Harper cancels National Portrait Gallery
p2pnet news view | Politics:- One of Britain’s most famous, most visited and most loved institutions is the National Portrait Gallery featuring historically important and famous British people.
America has a National Portrait Gallery as well.
For seven years Canada has been planning one to both honour and remember people who have help to make Canada what it is today — the good parts, that is.
Among the bad parts is George W. Harper’s Conservative government, which has cancelled plans for a Canadian national portrait gallery.
“In 2006, Harper’s Conservative government reviewed the portrait gallery project after it was delayed and the estimated cost ballooned from $22 million to $45 million,” says the CBC.
“It announced in November 2007 that it wanted the museum to be a public-private partnership and was inviting nine cities across Canada to compete for the gallery. Edmonton and Calgary were among the three finalists, with Ottawa, in bidding for a National Portrait Gallery.”
Earlier, “The decision of Stephen Harper’s Conservative government to cancel the National Portrait Gallery was a smart move to get out of a poorly conceived plan to build the museum as a public-private partnership,” the story has former Liberal heritage minister Sheila Copps saying.
” ‘I think that was a bit of a way of getting themselves out of a pickle that they’d created,’ Copps said Saturday. Heritage Minister James Moore announced on Friday that the gallery would be cancelled.
“Moore said none of the proposals submitted by developers in a nationwide competition was acceptable and the government must act prudently in a time of economic instability.”
Alberta’s minister of culture Lindsay Blackett saying the news that the bids were, “deemed unacceptable was a shock to him”.
“I don’t understand why, when the money’s there, that the government would say we’re going to close it,” he told CBC News. “The provincial government and private sector were going bear the cost. Really all the federal government had to do was incur the cost of shipping the artifacts to Alberta.”
Blackett said he’ll be making enquiries to see if anything can be done to change the decision.
Meanwhile, “One way or another, there should be a much fuller accounting than the government has chosen to give us so far,” says the National Post, adding:
“We offer this advice for its own good, because right now, Ottawa is asking why the last seven years have been wasted, Calgary is wondering why Mr. Harper couldn’t deliver the goods and Edmonton is simply dumbstruck. And the austerity excuse obviously won’t wash.
“When building stopped on the original embassy site in Ottawa, the architects learned of it by showing up for work one morning and seeing that the ‘Future Site Of The National Portrait Gallery’ posters had been torn down; since then, it seems, little has been gained in the progress toward transparency.”
CBC – Harper nixed portrait gallery to get out of ‘pickle’: Copps, November 10, 2008
National Post - Politics, not the economy, killed the portrait gallery, November 12, 2008
Use free p2pnet newsfeeds for your site. It’s really easy!Subscribe to p2pnet.net | | rss feed: http://p2pnet.net/p2p.rss | | Mobile – http://p2pnet.net/index-wml.php
Net access blocked by government restrictions? Use Psiphon from the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto. Go here for details.
November 13th, 2008 at 11:32 am
still can’t figure out why anyone in canada could have voted Conservative in this past election.
now we are stuck with this prick until he decides to hold another early election when he sees fit