brought up or suggested during the study of Canada’s 150th birthday — not by any witness, and not by the government. . . . So it really raises the question about process.”
The idea to transform the museum, located in Gatineau, Que., directly across the Ottawa River from Parliament Hill, came to Moore during a motorcycle trip through British Columbia in 2011, he says.
He said he had visited a local museum in the town of Midway and enjoyed a “fantastic display” on Okanagan-area Japanese Canadians who were interned during the Second World War. Such little-known exhibits, Moore decided, should be shared with other local museums across the country, all co-ordinated through a national hub — the Museum of Civilization — with plenty of its own artifacts hauled out of storage and added to the mix.
“And that’s why I came up with the idea of creating the Canadian Museum of History,” Moore told a November meeting of the Canadian Museums Association in Ottawa. “We want to build an institution for the 150th birthday of Canada that will not just benefit an iconic institution here in Ottawa, but that will benefit all of our museums across the country.”
Moore’s moment of inspiration is not being universally celebrated.
Concerns about the museum-sesquicentennial link have been stoked by the fact that the Civilization-to-History remake appeared to some to represent a major triumph for a small-c conservative strain of Canadian history, one that has long urged the promotion of a chronologically ordered, big-moment “national narrative” about the country’s evolution — starring Confederation, the Last Spike, Vimy Ridge and other upper-case highlights of politics, war and economic expansion — over an increasingly predominant “social history” approach to teaching about Canada’s past.
The latter vision had been epitomized, according to critics such as Who Killed Canadian History? author Jack Granatstein, by the Museum of Civilization’s now-doomed displays about “fragmented” Canadian communities set in vintage Chinese laundries and pioneer Ukrainian churches.
“The Canadian Museum of Civilization, I always thought, was a fairly bad museum,” Granatstein said in a recent interview, “with the worst kind of social-history, pander-to-ethnics exhibits. What we’re now going to get, I hope, is a chronological run-through of Canadian history, with a good, solid, political-history spine, that will tell the story of how the country developed.”
But to those who would like a 150th-birthday party orchestrated by an independent commission rather than by Conservative government fiat, Moore’s museum makeover plan came as a dark omen.
At the heart of the heritage committee’s recommendations, tabled in September, was the proposed creation of “an independent agency or corporation to plan, organize and implement Canada’s 150th anniversary.”
The idea of an arm’s-length body had been highlighted by various witnesses, including Peter Aykroyd, a top manager with the 1967 Centennial Commission and author of an acclaimed 1992 book on Canada’s 100th birthday, The Anniversary Compulsion. His deeply analytical memoir of the events leading to the country’s centennial and Montreal’s associated Expo world fair not only examined what made the ’67 celebrations such a success, but also explored the deep-seated need among individuals, communities and nations to commemorate what he called “recurring calendric dates” to affirm their identities and values.
The executive members of the 1960s’ commission had proven “very diligent” and “made the executive decisions very responsibly,” Aykroyd — father of the famed actor and comedian Dan Aykroyd — told the Commons heritage committee in November 2011.
Helen Davies, the author of the only academic study of Canada’s centennial, also told committee members that her PhD research at the University of Winnipeg had shown that the federally mandated centennial commission was “instrumental” in the years before 1967.
“Fearing Canadians would consider Confederation a rather dull, uninteresting political occasion, organizers had worked steadily in the years leading up to Centennial to develop an exciting program that inspired Canadians to get involved and celebrate. They succeeded in transforming an intangible, elusive moment in Canadian history into a meaningful event for people across the country,” she said.
The push for a sesquicentennial organizing body was also strongly backed by Peter MacLeod, a Toronto-based event planner and public-outreach expert who had co-hosted a March 2010 conference in Montreal — 150!Canada — to promote early anniversary planning and strong grassroots participation in 2017.
“The government should set up a commission, and in short order, too,” MacLeod urged the heritage committee last year. “If you take the centennial as a significant precedent, the commission was created in 1962. As you know, if we want to build anything of any significance, that requires planning.”
The celebration of Canada’s 125th anniversary in 1992 was also spearheaded by the arm’s-length, federally funded Canada 125 Corp., led by co-chairs Frank King and Claude Dupras.
Prompted by such testimony, opposition members of Parliament pushed — successfully, in the end — for a final committee recommendation calling for a similar, independent body to co-ordinate Canada’s sesquicentennial in 2017.
But that idea, Moore confirmed with Postmedia News, has been rejected. And the announced revamping of Canada’s main history museum has sent a clear signal that because the buck stops with the government, decisions about how funds for the 2017 anniversary will be spent — likely on cultural festivals, local history initiatives, the construction of public buildings and the refurbishment of centennial arenas and other ’67 “legacy projects” — are bound to flow directly from the minister and his department.
“Having an arm’s-length committee is one approach,” Moore said, “but as we’ve often found in the past, when we’ve set up arm’s-length committees to decide these kinds of celebrations, often all they’ll come back with is a list of spending options.”
Instead, Moore said he will help kick off a cross-Canada series of consultations with civic leaders and ordinary citizens about how they think Confederation’s 150th anniversary should be celebrated.
“It’s not just going to be a dozen politicians sitting around the heritage committee – or me, as the minister of Canadian Heritage – making all these decisions,” he said. “That’s why in January, we are going to be going around the country and talking to Canadians themselves about how they would see this celebration unfolding.”
In August, the CBC announced it would also be hosting a series of “2017 Starts Now” public-input sessions in early 2013 to “inform, inspire and incubate local, regional and national projects” to mark the upcoming 150th anniversary.
A parade of witnesses, as well as both government and opposition MPs at the heritage committee hearings, similarly have stressed the need to consult Canadians directly about how to mark Canada 150.
But Liberal heritage critic Scott Simms echoed Cash’s concern that the model used in the 1960s to finally plan and implement Canada’s centennial celebrations — the appointment of an arm’s-length commission — was being sidestepped ahead of 2017 at a time when Moore’s handling of a range of history-related issues is under fire from some critics.
The government’s enthusiastic, ongoing commemoration of the bicentennial of the War of 1812 — while generally supported by Canadian historians — has been slammed by other observers for promoting a “warrior nation” mentality that downplays Canada’s postwar peacekeeping tradition and dovetails with the Conservatives’ pro-military, law-and-order political agenda.
A 10 per cent budget cut and wrenching service reductions at Library and Archives Canada have also sparked a backlash, with the Canadian Association of University Teachers launching a “Canada’s Past Matters” campaign last month. It aims to unite opposition to the those cuts, the Canadian Museum of Civilization makeover and other alleged attacks on national history-preserving institutions, including Parks Canada.
Simms, for his part, is open to the proposed new Canadian Museum of History, but condemns the secretive way it was decided and how Moore tied that plan to Canada’s 150th anniversary.
“What bothers me is when he says, ‘We’re changing the museum, it’s going to be Canadian history, and this is Step 1 of celebrating 150 years,’ ” said the Newfoundland MP. “We are partisan; that’s just who we are. But we have to know where to draw the line. Going back to 150, I really hope that (Moore) creates this agency, this arms-length organization, to have the sole responsibility of going forward with what we’re going to celebrate as being Canadian after 150 years.”
“We think we should take politics out of this event and form some kind of an arm’s-length agency that will consult with the provinces and municipalities and communities and plan this in the best interests of all Canadians,” said Cash, “and not just a narrow view of history that the Conservatives consistently show a propensity for.”
Moore calls that a “ridiculous accusation.”
The Conservative government, he noted, “presided over the 400th anniversary of Quebec City – nobody accused us of politicizing that. We’ve had the 60th anniversary of Her Majesty’s Diamond Jubilee, and I don’t think anybody has suggested we’ve put a Conservative tinge on that. We’ve done it in a respectful way.”
Cash, in fact, says he sees an unmistakable Tory tinge when it comes to the government’s management of the history file.
“We’ve got the Museum of Civilization, and then you’ve got a government that’s fixated on the War of 1812 and all things to do with the Royal Family,” he said. “I’m not saying the Royal Family doesn’t have a place in Canadian history – of course they do. But what we’re talking about are the priorities of the government versus the responsibilities that we have to tell our story.”
“The Canadian Museum of History is an initiative by our government that has been widely well received,” Moore said.
“The War of 1812 was a war. There was fighting. People lost lives,” he added. “Canada — or what was to be Canada, British North America — was invaded, and Canada repelled the invasion. And it was the most important event that led to Confederation in 1867.
“We’ve portrayed it in a way that I think has been widely received by Canadians as a positive thing,” Moore continued. “And it’s not simply focused on any kind of a ‘warrior nation’ motive. That’s not at all what we’ve done.”
And as for the government’s decision to head up the planning and implementation of the 150th anniversary of Confederation itself, Moore is unapologetic.
Ironically, Moore can point to his Liberal predecessor from the 1960s — despite the existence of that era’s Centennial Commission — to justify a certain level of ministerial prerogative when it comes to making some decisions about a major national anniversary.
Judy LaMarsh, the cabinet minister appointed by then-prime minister Lester B. Pearson to oversee his government’s centennial agenda, famously ignored advice from centennial officials and invited children from across the country to flock to Parliament Hill on July 1, 1867, to see Queen Elizabeth and eat free ice cream.
“She was contemptuous of the red tape that might prevent her from bringing her imagination to realization,” Pearson recalled in his memoir, Mike.
“While ignoring regulations can cause a lot of trouble in the ordinary routines of government, this was a situation which often required the overruling of bureaucratic procedures. As a result, she did things which she was told could not be done.”
Original Article
Source: canada.com
Author: Randy Boswell
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