Editor’s note: This column is typically reserved for the news from CMA’s provincial and territorial museum association (PTMA) partners. In a break with tradition, we asked Massimo Bergamini, who joined the CMA staff team in a public affairs consulting capacity last April, to share his thinking on how CMA and PTMAs can best unite their efforts to help the sector adjust and prosper in the post-pandemic environment.
Massimo’s perspective on this is informed by his experience as chief executive officer of two national associations — including Canada’s Accredited Zoos and Aquariums (CAZA) — and his leadership role with the Federation of Canadian Municipalities (FCM) where he established a strategic and collaborative advocacy partnership between FCM and 13 provincial and territorial organisations to deliver the historic 2005 New Deal for Cities and Communities
Defining our Future
Massimo Bergamini
When the country went into lockdown on March 13, 2020, most Canadians thought that they’d be settling in for a few weeks of teleworking. More than a year later, most of the world is still struggling to extricate itself from the grips of a pandemic that upended plans, closed businesses, damaged economies, and cost thousands of lives.
Through the various phases of the pandemic, the Canadian Museums Association (CMA) showed it could pivot from an established operating plan and priorities to take on urgent new responsibilities such as leading efforts to secure federal assistance to help the sector weather the storm.
If the pandemic served to highlight the unifying leadership role of the CMA, it also served to highlight some of the underlying risk factors that Canada’s museum sector must address.
Defining our future together
With the signs of a pandemic spring growing more insistent, and with much of the country preparing for a return to some form of normalcy, the challenge for the CMA becomes ensuring that this new normal does not revert to the old normal.
In practice, with the country at an inflection point and attention by governments starting to turn to managing a post-pandemic reality, for Canada’s museum sector this means seizing the moment and getting to the front of the line with a focussed and effective advocacy push in favour of a new, sustainable government partnership framework.
And make no mistake, with a federal election looming and the country’s finances close to a breaking point any chance of successfully getting on the federal government’s agenda will be predicated on the museum sector’s ability to speak with one, compelling voice.
In addition to defining what a sustainable (and meaningful) government partnership would actually look like, the challenge will be in defining a pan-Canadian, sector-wide advocacy strategy and creating the conditions for its synergistic execution.
While the immediate impetus for a strategic coming together of the museum sector is found in the need to give museums traction in the runup to a federal election, the benefits of a strategic and collaborative relationship between the CMA and its provincial and territorial partners would extend well beyond the next election and could be transformative in scope.
Looking at successful models outside of Canada, we see that multilevel museum membership organizations co-exist in many countries and that the most successful ones enjoy a well-defined understanding of individual missions, needs and responsibilities.
The most obvious consideration in favour of a clear definition of the roles and responsibilities of every organization in the museum ecosystem is that it maximizes the impact of the sector’s resources by avoiding duplication, confusion and sometime, even contradictory initiatives.
The other advantage is that it facilitates and encourages synergistic policy action. This is no small matter for organizations that advocate to governments on behalf of the sector.
What this could look like: The municipal example
Between 2002 and 2005 Canada’s municipal governments waged an advocacy campaign to secure “predictable, sustainable and adequate” infrastructure funding in the form of an annual $ 2 B cut of the federal gas tax.
In addition to its scope — which was unprecedented at the time — this advocacy effort was complicated by the fact that under Canada’s constitution municipal affairs are a provincial responsibility, which created a potential flashpoint in federal-provincial relations.
Navigating the shoals of federal-provincial relations along with the deeply held dislike for so-called dedicated taxes within the most senior reaches of the federal public service required to a total focus on the goal and the tasks.
In order to ensure message and tactical discipline, early on in the process we established a collaborative framework between the FCM and the municipal sector’s provincial and territorial organizations. A key component of this framework was an MOU that set out in some detail the role and responsibility of each and also spelled out protocols that governed instances where overlap might occur.
Defining our future together (part two)
My experience has taught me that no formal who-does-what protocol can survive every possible situation. This is particularly true when disagreements centre on commercial and revenue generating considerations or direct services to members.
But my experience has also taught me that the process that results in the initial understanding will also lay the foundation for informal channels and avenues for dispute resolution and collaborative outcomes by fostering confidence and trust.
Coming together to define the overarching values and objectives that bind our community and determining the best and most efficient role each can play in achieving these outcomes will not only answer the question who does what, but it will provide a pathway to defining a better future together. M