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'You know," Marc Mayer said to me earlier this week, "I have this very strong sense that I know exactly what needs to be done."

The 52-year-old director of the Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal was talking about his new job as head of the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa, an institution that has been riven with internal conflict, and which he will take on in a moment of steep economic downturn and government upheaval. (He starts Jan. 19, one week before the resumption of Parliament.) So what if the skylights are leaking, the exhibition program is stagnating, and the atmosphere smacks of The Gulag Archipelago? He figures he can deal.

The situation he's walking into won't be easy. Deputy director and chief curator David Franklin was twice fired and rehired last summer. Eventually, he took the gallery to court, alleging that then-director Pierre Théberge, who suffers from Parkinson's disease, was too ill to properly perform his duties, and that he had sought to dismiss Franklin in order to thwart his chances of getting the job Mayer has now landed. In the end, an out-of-court settlement allowed Franklin to remain in his role at the gallery.

Meanwhile, of course, the federal government has been having its own problems. The National Gallery's search committee made its recommendations back in August, but the approval of the Department of Heritage had to wait until after the federal election. The appointment then slipped to the bottom of the to-do list as the Tories battled to hold on to their minority government. "Honest to God," Mayer says with a laugh, "it's like Kafka invented this whole saga."

Now, though, with the cat having decisively exited the bag, it was time to talk about his plans for the NGC, a museum that has always been the mother superior of the Canadian art world — with an $8-million acquisition budget to prove it — but which has often struggled to have a vital role in the national art discussion.

In part, the National Gallery's secret-kingdom aura has been a byproduct of geography: Ottawa is not on everyone's flight path. But the gallery has also needed to make a stronger case for itself, particularly of late, with Théberge's deteriorating health contributing to an increasing sense of institutional seclusion and entropy.

Mayer — who is passionate about art and is also as unpretentious a person as you can hope to find in the art world — may be the ideal candidate to step in, particularly in the current belt-tightening moment. How will he make a case for the importance of museums in this environment?

"From my perspective," he says, "the National Gallery of Canada has to be a machine that makes Canadians. You should go in there feeling mildly Canadian, and come out feeling very Canadian," exposed to the story of Canada in a new way, through the eyes of artists. "I think art can help us understand the story of how we ended up being one of the most advanced societies on Earth," he says, alluding to our traditions of civil liberties, universal health care, diplomacy and peacekeeping.

"Also, making art is something that Canadians are extremely good at," he says. "I mean, we are actually better at this than we are at most things we do. We need to recognize this about ourselves."

There are changes to be made. He plans to strengthen the museum's commitment to photography, responding to the strength of our contemporary artists working in that medium. "Our curators," he says, "should be encouraged to make exhibitions that are part of that international discussion." How is it, he asks, that the NGC has yet to organize an exhibition about contemporary art in Winnipeg, which for the past decade has been making waves internationally?

"The National Gallery also needs to make a great effort to include historical aboriginal material in its collections," he says, pointing to the very successful integration of white and aboriginal art at the newly opened Art Gallery of Ontario. "We need to tell that story, too, and that's a 10,000- 20,000-year-old story." And why don't we see more shows in Canada about historical Chinese art, he asks, given the contribution of Chinese Canadians to our country?

Mayer's own life history equips him to appreciate cultural hybridity. He was raised in a francophone family in Sudbury, one of three children. "We are French on both sides. My father's family came here from the Champagne region of France in 1686," he says. "There's an Algonquin grandmother in there somewhere." Most of his playmates, though, were from Italian-immigrant stock. It was a mix.

Mayer's mother, Madeleine, was a legal secretary, and his father, Gil, a part-time actor who gained notoriety in the seventies up north with his TV alter ego, Marcel the Mucker, a miner with a heavy Quebec accent who held forth hilariously on the goings-on of the day. Says Mayer: "My father is the funniest man I have ever met."

Leaving Sudbury at 18, he cast about in a variety of jobs, travelled through Europe, and eventually completed a degree in art history at McGill before moving to New York in 1986. There, he worked in art publishing and as an assistant at the government-funded 49th Parallel Centre for Contemporary Canadian Art.

"I got to know all the key Canadians in that job," he remembers today. Among his memories: three months spent cohabiting with the sculpture Wonder Mini Storage, by Toronto artist Robin Collyer, an object that reimagines a plastic pickup-truck liner as architecture. "It was right outside my office: I would sit and look at it all day long." He remembers, too, watching the late Montreal painter Guido Molinari hanging out at the gallery during his solo exhibition, accosting visitors incognito and asking them to defend his abstract paintings. "He would come up to them and say, 'Why would you want to look at that? I think it's awful,' and then he would sit back and listen," he says with a laugh. "It really was a bit perverse."

In New York, he had found his calling, and his career since has been a succession of quick hops, from the Albright-Knox in Buffalo to Toronto's Power Plant and the Brooklyn Museum, and then to Montreal. Over the past four years, he has overseen a museum that is increasingly focused, mounting major exhibitions of work by such leading Canadian artists as Rodney Graham and Geoffrey Farmer, and staging a stunning touring exhibition of the work of German artist Anselm Kiefer.

If Mayer's reputation has been, of late, more as an advocate and impresario than a curator, he's okay with that, having proven in Montreal his readiness to champion the talent of his curatorial team and draw out their best. Major acquisitions have been achieved on his watch: works by Canadians Luanne Martineau, Mark Lewis, Michel de Broin and Karel Funk, and pieces by international artists such as Candida Hoffer and Thomas Hirschhorn.

As well, Mayer initiated the Québec Triennial this year, bringing long-needed definition to bear on the Quebec scene. It's a formula he plans to repeat in Ottawa. "Don't fight the obvious! That's my motto," he says. "We need to celebrate Canadian accomplishment in a timely, accessible way. This is not rocket science."

At the root of it all, he says, are a few core principles, some of which he found himself espousing a few weeks ago to a group of students in Lethbridge, Alta. After a little urging, he shared some fragments from his notes.

"Making and looking at art are primordial and fundamental human activities." In other words: Always have faith in the public's natural appetite for art and art-making.

"Museums serve the public's need for art." It's a need, not a frill.

"The most important period in art history is the present. The whole point of preserving these objects is that they are useful to the present. We need to know who we are, where we have come from. Then we can figure out what we have yet to accomplish."

He makes it sound so simple. Let us hope, out of the chaos that he is inheriting, he can make it so once again at the National Gallery.