Liberals have killed museum plans twice, Currie charges

by WAYNE THIBODEAU
as published by The Guardian on Dec 4, 2009

A new report suggests a provincial museum could cost P.E.I. taxpayers as much as $41 million but Conservative MLA Mike Currie says the price tag is irrelevant because the Liberal government has no intention of building it anyway.

Currie accused the province of scuttling plans for a provincial museum not once but twice.
When the Liberals were elected, Currie said they scrapped plans for a provincial artifactory in Murray River and then they failed to include the museum in last week’s capital budget.
The capital budget lays out the provincial government’s spending priorities for the next five years.

“This was a promise of yours,” Currie said during question period.

“Did you not have the support of your cabinet colleagues to go forward with construction of a new museum?”

A report released earlier this week said the museum could cost as much as $41 million.

That interim report prepared by Bergmark Guimond Hammarlund Jones Architects and Lundholm Associates Architects said P.E.I. needs a “… strong central institution that can provide a comprehensive overview of the Island’s natural and human history and serve as a strong support to a network of heritage sites.”

The authors of the report say there are benefits to combining a central museum with the public archives.

The report then outlined a series of options ranging from a museum facility alone with reduced permanent exhibition space at 12,000 square feet at a cost of $24 million to the Cadillac version, which would include a full program museum and archive facility with 20 years of planned on-site collection storage and 20,000 square feet of permanent exhibition space at a cost of $41 million.
Cultural Affairs Minister Carolyn Bertram said her government remains firmly committed to a centrally located museum.

“We are doing our homework before we get into this too far unlike the previous government that was just going to build a storage facility with no thought or planning into it,” Bertram said.
“Our government is committed to a provincial museum.”

When the Liberals were elected they killed plans by the former Progressive Conservative administration for an artifactory in Murray River.

That facility would have stored the nearly 80,000 artifacts that are currently being housed in a warehouse in the West Royalty Industrial Park in Charlottetown.

The province wants the federal government and other provinces to contribute to a new,
central museum as part of the 150th anniversary celebrations of the 1864 Charlottetown Conference.

Currie then suggested during question period that the province should
work with the Town of Stratford to locate the provincial museum in Stratford.

“Now, that’s something that his administration would have done,” said Bertram.

“We are not going to go and pit one community against the other. We’re taking the recommendation of the study that it should be centrally located.”

See responses to this article at The Guardian site.