“What damages us enormously is that when the city introduces elements of uncertainty like this, our traditional donors stop giving,” Williams explained to the Straight. “We have our supporters who continue to give no matter what, but there are others who want to see value for dollar, and if they’re giving to an institution that the city may close down, then they’re not going to.”

Williams said the museum received a letter on May 5 from Sue Harvey, Vancouver’s managing director of cultural services, stating that the city would provide the institution with its annual subsidy on the condition that it shut down in 2009. That news followed the May 2 announcement that the province will provide
$9 million to the City of North Vancouver toward the construction of a national maritime centre in the Pier development east of Lonsdale Quay.

“What we were expecting was that if [the] North Vancouver [maritime centre plans] went ahead, then in due course our collections would be transferred over there, but not with us closing for a few years before then,” Williams said. Instead, he said, the museum—which receives $400,000 of its $1.1 million annual budget from the city—is being forced to close whether or not the North Vancouver project, which would not be completed until after 2010, goes into gear.

Harvey told the Straight that her department is discussing the future with museum officials. “What we needed to do was work with the museum to put a transition plan in place to be able to respond to that opportunity [in North Vancouver],” she said. “The draft envisions [a lease of] three years and envisions the term commencing 2008. But it does provide that recognition that…they may need to transition to a time and a place where not all of the building is open to the public.”

When asked about Williams’s claim that the museum has been ordered to close whether or not the North Vancouver centre is built, Harvey said that the museum’s “current situation is no longer sustainable, and hasn’t been sustainable for some time”.

On April 15, city council awarded a $56,825 contract to Commonwealth Historic Resource Management Ltd. to appraise the city’s maritime collection, which is held by the museum.