The Museum of Vancouver will run behind-the-scenes “Austerity Tours” from Sept. 24 to Oct. 17 to showcase how decades of reduced funding have affected aging facilities and collections.
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The Museum of Vancouver is launching behind-the-scenes “Austerity Tours” that open on Sept. 24 and run through Oct. 17, offering visitors a guided look at how chronic funding stagnation has left critical systems, displays and collections increasingly vulnerable.
The tours, scheduled to run around major election periods in British Columbia and in Vancouver, are timed to coincide with Vancouver’s civic election on Oct. 17 and a provincial election expected before the end of October. Museum representatives say the tour is designed to show what is lost when multiple levels of government do not invest in public cultural assets.
Ryan Hunt, the museum’s chief executive, said the museum’s situation has become an ongoing cycle of short-term wins followed by accumulating risk as equipment ages. “We’re winning national awards for our impact one day and then watching decades-old pieces of critical equipment inch ever-closer to failure the next,” Hunt said. He added that while admissions growth has outpaced both the industry average and Vancouver population growth over the past 30 years, government support has not kept pace with inflation, creating a widening gap between demand for public services and the resources needed to sustain them.
Hunt described the pressure as increasingly difficult to manage through ordinary operations, likening it to trying to stay afloat while structural problems worsen. “No matter how successful we are, sustainable funding feels unreachable,” he said. “Over the past 30 years, admissions have grown faster than the industry average and even faster than Vancouver’s population growth, but during that same period, we’ve seen government support decrease against the rate of inflation.”
Tour stops begin in the museum’s lobby under a large light fixture that cannot be fully illuminated because it is leaking hydraulic fluid. The museum says the building’s mid-century infrastructure, which reflects its 1968 origins, is part of a broader pattern of maintenance challenges that the tours aim to make visible to the public.
The tour also points to changes in the museum’s public-facing environment, including the loss of greenery that used to greet visitors. Museum representatives say upkeep of plants was disrupted after staffing cuts, illustrating how reduced operational capacity can affect even day-to-day visitor experience.
From the lobby, the tours move to the museum’s long-term exhibition c̓əsnaʔəm: The City before the City, which highlights local Indigenous history. The museum says the exhibition area has been affected by the aging heating, ventilation and air-conditioning (HVAC) system, with some stone, shell and bone fragments deteriorating over time; certain objects have been replaced by cutout photographs.
The next phase of the tour takes visitors to a rental space with an expansive view of the Pacific coastline, where a stopgap measure is used to address another maintenance issue. Guides lead visitors toward a closet where a drip tray has been installed to catch moisture from an ailing HVAC system, with the collected water managed in a designated recycling bin.
The tour then proceeds to a more subterranean area used for collections storage, which also connects to the adjoining City of Vancouver Archives building. There, visitors are shown a freezer described as relatively new and part of the city archives’ pest-prevention needs, highlighting how preservation requires specialized, ongoing infrastructure.
The museum also draws attention to a freezer that Hunt says belongs to the museum itself and is integrated into the original building. According to Hunt, the freezer has been running continuously since 1968, and the museum says the city of Vancouver decided last year that it would no longer fund its annual maintenance. Hunt said this places the museum at heightened risk if the unit fails, warning that acquiring replacement systems could be difficult and that the museum’s collection would be at serious risk.
Hunt said that if the freezer breaks down, the consequences would be severe. “If this freezer breaks down, it will be catastrophic for the MOV. Acquiring new objects would be challenging and the collection would be at great risk,” he said.
As the tours continue, visitors are shown taxidermy storage areas described as unsettling but informative, including Victorian-era holdings with intact specimens such as local coyotes and owls, plus the head of a rhinoceros. The museum frames this stop as an opportunity to discuss the maintenance and safety requirements tied to preservation materials, including toxic chemicals used historically to prepare objects.
The museum says some of these collection-preservation risks are addressed through trained staff and ongoing mitigation work. It also points to ceiling tiles that reveal where orange-coloured lead paint has been replaced with newer and safer white paint, presenting a visible record of remediation efforts carried out amid constrained resources.
The tour then moves through the museum’s woodworking studios, where in-house display construction is described as a way to reduce costs. Museum representatives say the approach can save thousands of dollars, linking operational choices to broader financial constraints.
Near the end of the tour, guides reference a disability exhibition expected to open to the public and discuss the museum’s recycling practices, including reuse of plinths and other display components until they are no longer functional.
Hunt said the tours conclude with a direct argument for sustained government support for arts and culture. He cited what he described as a return on funding, saying the museum sees “C$29 return on every dollar of funding.” He also pointed to spending levels for major events, arguing that governments could have significantly expanded arts grants in British Columbia if funds were redirected at scale.
Hunt said he wants large, high-profile cultural events in Vancouver, but argued that the scale of public spending on the FIFA World Cup demonstrates how much could be redirected elsewhere. He said the municipal, provincial and federal governments could have doubled every arts grant available in BC for the next seven years, and he described the potential economic and social effects as transformative.
The “Austerity Tours” run from Sept. 24 to Oct. 17 at the Museum of Vancouver, offering a public-facing view of maintenance needs and preservation risks that the museum says are becoming harder to address under conditions of funding shortfalls matched against inflation.
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