This week, the federal government is expected to formally announce what everyone already knows: Work on the Portrait Gallery of Canada is suspended (but not cancelled) pending a review. The review could be costly and won't report until November -- by which time construction costs, currently on budget, will rise.
Those familiar with the Portrait Gallery project say its fate is less about cost-cutting than bureaucratic horse-trading. Indeed, if Ottawa walks away from giving Canadians their own version of an institution the English and Americans already have and love, not only will the $9-million already spent go down the drain, there would be no new savings: The project's $22-million construction costs ($44.6-million total project costs) are covered under the existing fiscal framework.
Sources say the gallery is in limbo partly because of competing priorities within Library and Archives Canada (created in 2004 out of the former National Library of Canada and National Archives of Canada, it's the institution responsible for the Portrait Gallery), and partly because the Stephen Harper government wants to fulfill its promise to increase accountability.
And Harper may have his own plans for the downtown Ottawa site, the former U.S. embassy across from Parliament; several weeks ago, he toured its partly demolished interior. But Carolyn Stewart Olsen at the Prime Minister's Office says nothing should be read into that visit: "The Prime Minister's allowed to have a bit of curiosity."
Still, the visit has only piqued curiosity about his government's true intentions. In 2005, the Portrait Gallery announced that funding had been approved for renovating the embassy and building a grand expansion around and behind it. The gallery was helping out by shifting money from its operating costs into the building budget. So Public Works could have gone ahead and financed the next stage of construction this spring. But after a new government was elected, it opted to wait for the review.
Then the new government learned of Library and Archives Canada's other needs. In the works is $6-million for LAC to upgrade its record-keeping (a result of Auditor-General Sheila Fraser's call on all departments to bring records under better control). As well, some archivists were starting to fear that a large archival preservation centre built in 1997 in Gatineau, Que., was filling up. There's no official talk of opening another Gatineau, but archivists are concerned.
The trade-offs could go like this: Bring into play two LAC storage buildings in a nondescript Ottawa neighbourhood, Tunney's Pasture, in exchange for getting the facilities LAC senior management wants. Then enhance the exhibition space at the LAC's main building on Wellington Street for the Portrait Gallery's collection of paintings, drawings and photographs.
"It would be really sad to let the Portrait Gallery go," Nobel laureate John Polanyi comments. He is the sort of Canadian whose image would be included in the gallery, but he champions it for broader reasons: "Ultimately we shall need one, and be forced to erect a concrete mausoleum."