Globe: Feds pledge $100M to cultural bldgs

[wyliepoon]

Link to article


Feds to pledge $100-million for cultural buildings

JAMES ADAMS AND VAL ROSS

Globe and Mail Update

Canadian Heritage Minister Beverley Oda is announcing Monday that her department will provide what sources say is $100-million to repair and upgrade six national cultural institutions in the Ottawa region.

Oda will make the announcement at the Canadian Museum of Nature, one of the institutions benefiting from the infrastructure aid package. Other buildings receiving assistance include the National Gallery of Canada, the Museum of Civilization in Gatineau, Que., National Battlefields Commission, Science and Technology Museum and the National Arts Centre.

Oda appears to be responding to Auditor-General Sheila Fraser's 2004 report that warned Canada's cultural heritage was disappearing because of a lack of operating funds to maintain a variety of endangered cultural sites. As National Gallery director Pierre Théberge said this year of his leaky facility near Parliament Hill: “When it rains on receptions of your potential donors, it's embarrassing, to say the least.â€

Expectations were high Wednesday among some cultural mavens in Toronto that Oda's spending announcement might include at least a partial commitment of the $49-million in top-up capital money that Toronto's “Big Six†cultural organizations requested from the federal government in the spring. Included in the six are the Royal Conservatory of Music and the Canadian Opera Company. However, it appears any announcement of that ilk won't be made until late next month, at the earliest.

Nor is Monday's announcement expected to bring any clarity to the fate of the Portrait Gallery of Canada. Reports have circulated since the fall that the gallery, which was to be housed in the former U.S. embassy directly across from Parliament Hill, has been scrapped by the Harper Conservatives. Oda, however, has issued no confirmation or denial of the reports.

 

[interchange42]

I am under the impression that the National Archives and National Library on Wellington Street in Ottawa are also in desperate need of repair and upgrading, to the point where artifacts housed therein are decomposing...

Yikes!

42

 

[bizorky]

With respect to the Museum of Science and Technology, they are their own worst enemy in too many cases. They could not muster a campaign to get a new facility built during the period when Sheila Copps was doubling heritage spending on cultural institutions. That museum still resides in a former bread factory in the middle of nowhere, Ottawa, when they could have a new building well under construction on the Lebreton flats.

Also, the renos to the Museum of Nature are well under way. Some of the new galleries have even opened.

Too many federal museums have former public service hacks in command where they spend their time coasting to retirement.

 

[avenue4]

I wonder if $100 million is enough. I agree, many national institutions could be better run. But frankly, they can't be privatized, so they have to be run by civil servants, and all in all Canada's civil service is pretty darn good when compared to other countries.

 

[building babel]

There was an item in Friday's NY Times Business section about how the French government is selling off dozens of opulent but crumbling chateaus and villas in chic parts of Paris and elsewhere. Foreigners, mostly U.S. pension funds and the like, are buying them.

France owns $50 billion ( U.S. ) of such properties, not including priceless structures such as Notre Dame. It spends $4 billion a year to maintain them and has already sold off $1.6 billion's worth. In the past two years, for instance, the state has sold ten 18th and 19th century Parisian mansions that once housed the French aristocracy.

A great quote at the end of the article:

'"They won't have the right to destroy it, or paint it red, or build a tower in the garden," said one official at the Ministry of Finance, who could not be named because of ministry rules. "But they can use it for a bordello as long as they obey zoning laws."'

 

[tudararms]

A little facadism in the Marais perhaps?

 

[adma]

Believe it or not, landmarks such as the Place Vendome can be pointed to as absolute forerunners of facadism--c17 facades concealing thoroughly c20 interiors...

 

[bizorky]

"But they can use it for a bordello as long as they obey zoning laws."

Hmm, a completely untapped possibility for a museum. Just think of the interactive display possibilities.

 

[adma]

It's been done

 

[building babel]

In England, during the Georgian period, many a Mediaeval or Elizabethan building was re-clad with a Georgian front; not so much a looking-backwards faux styling as a disguising of what was really there - once you're through the front door the disposition of the rooms reveals the ruse.

 

[tudararms]

A little 'wattle and dab' will do ya.

 

[Darkstar416]

Nor is Monday's announcement expected to bring any clarity to the fate of the Portrait Gallery of Canada.

Proposed portrait gallery may go to Calgary: MP

Last Updated: Tuesday, December 5, 2006 | 9:59 AM ET
CBC News

The federal government is treating the location of a proposed national portrait gallery like "a state secret," says an Ottawa MP who wants an end to the rumours swirling about the project.

The future of the partially built gallery has been uncertain since the federal government launched a review of the project in the spring.

Paul Dewar has demanded that Prime Minister Stephen Harper confirm that the proposed Portrait Gallery of Canada, which had been planned for Ottawa, will be built in Harper's long-time home city of Calgary and will be partly funded by the energy company Encana.

The future of the gallery has been uncertain since Harper's Conservative government launched a review of the project earlier this year.

"The decision for the location of the portrait gallery has been treated like a state secret by this government," Dewar, the NDP member from Ottawa Centre, said in the House of Commons on Monday.

Dewar said the response he received to an access to information request about the gallery came back mostly blacked out.

Heritage Minister Bev Oda refused to be pinned down on the matter.

"As I've told this House before, we are looking at the options before the government to make sure that our portrait gallery is accessible to as many Canadians as possible," she said. "And we'll also make sure the federal funds are used responsibly and accountably."

The portrait gallery, announced in 2001 by Sheila Copps, then Liberal heritage minister, is intended to showcase the highlights of more than one million Canadian portraits collected since the 1880s by Library and Archives Canada.

The gallery was to open in 2005 in the historic former American embassy building on Wellington Street in Ottawa at an estimated cost of $22 million.

However, the project's cost grew to $45 million and its opening was delayed until at least 2007.

The federal government ordered a review of the project this spring, prompting a group of Canadian artists to urge the government not to kill the project.

 

[building babel]

The AGO is coming along nicely. We haven't been paying much attention to this building lately, have we boys and girls?

The live cams in the Renderings section indicate that the floor of the long sculpture gallery on Dundas is already in place; it will lead through to the Henry Moore sculpture gallery at the east end of the site. And the perimeter of the big contemporary art block to the south, overlooking Grange Park, is bristling with strongly vertical beams on all floors as if taunting, "enclose me, clad me ..."