For Canada’s 150th birthday, free the museums

Let’s increase public access to our art and culture, writes John Anderson

To celebrate Canada’s 150th anniversary this year, I suggest we move to free entry for all our national museums. Since most of them are in Ottawa, this could affect the national capital the most.

As my partner said when we moved to Ottawa many years ago, “Do most of the people of Canada know what they own here in wonderful museums?” The answer is that many, even in Ottawa and Gatineau, never get to visit the museums at all, or on a regular basis, because of the cost — and many outside of the National Capital Region are deterred for the same reason.

For many years now, both the United States and the United Kingdom have offered free entry to major national museums. What a wonderful occasion it can be to visit the museums on the Mall in Washington and walk into to all the beauty: the treasures and science in the Smithsonian and in other museums.

The main goal of museums should not be to break even but to increase public access to all our wonderful art, culture and objects, from paintings to airplanes.

The British experience from 2001 to 2010 showed that when free museum visits were introduced, visits increased by more than 150 per cent, from 7.2 million in 2000-01 to nearly 18 million in 2010-11. The 16 museums sponsored by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport showed a total increase in visits by 4.1 per cent in one year — from 48.7 million in 2013-14 to 50.7 million in 2014-15.

If we opened up our museums, we could continue to charge for special shows and exhibits but the regular collections would be free. We must move beyond national museums opening free one day a week, for only a few hours at the end of the day, or one day a year on July 1.

To take one example of how relatively minor ticket revenues are in Canada, the most popular museum, the Canadian Museum of History, which administers two major museum sites (the second is the Canadian War Museum), had 1.690 million total visitors in 2015-16, of which only 762,000 represented paid attendance, less than half. Of the total revenues, only $14 million came from operating revenues (tickets and parking, boutiques and restaurants combined) while $76.3 million came from the government.

There are other ways of making money for national museums when visitors are on the site. One of them, in both Washington and London, is having great restaurants and cafés at different price levels inside the museums, places where people will go to lunch or dine in an exciting atmosphere. This is something that our national museums could improve dramatically.

With no attendance fees, there would also be a tremendous gain for the economy in Ottawa and other cities, such as Halifax and Winnipeg, which also have national museums. With more visitors coming to the museums, there will undoubtedly be more spending on everything from restaurants to hotels. If we can encourage Canadians and international visitors to see our museums, we can help boost both national and international tourism in a major way while opening up our publicly owned culture to more members of the public.

We could start this by offering free entry this July for the whole month, then introducing completely free entry for 2018. Minister Mélanie Joly, I hope you are listening. John Anderson is a former director of parliamentary affairs for the Official Opposition and also director of Government Affairs for the Canadian Co-operative Association.

There are other ways of making money for national museums when visitors are on the site.