After two weeks of criticism, Tourism Minister Melanie Mark tried to win over a skeptical public on Wednesday about plans to rebuild the Royal BC Museum by outlining the business case for the $789 million project.
the liberated province over 2,300 partially redacted pages of reports and annexes supporting the controversial project and held a 90-minute technical briefing with journalists ahead of the minister’s press conference in an attempt to explain why the museum needs to be completely rebuilt.
Mark described the museum in its current state as “nonfunctional,” explaining that it is seismically unsafe, filled with hazardous materials like asbestos and lead, inaccessible to people with disabilities, and structurally insufficient to maintain its current collection or house major exhibits.
“I understand that this investment is a large amount of money, but we will not just walk away from this project. We will not risk erasing our collective history,” said Mark.
She said the business case shows that rebuilding the facility is cheaper than upgrading or repairing the current building.
“There’s a risk of doing nothing,” Mark said.
the project has been a source of intense controversy since Prime Minister John Horgan announced it at a press conference earlier this monthjoking that it was “mammoth” news for the province.
Critics have criticized the government for committing so much money to rebuilding the museum when BC is dealing with a shortage of family doctors, skyrocketing gas prices and a affordability crisis.
New BC Liberal Leader Kevin Falcon has also made the museum a major talking point. Opposition members have mocked the plan as a “vanity bill” dozens of times on the floor of the legislature.
‘We are trying to invest in the future’
Mark acknowledged the controversy during Wednesday’s press conference.
“The ad didn’t land as expected,” he said.
He also tried to bring political football back to the opposition, pointing out that the previous Liberal government was aware of the museum’s seismic problems in 2018.
“They didn’t do the job,” he said.
Mark argued that investing hundreds of millions of dollars in the museum doesn’t mean the government can’t afford other crucial projects, like hospital improvements and seismic work on schools.
“We’re not trying to take anything away. We’re trying to invest in the future,” he said.
He added that the project would create jobs and eventually generate more dollars for tourism.
The reconstruction project will take more than seven years to complete and will require closing the current museum from September this year until 2030.
Reporters heard Wednesday that it would take two and a half years for staff to properly clean, pack and move the museum’s 7 million artifacts so construction could take place.
Two years ago, it was announced that much of the collection would be housed in a $224 million satellite facility in the neighboring community of Colwood for research and storage. That building is scheduled to be ready by 2025.
During Wednesday’s technical briefing, journalists heard that infrastructure issues and lack of space had become major issues at the museum. For example, officials said BC recently missed out on hosting the Royal Ontario Museum’s celebrated blue whale exhibit because all the elevators were too small to fit in the skull.
The state of the building has also interfered with the repatriation of artifacts to the indigenous communities from which they were taken.
Officials revealed that the planned repatriation of a totem pole had been delayed because walls and windows would need to be removed and a crane brought in to move the item. Meanwhile, there is often not enough space in the building to host the appropriate ceremonies related to repatriation.
The province also shared photos showing overcrowded storage areas, structural issues related to the age of the building, and damage to the building caused by flooding in recent years.
‘A public relations disaster’
The details presented on Wednesday failed to convince the opposition. The BC Liberals described the business case as “unconvincing and incomplete” in a written statement, and financial critic Peter Milobar predicted that the project would become a “boondoggle”.
“I think the most worrying part is that a third of the report has been written,” Milobar told CBC.
“This is important because the government is telling us … that we should trust them on what is now an eight-year, nearly $1 billion project.”
Green MLA Adam Olsen described the release of plans for the museum as “a public relations disaster” in a written statement, saying the province has failed to meaningfully engage the public in a process that appears to have been underway for years.
Olsen, who is a member of the Tsartlip First Nation, also argued that the government has done little to show how a new building will help indigenous people in BC.
“The BC NDP has framed the new museum as an act of reconciliation and an opportunity for further repatriation of items, but today’s business case clearly points to the construction of a larger, ‘modernized’ building to house our sacred items and ancestral remains as the main target,” he said.
“We don’t need a new building to house items that they intend to return to indigenous peoples; we simply need the museum to prioritize their return.”
Reference-www.cbc.ca