REMARKS BY PRIME MINISTER JEAN CHRÉTIEN ANNOUNCING THE CANADA HISTORY CENTRE

May 26, 2003
Ottawa, Ontario

I am pleased to welcome you to the Government Conference Centre. This Centre will soon become the site of one of the most important meetings in its history: one between Canadians and their shared past.

Together Canadians have built a nation that is strong, prosperous and free. We must know the builders of our nation to sustain what their mind and hearts, their muscles and their blood, have created.

I never knew Canada until I sat at kitchen tables in Saskatchewan, skied in the Rockies, walked on the tundra in the Arctic, played pool on Fogo Island in Newfoundland, or talked with Aboriginal elders around fires. Canada touched my heart and affected my thoughts as I discovered the grandeur of its history. It moved me deeply to learn that over 150 years ago, when religion and race caused wars everywhere else in the world, in Canada, Robert Baldwin resigned his seat in the Parliament of the United Canadas so that his colleague Louis-Hippolyte LaFontaine could run in a seat in the heart of English Canada.

LaFontaine became the Francophone Catholic member for a thoroughly English and Protestant riding. Working together, Baldwin and LaFontaine brought us responsible government. How many young Canadians know that just over a century ago, as religious quarrels engulfed the world, Canada, a country with a large Protestant and British majority, elected its first Francophone Catholic prime minister?

We must find ways for young Canadians to learn what they share, to know what we have done, and to gain pride in their nation's accomplishments. We are working with our great museums, other federal and provincial institutions and with voluntary groups to develop ways to increase Canadians' knowledge of what we have done together.

Canadian blood was shed in many wars, and last fall I turned the sod on Le Breton flats for a new Canadian War Museum. That museum will tell the stories not only of Wolfe and Montcalm, Currie and Dallaire but of millions of other ordinary Canadians doing extraordinary things to preserve freedom.

Our new Portrait Gallery opposite Parliament Hill will tell the stories through art of Aboriginal hunters on the plains, habitants making maple syrup, and Canadians celebrating their achievements.

The treasures these institutions hold and stories they tell can now be seen and shared not only in the National Capital but in all provinces and territories. Their websites and those of the other national cultural institutions are accessible to Canadians everywhere, even when they are peacekeeping in Asia or studying in Europe.

In the first century of Confederation our leaders built great national projects of steel and asphalt to link us. The national railways and the TransCanada highway bound together a continental nation of diverse people. We need bricks and mortar to protect and preserve our heritage but we have new means to bring our heritage directly into our homes.

Today our borders are open to the world. News of faraway places that we once learned about weeks later can now be seen simultaneously on television. Mail once took weeks in ships; email arrives in seconds.

Sharing the experiences we have as Canadians takes on new meaning in this so much smaller world. Articulating and affirming our distinctive values becomes even more important in a multicultural and borderless world.

We must once again strengthen the ties that bind us together and the understanding of Canada that we share. Our past must be near us as we move into the future. I am proud to announce the creation of the Canada History Centre. In this former train station, Canadians can begin a rewarding journey into their shared past. From this train station, new technologies will carry the documents, the pictures, and the people of our past to classrooms and computers everywhere.

The Centre will be an interactive meeting place where scholars, students, and visitors will discover how, as North Americans, we created this nation.

Listen carefully and you can hear echoes in this magnificent building.

You can hear the echoes of cheering crowds as soldiers returned home from the wars.

Echoes of immigrants arriving from Pier 21 in Halifax, some to stay, some to open up the Canadian West.

Echoes of the debates that led to our Canadian Constitution in the 1980s.

Echoes of the signing of the Ottawa treaty to ban landmines in the 1990s.

And now in this new decade in a new century in a new millennium, we come together to create an institution where we can listen and see those moments. On newsreels from the forties, we will see those weary soldiers overjoyed as they greet their loved ones. In treasured black and white photographs or colourful portraits, we will find our ancestors in the varied garments they wore when they came to Canada. We can see and hear Bernard Derome or Lloyd Robertson predicting what we benighted politicians would do with the Constitution in the 1980s. We will take pride as we watch Kofi Annan praise Canada's work in banning landmines.

The Canada History Centre will bring to life the memories of men and women who, through their ideas, their vision and their actions, inscribed their names on the rolls of our history.

The Centre will allow us to achieve a better understanding of the defining moments of our history, such as the birth of Confederation, the adoption of a new national flag and the repatriation of the Constitution. When future generations come to this place they will see the original flag, the signatures on the British North America Act and on the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Their images will be available in every classroom, and on every student's computer desk at home.

We have succeeded in blazing a trail, not by playing rough and imposing our will, but rather by clearly demonstrating that cooperation, respect and accommodation are preferable to confrontation.

That dialogue is more interesting than monologue.

That diversity is more creative than uniformity.

That our values are the product of our heritage and history.

They are the legacy of our shared past, reflecting the long dialogue and negotiations between Canada's French and British settlers, our Aboriginal peoples, and the generations of immigrants that followed.

The new Canada History Centre will open a door to the great wealth of our history and our heritage, making these treasures available to the people of Canada and the rest of the world.

Our young people will then have the opportunity to discover the great gifts they have inherited from past generations.

They will also have a powerful new resource to help them build on those gifts, and pass them on to those who will follow.

Thank you very much.

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