The Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto. More Canadians are visiting museums, but the hard question for the country is what they take out with them, writes Osama Elemary.Ammar Bowaihl/The Globe and Mail
Osama Elemary is a museum and heritage strategy consultant based in Calgary and Vancouver. He is originally from Tanta, Egypt.
From my apartment in Vancouver, I watched Egypt move its kings.
It was April, 2021. Twenty-two royal mummies were carried through Cairo on gilded carriages, an orchestra playing hymns in a language dead for millennia. My friend Oliver sat at the other end of the couch with a coffee he kept forgetting to drink, and he couldn’t stop asking questions. At one point he just said it looked like the whole pharaonic world had stood up and walked back into the room.
I was proud. I was also uneasy. I’ve never quite managed to feel one without the other.
Last autumn the Grand Egyptian Museum opened, and I watched that too – this time from a hotel room in the Netherlands. Same magnificence, same pride, same worry underneath. A country cannot live inside its own past. Sooner or later the glory of what you were becomes a way of avoiding the question of what you are.
That worry came home with me.
In March, 2025, Canada changed a name. The Ministry of Canadian Heritage became the Ministry of Canadian Identity and Culture. Prime Minister Mark Carney explained it plainly: with pressure mounting from beyond our borders, defending Canadian identity had become a matter of sovereignty.
He was right to draw the line. Heritage looks back; it is the word for what sits in storage, inherited and catalogued. Identity faces the other way. And Canada’s strength never came from a single past handed down whole. It came from the reverse: people who arrived from everywhere, became Canadian and refused to leave behind the places that made them. Naming a ministry after identity finally says out loud what holds this country together.
So the name is right. Which is why I can’t stop thinking about everything that hasn’t come after it.
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I have spent 16 years building cultural projects – in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, India and Britain. One still tests me. Designing the visitor centre at the Urwah ibn al-Zubayr palace in Madinah, in Saudi Arabia, we hit a decision early that governed everything after. Were we telling the story of the palace, or the man who lived in it? Stone, or a human being?
We chose the man. You can spend a fortune on projection and interactive glass and still send a visitor home remembering nothing. What they carry out is never the building. It is a life: a name they had heard, a history they can stand inside, a person whose choices somehow reach into their own. A 1,400-year-old story only becomes part of who you are when it finally wears a face you recognize.
That is the call every culture ministry has to make. Canada hasn’t made it. Whose face does our story wear?
Instead, we opened a door. The Canada Strong Pass let families into national museums, historic sites and parks for free, and by its own numbers it worked – nearly 1.6 million people through the gates in a single summer, 86 institutions across nine provinces taking part. Getting more Canadians inside a museum is not nothing.
But the door was never the hard part. The hard question is what they take out with them – what a Canadian is supposed to feel on the walk back to the car.
More than a quarter of this country – 26.5 per cent at the last census – belongs to a racialized group; nearly one in four of us was born in another country, the highest share since Confederation. We walk into a national museum and find the British story and the French one: settlement, founding, the version that begins in 1867. All of it true. All of it cared for. And all of it only a slice of what this country is on an ordinary Tuesday in Toronto, or Calgary, or Vancouver.
I know what that walk feels like. I am Egyptian. I became Canadian. I carry a language and a lineage that appear nowhere in any museum here, and I have looked – not as a newcomer, not as a line in a diversity report, but as someone who chose this place and wanted to find himself in its story.
That is the question the new name asked out loud. No one has answered it.
Since 2015, this file has changed hands seven times. The renamed ministry is barely a year old and has already had two ministers; the first lasted eight months before he resigned. You don’t move people through a job that fast if you believe it matters. You do that to a job you have already decided is a symbol.
Egypt staged the grandest procession in years and left the present to fend for itself. Canada changed the name, signed real cheques and stopped at the edge of the one decision that counts: What identity are we actually building? Until that is answered, every museum we throw open for free is a beautiful room with nothing settled on its walls; meanwhile the most diverse society on Earth waits to see itself on one, and the rest of the world waits for a reason to come.
More than half of all travel now moves toward culture. The countries that decide what story they are telling will own what comes next.
I chose this country believing it could answer hard questions. This one is still open – and I am not the only one who has noticed how long it has been left that way.