Province needs to prove that heritage matters

Government must back preservation, conservation, writes Dr. Merle Massie.

Last summer, the Government of Saskatchewan received an international award for heritage restoration work completed on the dome of the Legislative Building in Regina. This is an impressive achievement.

Work took well over a year to complete, notwithstanding planning time, and employed hundreds of tradespeople, engineers, and other professionals at a cost of over

$21 million.

Every dollar put into heritage property restoration generates $12 in return. So, a $21-million investment to save the heritage dome generated $252 million for the City of Regina. This figure was calculated by the Saskatchewan Heritage Foundation.

Twenty-one million dollars for one heritage project, for a $252-million benefit. That’s not an unreasonable amount. Heritage restoration is expensive, and rightly so. Experts are required, and materials are costly.

What is unreasonable is that every other heritage building project in Saskatchewan does not have equal access to this kind of funding.

The major funding source for heritage restoration projects is the above-noted Saskatchewan Heritage Foundation (SHF), a Crown agency created in 1991 via its own legislation, the Heritage Property Act. The SHF celebrated its 25th anniversary with an event at the Broadway Theatre in Saskatoon, one of the many hundreds of properties across Saskatchewan which has received SHF financial support through the years.

That support, though, is laughably small in comparison to the need. In the original 2016-17 budget allocation, the SHF received a mere $504,000 from the Government of Saskatchewan General Revenue Fund. The government then clawed much of that back in the fall budgetary squeeze.

Grant requests come to the SHF from across the province, from universities and cities, churches and banks, libraries and businesses, to small rural churches kept standing through bake sales and pocket money and donated hammer time. The number of requests, and the amount of those requests, far outstrips the available grant revenue, by an order of magnitude. Grant applications are adjudicated by the SHF board of directors, who are appointed through order-in-council.

For 25 years, the SHF received government support via dedicated staff seconded from various ministries, most recently Parks, Culture and Sport. This support means that the SHF was able to allocate almost all of its funding directly to the heritage projects that people of Saskatchewan support.

No longer. The current government has allowed its middle and upper management to run roughshod over the SHF, trying to dictate what by law should be an arm’s-length foundation as a personal fiefdom.

After years of growing tension, the government saw fit to quietly let all of the old board members go, and appoint an all-new board, no doubt hoping that they would be better at bowing. But the new board members are just as smart — smarter — than the old. They have formally cut all ties with the ministry, and have hired their own manager and their own grants and finance officer. The board and the staff are dedicated to serving the province of Saskatchewan, as is their mandate.

It is imperative that the SHF, with its public granting programs, be arm’s-length from the government. The interference was too much. I call upon the five Saskatchewan Party leadership candidates to look into this issue, and make it part of their platform. It is imperative that you give the Saskatchewan Heritage Foundation transfers directly from the General Revenue Fund at the level given to other third-party agencies of Saskatchewan, such as the Saskatchewan

Arts Board (2015-16: $7 million) or Creative Saskatchewan (2015-16: $8 million).

You’ve proven it yourself: Saskatchewan has a bold, international statement to make through heritage conservation and preservation. Heritage matters.

Therefore: we expect our government to support its many inspiring national, provincial and municipal heritage properties, from north to south and from east to west, not just the dome in Regina.

Do better.