Hon. Jerahmiel S. Grafstein: 

Honourable senators, this matter is not new to the Senate. It has been on the Order Paper since 2007. I will not go over the arguments because, if interested, historians can refer to the Hansard in the last two parliaments and they will see extensive analysis and speeches related to this matter. A brief history, however, of the origins of the National Portrait Gallery would be appropriate.

Over eight years ago, I visited, as I did annually, London, England, and the fabulous National Portrait Gallery off Grosvenor Square. This is a jewel of a gallery. It is five stories; it is not very big. It is a small building, but it houses, and you can see exhibited there the great figures of Britain past and present. A floor is dedicated to the royalty, a floor to politicians, a floor to business people, a floor to the arts and a floor to average citizens of England. It is a wonderful visual history of England.

I discovered one fabulous portrait that was important to the history of Canada. It was a portrait of the first imperial war cabinet, the British Imperial War Cabinet, in 1918. That painting marked the start of Canada on its road to independent foreign policy. If honourable senators will recall, during the First World War, Canada sent over its troops but was not involved in decision-making of the war until Robert Borden, and the Prime Ministers of South Africa and Australia decided that the British war cabinet should be enlarged, and the imperial war cabinet was established. In this portrait, you will find Mr. Borden, Sir Winston Churchill, Herbert Henry Asquith and other dominion leaders in that first Imperial War Cabinet.

When I left the English portrait gallery that day, I went downstairs, punched a button and retrieved, for a couple of pounds, a copy of that portrait, which now hangs in my office. When I came back to Canada, it struck me that, having done a little bit of work on the history of national portrait galleries around the world, we did not have a national portrait gallery. Our portraits were placed in various caches. Then I attended at the archives building in Hull and discovered, to my amazement, a treasure trove of tens of thousands of portraits that have never been seen or never will be seen of Canadian figures: Aboriginal leaders, artists, writers, poets, merchants, politicians and average Canadians.

I decided that perhaps this project might be an interesting one. Eureka, something happened. The American embassy was vacated across the street from Parliament Hill and I thought this building was absolutely the ideal building. I immediately attended upon my good friend Senator Joyal, who, as honourable senators know, is one of Canada's outstanding art experts. I said to him that this project would be a fantastic one for us to work on together, and he agreed. We prepared a presentation and shortly thereafter attended to Mr. Chrétien, the Prime Minister of the day.

We made a presentation to him. He said to leave it with him. Then we attended again on, I think, Minister Copps. We did it individually and collectively, lobbying her and her officials for this particular venue. Finally, we persuaded the government of the day, Mr. Chrétien and Sheila Copps, that this project would be an appropriate project to do. After a little delay, it was finally approved; monies were allocated for it; a bureaucratic board was set up; and Senator Joyal and I attended various meetings to urge the bureaucrats to move swiftly. They did. They held an international competition for architectural renovations to the building that was awarded, and that cost somewhere between $10 million and $15 million.

One of the other rationales for that particular building was that there is no place for visitors to Parliament to go immediately after they visit Parliament Hill. I discovered that somewhere between 750,000 and a million tourists come to these Parliament buildings every year. They leave Parliament Hill and have no place to go. However, if the National Portrait Gallery was right across the street, it would instantaneously become the most visited art gallery in Canada.

The gallery could be publicized freely. All we needed to do was persuade the national television services in their set-ups on Parliament Hill to turn their cameras around so that, instead of facing Parliament Hill, once a week they could face the national portrait gallery across the street. It would quickly become, at no cost to the taxpayer or the federal government, an iconic building. It would probably become quickly the second-best known building in Canada, all at no cost to the taxpayer.

All this was done. All this was working along nicely and you will see that there is still some hoarding outside. Then a new government came along and, as happens with all new governments, whatever projects the last government undertook must somehow be erased. This is called political egotism at the greatest level. This is not new with Mr. Harper or Canada. This has happened before here and in other countries.

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