:
I've prepared a long brief, and I've shortened that. I was told we could hand out visuals. The pictures virtually speak for themselves, and they don't need a lot of translation. It would have been good for me to have been aware that they should have been done that way, but it wasn't that clear.
Thank you members of the committee, and in particular Jim Abbott, for making it possible for me and my colleagues who represent railway heritage and have collections with national content to present to you.
Each of us has a different collection and different stories to tell. Some priorities are therefore different. However, we hope that our input will help establish a new, comprehensive Canadian museums policy that considers the unique challenges for museums--particularly railway museums--with large, fragile artifacts that are stored outdoors.
I have provided handouts that show some of the beautiful interiors of the railcars in Cranbrook and some of the preservation challenges facing them. You can refer to these in detail as I read. You may find the “before and after” photos of restoration particularly interesting.
Since it began in 1976, I have been the chief executive officer of Trains Deluxe, the trade name of the Canadian Museum of Rail Travel in Cranbrook, British Columbia. I work with, and I am supported by, an elected board of twelve directors. We all work with the museum development committee of the City of Cranbrook. We also work closely with other associations, such as the British Columbia and Canadian Museums Associations and other related groups.
I would also highlight the role the Canadian Council For Railway Heritage has played over the past fifteen years in education about the special challenges facing this sector. This council has developed a draft evaluation mechanism for historic railway equipment that could be of use in the assessment process for railway heritage outside the federal system. Their brief is an important document in this process as it deals with the railway heritage sector in general, whereas my presentation is very specific.
We often describe Canada as a vast and diverse country, which can also describe the railway heritage of our country. There are many collections, telling many stories, from local to regional to national, and even international levels. It has always therefore surprised me that the 170-year-old railway story does not figure more prominently in the story of Canada. Perhaps the efforts and associated costs of preserving these huge artistic and/or industrial artifacts were beyond the ability of the existing museum community at a time when artifacts were usually small and placed in display cases inside buildings.
Other railway museums share common problems with us. I hope my presentation can shed light beyond our historical experience. However, our unique museum story is about deluxe hotels on wheels. This is a departure from the more usual technical and mechanical emphasis of most railway museums. It also presents unique challenges not usually encountered on the scale that face our museum. These challenges are illustrated on pages 1 to 4 of the visuals and include exceptionally fragile artifacts with national significance--stored outdoors--that are outside our national capital. On pages 5 to 11 there are some examples of the beautiful interiors of the cars that are at risk.
The railcars contain tens of thousands of square feet of extremely fragile, inlaid exotic wood panelling that creates substantial challenges to properly preserve through control of relative humidity, ultraviolet light, dust, and other airborne particles. There is only a thin wall of these original artifacts separating the interiors from the hot summer and cold winter exterior temperatures. Since they are artifacts, insulation cannot normally be added without substantially changing the artifacts themselves. These preservation challenges are further enhanced by the amount of fragile interior textiles, such as upholstery and carpets, and other items, such as leaded, stained, and bevelled glass, railway china, silverware, and glassware.
This type of collection also requires substantial security. Public access to the interiors of the cars can only be done with a museum guide. Due to the small spaces in some cars, there is a limit of ten people per guide, making visitor capacity and the manner in which tours must be done another challenge. The preservation challenges are serious and will continue to grow to become major setbacks if steps are not taken soon to help resolve them.
Resources at many levels are needed to address these challenges, from local to provincial to federal.
The following questions have been asked of me and have been elaborated on in the written brief supplied to you earlier within the ten-page limit. They are: one, national significance; two, acquisition costs; three, restoration costs and ongoing preservation; four, museum operating costs; five, cost recovery; and six, which is numbered eight in your brief, unfortunately, is the federal involvement expected in the preservation of the collections.
In this last section, there are some important quotes from Robert Turner, the now-retired curator of modern history at the Royal British Columbia Museum, from his 1992 report, “The Historical Significance of the Collections at Cranbrook”. The study was commissioned by the Royal B.C. Museum and a copy has been provided with our written submission, for the record.
In summary, the Canadian Museum of Rail Travel believes that the current museums policy is well out of date and must be revised as soon as possible. One particular program of the old policy--the museum assistance program, or MAP--is mostly unsuitable to our type of museum and its railcar artifact collection. The current MAP emphasis on creating touring, temporary, historical exhibitions does little to help preserve our fragile permanent collections.
Other presenters may have outlined a range of serious museum concerns, but from our point of view, any new Canadian museums policy must put the preservation of collections as the top priority. Multi-year commitments to any program would be a big improvement over the current annual application process. Without greatly improved conservation and the efficiencies of a proper building, our nationally important collection will continue to deteriorate, considering the relatively small population base of Cranbrook, the support, where the museum is situated, how the museum is currently funded, and the expected increases in energy and related conservation costs. This large, outdoor-stored collection of rare and extremely fragile railcars of national significance is not sustainable.
Through a new Canadian museums policy that addresses the above concerns, the federal government can join with the Province of B.C., the City of Cranbrook, and a large support group of corporations, foundations, businesses, individuals, families, organizations, and the museum's own earned revenue to keep this national collection intact and properly preserved for the future.
Thank you, and we hope to participate in the ensuing process to create a new policy to better assist museums to better tell the story of Canada. This, in turn, will provide long-term benefits to the many Canadians and visitors to Canada who attend our museums.
Thank you very much.
Did you get the handouts?
Mr. Schellenberger, members of the committee, ladies and gentlemen, thank you very much for taking the time to closely examine the situation of museums in Canada today and to hopefully do something to improve it.
Thank you also for this opportunity to appear before you and to assist you in your deliberations.
You have heard a lot about the details of the state of railway museums in Canada through the presentations by the Canadian Railroad Historical Association and the Canadian Museum of Rail Travel. I will leave the basic description of the Revelstoke Railway Museum to our submission and to the images that I have now provided.
Pictures speak a thousand words, so there are about 150,000 words.
Suffice it to say, the Revelstoke Railway Museum is a small, first-rate museum located in Revelstoke, B.C., a city of just over 8,000 people on the main line of the Canadian Pacific Railway, with a small six-month operation at Craigellachie, the location of the driving of the last spike of the Canadian Pacific Railway and the place where Canada became a de facto country, from sea to sea, on November 7, 1885. Between these two locations, we get to tell this story to about 45,000 people a year, and that has been consistent since the museum was established.
They wonder why we want to do this. First of all, it is because of the nature of the railways and the role they have played and continue to play in Canada.
Because of the nature of this country, Canada is world-class in three areas: extraction of raw materials; communications; and transportation.
As an example of this dominance, CN was named the number one railway in the world by Trains magazine.
Canada has a nationally funded aviation collection and museum, yet the museums that preserve and interpret Canadian railway history have had to be developed and funded by the enthusiasts, their communities, and non-profit societies. Canada should really have a world-class system of railway museums.
Railways are the reason Canada exists. The Revelstoke Railway Museum works hard to get this across to the visiting public, both at the museum and at Craigellachie.
In addition, the completion of the Canadian Pacific Railway through B.C. prevented the southern portion of the province from becoming part of the United States.
The railways went on to become the largest single employer in Canada up until the 1950s.
As an aside, how many of you know how many provinces entered Confederation with a railway clause as their act of incorporation? Was it one, B.C.? Was it three, five, seven, nine, or all ten? Well, as a matter of fact, it was nine. Only Manitoba entered Confederation without a railway clause in its act of incorporation. It's an extremely important fact to remember.
Railways continue to be the lifeblood of this country. In 2005 they moved approximately 65% of the raw materials and merchandise of this country. Very few Canadians recognize this.
The total tonnage handled was the largest ever in Canadian history and formed one of the economic indicators of the strength of the Canadian economy. This is used by the Bank of Canada.
In addition, there were 63 million passengers on Canadian railways last year. The majority of them were commuters.
It is interesting to note that in fact the cities of Canada developed along street railway, tramway, and commuter rail lines. These routes were in fact largely abandoned in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, but they are now seen as the solution to congestion and pollution in urban and suburban areas of the country.
These railways continue to develop and improve their infrastructure and service to support Canadian commerce. Thus railways are expanding facilities, rights of way, and improving their efficiency.
Older technologies and equipment have been added to the museum's collection as they are retired; otherwise they will be lost forever and we will not be able to tell the complete story of Canadian railways.
I have a few comments on preservation, conservation, and interpretation.
Rolling stock for the collections are largely provided by the railways at little or no cost. If the collections aren't assembled as the artifacts become available, they are then lost forever. They are lost to the scrapper. This is not the situation for an art museum that misses an acquisition or a major work of art; it is still preserved somewhere.
The major artifacts are large, up to 100 feet long, and require significant buildings to be preserved properly. Professionally oriented museums have always striven for this, but they are expensive to build, expensive to operate, and need to expand to provide additional protection for their growing collections. Thus, there is a necessity and a major role for the federal government to support these institutions. Smaller artifacts and archival material require similar or better conditions to ensure their long-term survival. These artifacts are also donated by individuals as well as the railways.
Some railway museums, such as Exporail and Revelstoke Railway Museum, are preparing and hosting travelling exhibits. “Women Railroaders” and “Mail, Rail, and Retail: Connecting Canadians” are examples. This increases the exposure to the public of broader aspects of Canadian history and culture than could otherwise be.
The Revelstoke Railway Museum, Exporail, and the Canadian Museum of Rail Travel are all supported by their communities, and in turn, support their communities.
The Revelstoke Railway Museum has run Railway Days for a number of years, and I am pleased to say it's becoming a signature festival in Revelstoke. For it, the railway museum won the Business Excellence Award for 2006, on Saturday night, at the Chamber of Commerce dinner.
The presence of a railway museum in a community is a major factor in tourism. Forty-one percent of the visitors to Revelstoke visit one or another of the museums. Half of them come to the railway museum.
Railway museums that are fulfilling their educational mandate are effective locations for the education of students on the topics of Canadian history, Canadian geography, and Canadian technological innovation. The Revelstoke Railway Museum's exhibitions that chronicle the completion of the CPR fit directly into both the elementary and secondary schools' curricula and are used extensively by teachers during school field trips and other learning opportunities.
I'd like to conclude by looking at a few recommendations we would like to make to the committee.
First, we feel that the Government of Canada should substantially increase the funding for upgrading and expanding railway museum facilities that house nationally significant artifacts.
Second, the Government of Canada should provide for the preservation and conservation of railway artifacts of national significance.
Third, we recommend that the Government of Canada provide funds for increasing the capacity of museums to achieve financial stability through funding development officers or fundraisers.
Fourth, such funding should be made available over multiple years to ensure program success.
Our fifth recommendation is that the Government of Canada consider indemnifying artifacts and collections of national significance, as well as directors' liability insurance, to allow the funds presently spent on these items to be redirected to preservation activities.
Sixth, we recommend that the Government of Canada create an easier mechanism of recognizing the value of donated artifacts and property and permit the inclusion of services involved in preparation and delivery of such artifacts in the tax receipt.
Seventh, as much of the expertise in railway and other technology museums lies with volunteers, we recommend that the Government of Canada consider the recognition of volunteer contributions through funding equivalent time at some fixed rate.
Our eighth recommendation is that the Government of Canada consider the possibility of entering into public-private partnerships with railway museums to achieve specific program goals.
Ninth, we recommend that the Government of Canada act expeditiously to provide the funds required to ensure the long-term survival of national historic railway-related artifacts located outside of the national museums and to support public access to these artifacts.
Mr. Chairman, that's my presentation. I'll be happy to answer questions after our third speaker.
:
Like the others, I certainly appreciate the opportunity of being here. I might remark that this is the first time I've addressed a parliamentary committee, other than as a public servant.
I'll provide a little background about myself. Mr. Johnson referred to volunteers. My involvement with museums in general and railway museums in particular began when I was a teenager in Montreal fifty years ago, at what has since become Exporail, the Canadian Railway Museum.
I joined the public service in June 1962 and retired in February 1994, but my professional involvement in museums began in 1970, when I became part of the arts and culture branch of the Department of the Secretary of State, and in 1970 and 1971, I was one of the four people who put together the original national museum policy, under the direction of André Fortier, who at that time was assistant under secretary of state.
Then, finally, from March 1976 till my retirement, I was employed by the National Museums of Canada in a senior staff position, undertaking a wide variety of assignments regarding such things as friends organizations, volunteers, tax issues, copyright funding, governance, and many others.
I submitted a brief to the committee on October 1.
[Translation]
I understand there is a French version of this brief and it has been circulated. Fine.
[English]
I'd like to refer briefly to two points I made in that particular brief, and that is all. They are two that have bothered me for years. One is the lack of good statistical analysis of museums, obviously to serve as a basis for policy development and application of any policy, particularly with regard to funding from the federal level. The second point is how best to administer any enhanced federal financial assistance and other assistance to museums, if it ever happens in time.
On the first point, since the mid-1980s Statistics Canada, every two years, has been collecting information about heritage institutions: financing, volunteers, employment, visits, and so on and so forth. Up until the time of the 1992-93 collection, these results had been published by Statistics Canada in paper form, and the breakdowns had been done in several different ways, and included one by what I call museum sector. They're listed on the last page of my brief. There are eleven altogether, running from art, human history, multidisciplinary, and so on, including transport. Since then, they have published only aggregate figures for the entire heritage institution community, broken down financially but not by museum sector. Statistics Canada will furnish, of course, other analyses and other breakdowns for a price now, because they're on a partial cost-recovery basis.
In the exercise that the Department of Canadian Heritage did in 2005, leading up to the possibility of a new museum policy, they did finance from Statistics Canada an analysis broken down by budget size: museums with budgets under $100,000; between $100,000 and $1 million; and above $1 million. What they specifically were looking for was what had happened to attendance figures. In the ten-year period from 1991 to 2002-03, the aggregate attendance at museums with annual budgets larger than $1 million fell by 40%. Museums with budgets under $100,000 largely held their own, with a drop of only 8%. For museums in this range of between $100,000 and $1 million, the fall was 19%. So the obvious question is, “Why? Why did this happen?” The answer is that we don't know all that much about it.
However, anecdotal evidence does suggest that for attendance drops, if indeed there have been any, there is some variation by museum sector. But at the moment, we don't have the information to tell us this or not to tell us this. Certainly I would like to know. It was something that, if I were administering a grants program, I would want to know as well.
I took the last year for which some sector numbers were available--I'm already over five minutes--which was 1992-93. In that particular year, taking an average for the entire country, 80% of museum revenues were unearned; i.e., they came from one or another level of government, donations, and so on. However, for transport museums in that year, only 52% of the income of those museums was unearned. And I think this phenomenon was mentioned by Steve Cheasley when the CRHA appeared here.
Another interesting note here is that when you look at unearned income per visit for art museums in this particular year, 1992-93, it was $23.62, while for transport museums it was $4.70. Now these numbers, especially since they're fifteen-plus years old, raise far more questions than they answer. But these are the kinds of things I would like know about, especially now since after retirement I was given a post-retirement honourary position as a research associate at the museum studies program at the University of Toronto. What have the trends been since then, and just where is the museum community going?
So one of the things I've recommended is that the Department of Canadian Heritage sponsor the analysis by Statistics Canada to try to give some insight into where different parts of the museum community are going.
Since I'm already up to seven minutes, what I'm going to do is cut short the second one to say that in my own experience, if there's going to be a major increase and upgrade in federal financial assistance to museums, it should be administered by an arm's-length organization. Interestingly enough, in 1987, when the National Museums of Canada was being dismembered, the predecessor of this committee recommended that the museum assistance program be administered by an arm's-length agency.
Thank you.
:
Thank you all for being here today.
Quite frankly, I find it a national shame that we don't have a national rail museum in Canada, especially given the fundamental importance of the railway in creating Canada in the first place.
Mr. Johnson, I thought your quiz was very apropos. I didn't know that nine provinces had a railway clause—all provinces except Manitoba.
I think it's also a national shame that part of our heritage is rotting away—how we shall I say—under the elements.
First, regarding this point about the museum assistance program, Mr. Heard, it seems to me that railway museums in Canada should be outside of the scope of MAP in a way, because the National Art Gallery is outside of the scope of MAP, as far as I understand, and so is the Canadian Aviation Museum.
In some ways, you're being too modest in your demands. You shouldn't be saying, oh, please, give us a few hundreds of thousands of dollars here and there every now and then through MAP. I think we should have some dedicated funding for a national railway museum infrastructure in Canada.
But going back to MAP, Mr. Heard, you mentioned that you think funding should be administered by an arm's-length body like the Canada Council, which is a point Mr. Abbott more or less raised in debate in the House earlier this week, although he said his idea was more about items and gifts donated by Canadians to museums. Why do you think we need an arm's-length body like the Canada Council?
I understand why the Canada Council has to be at arm's length; it's the same reason the CBC has to be at arm's length. These fields of art are often dealing with cutting-edge ideas that can be controversial and challenge political orthodoxies, and we don't want the government meddling and influencing their decisions one way or another. But when we talk about rail museums, we're not talking about the most radical form of cultural expression. We're talking about managing—and I don't mean this in an inelegant way—a park of heritage assets. So why do you think we need an independent body to make those decisions?
:
It is interesting in this connection. Certainly in 1987, when this whole issue came up with the restructuring of the National Museums of Canada, the issue came up as to whether or not it would be better as an arm's-length agency or in the hands of a government department under the control of a minister. At that time, the Canadian Museums Association certainly supported putting it under the control of a government department, because they felt that was the only way they were going to get the money they would like to get. In the past 25 years, exactly the opposite has happened. Except for the dip or the cuts that took place in the middle nineties, the budget of the Canada Council has been increased considerably, while the budget for the museums has seen exactly the opposite.
This also speaks to Mr. Kotto's question. When it comes to giving the money, if you have a strong board like the one the Canada Council had, with people like Mavor Moore and Maureen Forrester chairing it, people who spoke up for the arts, they were in effect the advocates for the arts at the federal level. We don't have that for museums. We had it to some degree when the National Museums of Canada still existed. So going on the historical evidence, that's one of the reasons why I think that should happen.
The Canada Council is a very good model. From my own experience in government, it's one of the most forthright institutions in government in getting the information on its website. All the members of the peer group juries are there, as are the grants given, and so on and so forth. There is all sorts of statistical information. It's all there. They have a very good reputation. They can move fast. They're in a better position....
One of the things about grants to any kind of a cultural institution is that there is always some kind of a risk. If a theatre company is putting on a season of plays and one of them bombs, they may lose their shirt on that one, but there is nothing you can do about that. But the money wasn't misspent. Rather, they took a risk that didn't work. Certainly in the arts, in my estimation, people need to have the right to make the odd mistake.
There is the insulation of the arm's-length agency. It's not the minister who makes the decision to give a certain amount of money to a certain organization to do a certain thing. It is this council. It's the political master's job to find out globally what money should be given to what agency, but when it comes to grants, I fervently believe it's up to the arts organizations and the museums to decide who gets how much, in accordance with the needs of the field, with what museums need, first of all.
For valid reasons, with things like Young Canada Works and the student employment grant programs and so on—that's the one you were referring to—about one-quarter of it lapsed because of the administrative inertia in getting the—
I think you have to understand--and I'm sure you heard on the 6th of October when Exporail was here--that the CRHA was around at the time the railways were going through major changes, and they were able to assemble what was truly an outstanding collection of representative railway and tramway rolling stock, and they have continued to do so. They have a large proportion of significant railway artifacts in their collection. They were able to pick and choose, literally, which class of steam locomotive they wanted to preserve.
They certainly have a significant portion of any national collection. They are also willing and able, and have demonstrated this, to disperse this collection to a certain extent across the country--they have pieces from Salem and Hillsborough Railroad in New Brunswick through to Prince George and Revelstoke in B.C.--to somewhere they can be assured that the artifacts are going to be properly cared for and preserved in conditions that are as good as or better than those in which they would have been able to look after them themselves. We have a location that happened, by circumstance, to have a wide-ranging collection assembled at the time these were becoming available.
Other institutions across the country have done an excellent job in assembling specific elements of the national railway historical collection, to tell the stories in their particular locales. Therefore, I think the federal government has a role to play both in supporting the local or regional locations where the national story is being told in railway museums and in supporting Exporail.
As far as funding goes, I would say that, yes, you could support both very easily. I believe you heard something in the range of $75 million, coming from the Canadian Museums Association, as a starting point for appropriate funding by the federal government for the museums in Canada. If 5% of that went to the railway museums, I think you would be making a significant contribution, on an annual basis, to improving and preserving railway heritage in Canada. We might be able to get some of the collections properly housed and properly displayed and properly interpreted for the public.
:
Mr. Malo, in terms of having the debate at the Treasury Board, I'm sure that has to come. From your point of view, I'm sure the committee, if it chooses to do so, will recommend to Treasury Board that additional funding is needed.
There are specific steps that you could push the Treasury Board towards, for instance, to help with this funding and these decisions. Some of them were included in the recommendations in my report.
For instance, curators can currently identify artifacts and cover the rationale for tax receipts up to $1,000. This hasn't been adjusted in a significant number of years, and inflation alone might take that value to $10,000. Institutions need to be relieved of the responsibility of having to get third-party arm's-length appraisals for a significant number of artifacts that are donated.
That's one concrete way you could work with the Treasury Board to make a change to allow this to happen and to make things easier.
Similarly, I mentioned that it would be helpful to have the preparation and movement of the artifacts to the railway museums recognized within that tax receipt. I think this would be very helpful for all of the institutions. I think it could be expanded to other museums as well.
For instance, I think proof of fair market value for donated artifacts could be based on evidence that is even supplied by the railway companies. In our case, we're getting a donation of a particular locomotive, and its class happens to be an SD40. The railways sold hundreds of these in the recent past. Why wouldn't proof of value of sale be sufficient to justify that, rather than the institutions having to bring in a person to do an arm's-length appraisal?
There are ways to help work with the Treasury Board. Some recommendations for funding have already gone to Treasury Board, through the pan-Canadian funding practice in communities, from the Canadian Council on Social Development. Many recommendations in this report would correspond with the kinds of things that we're saying would make things better.
Are there any others?
:
Yes. I want, for the record, to change the tone of the discussion a little bit.
You gentlemen are in the business of preserving big artifacts. I was in the business of preserving even bigger artifacts--mining headframes in the pioneer community of Cobalt--and we had a hell of a job. We had two levels of government that would say to us again and again, “Prove the value.” They saw these pieces as massive structures of junk. In fact, we had to fight with the government to stop them from bulldozing what we saw as artifacts.
Then lo and behold, a provincial television show voted Cobalt the most historic town in Ontario, and suddenly we had bureaucrats running in saying, “Oh my God, how do we save your heritage?” Well, we had lost most of it by that point. But we still had some worth saving. Finally, the federal government came to the table saying that this is a nationally historic site--after, of course, we had lost a lot of our artifacts.
I'm telling this story because the argument we always had to use was not so much that these were nationally significant sites that were being bulldozed, but that this was an economic engine. I don't think that in the discussion on museums we hear very often about the pivotal role museums play, especially in the regions.
So I'd like to ask you, in your experience, when economic development plans are being discussed, when economic development strategies are being discussed, when tourism strategies are being put forward, are the museums somewhere out there doing their own thing, or are you a pivotal part of what a lot of agencies and businesses are looking for in order to attract people and economic dollars to your region?
:
In response, yes, there's a very specific process we're going through. Each institution that is at a truly professional level has its mandate clearly defined. Within that mandate, it tells exactly the story it's going to tell. We're telling the story of the Canadian Pacific Railway in its fight through the mountains, in its ability to move goods through the mountains, and the completion of the railway across Canada—that sort of storyline.
Garry in Cranbrook, for instance, is telling the story of luxury passenger rail travel, and he's doing a great job down there.
Exporail is looking at a broader aspect of the railways of Canada, and as I say, they were there at the time the railways were deaccessioning, to use the museum term, or scrapping, to use the railway term, the significant pieces as they changed from steam to diesel and from diesel to second- and third-generation diesel.
Have a clear mandate; have a clear policy on collections. You identify those items that fit within the collections policy and reflect the mandate. Then you look at whether you're going to be able to actually house and care for the artifact on the one hand. On the other hand, you say, are we getting near the end of that particular kind of artifact and if we don't take it now there will be no more? That's one way.
Another way to look at an artifact is if it's of particular technological significance. Exporail just received the first Green Goat prototype. I don't know if you've heard of the Green Goat. It's a Canadian Railpower Technologies Corp. development that uses a small diesel generator set to charge batteries, and it then uses the power from the batteries to power the traction motors to move the locomotive and the cars. This technology is much less polluting and much more fuel efficient. So here's a substantial increase in both pollution reduction and efficiency. The prototype is only one. Do you preserve it or not? They were able to do so. This sort of argument goes back and forth within the museum, within the institution, with the railways all the time.
So, yes, we are aware and have policies, which I think Garry can confirm.
:
I'd really recommend that you take a look at its web page.
I want to ask a question. When you restore a car, approximately how much a year are you looking at in terms of cost? I'll come back to that.
I just want to quickly walk through the pictures, both of the Canadian Museum of Rail Travel and the railway museum, and I'll ask our witnesses some questions.
If you take a look at page 1, you can see the buildup of snow on the outside. On page 2 of the pictures from the Canadian Museum of Rail Travel you see the challenge with the weathering on the outer shell. The page 3 pictures are basically before the work. If you flip over to page 5, you start to get an idea of the work that my friend Mr. Warkentin was talking about, actually stripping the paint and the unbelievable art work that is underneath.
Now take a look at page 6. That is exactly the way it is. As Garry mentioned, in many instances they had to recreate the carpet and the upholstery, and they had to refinish the furniture. You get an idea of the before and after from those pictures.
Carry on to page 7. If you take a look in the upper left-hand corner and then the lower right-hand corner, you see the difference between what was then and what is now. These are absolutely unbelievable works of art. I'd recommend that you come to Cranbrook any time. This is really unbelievable stuff.
Take a look as well at page 9, where you have the Curzon car that was a lakeside cabin. You can imagine what the inside of the Curzon looked like. Take a look at what was actually underneath all of the paint.
I'll go through Mr. Johnson's pictures in just a second. But my question to Mr. Anderson is that without doing anything more, to maintain the heat and the protection from the weather on an ongoing basis, approximately how much does it cost per car?
Before you answer that, I'll also ask Mr. Johnson a question. On page 2 of Mr. Johnson's pictures, if you identify the yellow caboose in the three main pictures on that page, you get an idea of what relates to what. My question for Mr. Johnson is whether it would be desirable to put those cars into some kind of a shelter, and if so, would you not also be looking at the possibility of additional cars? What approximately is the cost for just your fundamental maintenance?
Finally, I presume your financial documents are public information, so would you make them available to the committee? If we're talking dollars and cents, what are we talking about in terms of dollars and cents for this? What does it actually cost now that we have the picture of what you're about?
Those are my questions, Mr. Chair.