No doubt the reader has a more or less precise memory of the comments we made with other colleagues at the time of the surprise appointment of the President and CEO of the Bibliothèque et Archives Nationales du Québec (BAnQ) at the summer 2021. We had then expressed serious doubts as to the conformity of this appointment, made in such a way as to force the hand of BAnQ’s Board of Directors, whose members had not been informed of the modification of the skills profile that they had the formal responsibility to define.
Our information was confirmed very recently in an article by journalist Alexandre Robillard in The duty of April 28. The Minister confirms that the requirements of the post have been lowered by State intervention, denies having herself proposed this devaluation of the post and attributes the decision to the Secretariat for Senior Jobs, which we know reports to from the Prime Minister’s office. The political nature of this appointment could not be better underlined. A lot of water had flowed under the bridges, the sleight of hand had been forgotten, we are now reminded of it. And Marie Grégoire, the new CEO, is well in the saddle.
Time has also done its work for us. After a few shocks of indignation, a few journalistic requests for access to information, which the directors of the Ministry of Culture and BAnQ rejected outright, we let go. We are now wondering whether the person appointed, who was said to have at least privileged access to decision-makers, will be able to seek additional resources to allow BAnQ’s accelerated development to be up to what we were promised.
Some were convinced that this extraordinary appointment would force the government to provide the resources necessary to calm the serious doubts raised by the community. It therefore seemed wiser to wait and see if significantly increased budgetary appropriations would be forthcoming in the spring of 2022. Here we are! And the figures, which cannot hide behind a wooden language, speak for themselves.
think blue
The answer can be found on pages 72, 81 and 83 of the companion document to the Government of Quebec’s 2022-2023 budget entitled Estimates published by the Secretariat of the Conseil du trésor the same day the budget is unveiled. Basically, the government subsidy for BAnQ in 2022-2023 is $77 million (just indexing to inflation, since it was $75.4 million in 2021-2022). The document clearly indicates that the grant for these two years is “comparable in level”, so let’s say stagnant. Contributions from other sources (Montreal, for example) raise the budget to $95.7 million, but the planned expenditures are still $101.4 million, a gap that the government will certainly want to correct one day.
This deficit seems authorized (see page 83 of the document mentioned above) because of the general increase in remuneration in the public sector and the sums spent on the transition to cloud computing, a largely technical operation which becomes the only expansion project like us we feared it. There is also talk of a sum of $13.7 million in investment, and it is probably about maintaining assets for all of BAnQ’s buildings. In short, no real development, no increase in resources.
Moreover, in culture, four-fifths of major investments concern “blue spaces”, these new buildings whose mission is to exalt the cultural pride of Quebecers, in all possible forms. This can be seen in the Quebec Infrastructure Plan (PQI), also contained in Estimates. No doubt BAnQ was asked to contribute to this mission dear to the current government.
This may explain why the latest issue of his journal With open spokesaccompanied by a leaflet, informs us of the transition to an annual rather than a quarterly publication (good economy!) and of a desire to make this unique issue a place to become familiar with the characters or places that have contributed to this that we have become.
In other words, the texts that relate to the very work carried out by BAnQ (most often related to conservation missions) will no longer be the raw material, we will rather think blue. We can be saddened without however being surprised!
No longer a locomotive
And anyway, is all this so unexpected? After all that we see of the carelessness, even the detachment of the Ministry of Culture towards heritage: the Chevalier house in Old Quebec (by the way, where are we in this file?), wild demolition of the Domaine -de-l’Estérel in Sainte-Marguerite-du-Lac-Masson, the distressing case of the Saint-Louis-de-France church in Quebec, the other of the campus of the Sisters of the Congregation of Notre-Dame-du -Perpetual-Secours established in the beautiful village of Saint-Damien-de-Buckland, the decay before our eyes of the historic building of the Saint-Sulpice library, rue Saint-Denis, and how many other places disappeared or were left in the oversight.
Is it so abnormal now that, for BAnQ as for many other institutions, Quebec is so badly fitted to respond intelligently to its so dear “I remember”?
Were we right to doubt the fact that BAnQ would manage to hold its own and collect the essential sums to fulfill its mandate to disseminate and preserve knowledge and knowledge in all its forms? As we stated last December 11 in a text published in The dutyon the 100th day of the current CEO’s taking office It’s a shame to see that in the end, BAnQ will not benefit from the announced improvement in its budget situation and the renewal of its resources.
Decidedly, in the cultural domain of Quebec, BAnQ will no longer be the driving force that it had become. Unfortunately, if we rely on the resources available to BAnQ for the year 2022, our observation of December 11 is still valid.