By Kirsten Ferguson
The Surveyor

A new tourist attraction opening on P.E.I. this summer will transport visitors back to the 19th century.

In two months, a red brick building on the Charlottetown waterfront will be transformed from a maze of empty rooms filled with construction workers and paint cans into one of Canada's newest and most unique heritage attractions.

Founders' Hall, on 8 Prince St., is scheduled to open July 2001. It will include a restaurant, a gift shop, conference theatres, and several multimedia displays.

"It's a fun history lesson,"says Founders' Hall general manager Paula Kenny. She is also the director of heritage programming for the Capital Commission of P.E.I., a marketing agency founded in 1995 to promote Charlottetown as the birthplace of Confederation.

Kenny says the commission has wanted to create a project like Founders' Hall for a long time.

The organization needed an interpretive centre to provide visitors with information and highlight other Confederation-themed attractions. Attractions like the Province House historical site where the 1864 Charlottetown Conference was held and the Confederation Centre of the Arts, originally created as a memorial to the Fathers of Confederation.

"It isn't enough for us to say this is the birthplace of Canada. We have to tell them,"Kenny says.

Founders' Hall became a reality last year when the Millennium Bureau of Canada gave the project almost a $1,500,000 grant. It is not only the largest millennium project on P.E.I., but also one of the largest in Canada. The building belongs to the Charlottetown Area Development Corporation.

"The CADC purchased Founders' Hall from CN when they abandoned the building in the early '80s,"says corporation landscape architect Ernie Morello. The building was the site of the old CN car shops.

The corporation sold the building to the Confederation Centre of the Arts, which used it to store wardrobe and theatre props.

"In 1999, CADC bought the building back,"says Morello. "It's been extensively fixed. There were a lot of problems inside. It has all new windows. It has a new roof."Also the mortar between the bricks has been replaced.

While Morello and the corporation work on the exterior of the building, the Capital Commission has big plans for the inside.

The main attraction of Founders' Hall will be the Time Travel Tunnel, which takes visitors through a multimedia journey from the time of the 1864 Charlottetown Conference to modern-day Canada.

In the orientation area, visitors are introduced to a fictional reporter named A.J. Arsenault who guides them throughout the tour. Arsenault isn't very enthusiastic about her assignment at the beginning, but becomes more passionate about the story of Canada as the tour continues.

Island-born actress Tamara Hickey portrays Arsenault. She lives in Toronto and stars in the Canadian TV series The Associates, but considers herself an Islander, which is important since the Capital Commission wanted a local actress for the role.

"It's fun to have her involved in this project,"Kenny says.

Kenny isn't sure who developed the idea to tell the story of Confederation through a reporter's perspective, but thinks it might have been inspired by a recent survey asking Canadians to list the top 10 news stories in Canada's history.

A lot of people were surprised to discover the story of Confederation came out on top.

"It's very interactive,"Kenny says about the 36-zone time travel tunnel. "A lot of multimedia and some new technology as well, which is pretty exciting."The new technology includes interactive headsets seen often in Europe, but never before used in Canada.

"The whole tour is set up so that you take the walk through the site with a headset which can be tuned to English or French. And as you move from area to area, you pick up the audio pertaining to that part of the display,"says Kenny.

"A lot of the headset presentations that you see, you might have to push a button or sort of code your setting, but this one will pick up transmissions from different parts of the exhibit.

"We want to get you to think you're in 1864 so we have sort of a space-age little walk. And it's a bit of a winding passage that will take you through some vapour and strange lights and backwards-turning clocks. And when you come out of the other end you'll be supposedly in the area of British North America in 1864.

"We want to set the scene for what the Fathers of Confederation were working with when they brought the delegations together.

"The historical integrity of the story has been very important,"Kenny says. A national heritage advisory board looks over the scripts and presentations which will be used in Founders' Hall, checks them for accuracy, and makes corrections.

"These people have made sure that we've not only told the right facts, but we've moved through the most important aspects of the confederation story,"said Kenny.

One of those people is retired U.P.E.I. history professor Father Francis Bolger.

He taught history for 40 years before retiring in 1994 and says he's honoured to be the only Atlantic Canadian representative on the five-member Founders' Hall advisory board.

"Being from here, that would be an advantage, I suppose,"Bolger says. He and the other board members hold conferences where they receive scripts and comment on them. Bolger says he and the other board members make a lot of suggestions and corrections to the Ottawa-based company creating the scripts.

"They have a general idea of how some things should be interpreted,"Bolger says. "They're very imaginative people, I think."

The beginning of the tour depicts pre-Confederation rural and urban British North America, with a tent representing the circus which came to Charlottetown the same week as the 1864 Maritime union conference.

The circus was considered the more newsworthy story at the time. Visitors then travel through a 20-foot replica of the S.S. Victoria, the ship the Fathers of Confederation used to travel to Charlottetown, on their way to the 50-seat Queen Victoria Theatre.

Various period characters give their opinions on Confederation-related issues during a multimedia presentation at the theatre.

"I have no say in this. Women don't get to vote,"a female schoolteacher says.

A man says he also can't vote because he is not a landowner.

"Some of the things that we have are multi-screen presentations for audiovisuals. We have some manual interactive displays,"Kenny says.

A holovisual display called Confederation Confidential reveals personal tidbits about the Fathers of Confederation, such as first Canadian Prime Minister John A. MacDonald's love of liquor. Actress Mag Ruffman, who starred in Road to Avonlea, narrates this segment in the Hall of the Delegates. The room features life-sized statues of some of the Fathers of Confederation.

Kenny says holovisuals are a relatively new technology. A holovisual image first appears as a still photograph, but the image appears to move after people stare at it for a few minutes.

Visitors can see 19th-century life through the eyes of 21st-century technology in the TV Room. Several monitors display election coverage, awards shows, weather reports and TV shows such as Troopers, a Cops-style show about the 1865 Fenian raids.

The Road to the Provinces contains displays and props to explain why each province decided to join Confederation. The British Columbia display features railroad cars while the Newfoundland display features film footage of Joey Smallwood campaigning for the Island to become Canada's tenth province in 1949.

The tour ends in the Canada Today Theatre, where various Canadians name their hometowns in a five-minute multimedia presentation. Kenny says she hopes Founders' Hall visitors will someday be able to film and include themselves in this presentation.

Founders' Hall will include a 1,300-square-foot gift shop named Canada Eh? An All-Things Canuck Emporium and a 100-seat restaurant displaying several train artifacts. The restaurant, McAssey's Fine Food and Beverages, is named after a prominent Island railway worker. The building will also be used to host meetings and conferences.

The building will also be the starting point for daily walking tours of three historic Charlottetown areas. The tours will feature the Confederation Players, a group of young, bilingual Canadians dressed in period costumes established in 1989.

The Founders' Hall opening ceremonies will be part of this year's Canada Day weekend Festival of Lights celebration.

"We don't want just typical ribbon-cutting,"Kenny says. She hopes several Canadian bands and dignitaries will be able to participate in the ceremonies.

"I think different times of the year we'll see different types of visitors,"Kenny said about the kinds of visitors Founders' Hall will attract. "There's a fair bit of convention traffic to the Island and people are interested in seeing something of significance about Charlottetown when they come here."

Kenny says Founders' Hall will attract Islanders just as much as tourists.

"The local people, I'm sure, will find Founders' Hall to be a really enjoyable site to visit, too, because we do spend a bit of time talking about Charlottetown as the birthplace, but this is a good way to get a history lesson without really having to open up any books.

"We haven't wanted to miss anything, but truthfully, when people are going through the site, I don't think they'll see it as a history lesson,"said Kenny.

"I hope (Founders' Hall) will bring lots of new visitors, repeat visitors, and hopefully it'll encourage them to stay in the city a while longer,"Morello says. "I hope it's successful."

"It's really phenomenal, isn't it?"Kenny says about the sudden popularity of Canadian history thanks to books and series such as Canada: A People's History.

"History is a cool thing now."