It's been just over seven years since the Foundation was officially launched with a mandate to preserve and celebrate Canada's broadcast heritage.

We knew there was a lot of work ahead of us.

• We knew there was no federal policy that identified broadcast heritage as a significant component of Canada's history.
• We knew that our national public broadcaster – in the past by far the greatest source of Canadian radio and TV – had not been provided with the resources required to preserve its own programming legacy.
• We knew that the second-generation of private and public broadcasting pioneers were beginning to ‘fade away’, with their stories largely untold and their collections at serious risk.
• We knew that the budget of the National Archives, now Library and Archives Canada, was completely inadequate to address the contemporary issue of broadcast heritage preservation.
• We knew that a combination of  “vinegar syndrome”  and technical obsolescence was seriously endangering unpreserved kinescopes, news, and other kinds of vintage radio and TV programming.
• And we knew that emerging technologies were about to change everything yet again.

In the 1990's, Lorraine Thomson had convinced her colleagues at AFBS to take a small bite out of this huge problem with an Oral History Project. But she recognized the need to do more and AFBS eventually agreed to fund a couple of pilot studies to define the scope of the problem

By 2000, it was clear that a dedicated private sector organization that could act as a catalyst to public discussion and action was the only practical answer. Lorraine asked Kealy Wilkinson to come on board and put the necessary infrastructure in place.

The cause was a great one and I agreed to serve as Chair of the Board while we created what, on January 3, 2001, became the Canadian Broadcast Museum Foundation. We charged off into largely uncharted territory, convinced there was a major job to be done.

In mid 2001, CTV responded to our request for support with a magnificent public benefit grant. We began identifying potential partners in the Heritage Sector whose objectives and expertise would complement our own and when we convinced the Department of Canadian Heritage that it had a role to play in all this, a commitment of $250,000 was made.

We brought broadcast partners on board to provide additional financial and collection support. We looked at models that were addressing broadcast heritage issues internationally … and created the concept of a distributed National Broadcast Collection for Canada and added substantially to the Oral History Collection which now numbers in the hundreds.

In 2006, we began Project Salvage, a project that provides a modest but safe home for artefacts and other broadcast-related material previously in the hands of producers, writers, performers, executives and technicians from coast to coast. This was such a huge success that, 18 months later, the CBMF finds itself with the more than 6,000 broadcast-related artefacts, the largest collection in the country – and without even going public!

During this process, we built a small but specialized staff with development and educational expertise, a collections specialist and registrar, and a person to handle research, digital content and website development.

And in seven years we did all this for under a million dollars!

But we've been dogged by our inability to generate financial support sufficient to enable this small organization to do properly what is clearly an enormous job: the preservation of our history as it has been and is portrayed through Canadian broadcasting.

It has become clear that it is going to take

• greatly expanded partnerships,
• substantial private sector support, and
• momentum driving some form of national policy and federal commitment.

We have to ensure that future generations of Canadians will be able to see and hear – and share the excitement of – the stories and songs, sporting achievements and other great national events that contributed so much to Canadian life in the 20th and 21st centuries.

I acknowledge it's an enormous challenge but it can be done.

With its vast spaces and small population, Canada is more indebted to broadcasting and other forms of electronic communication than most other modern nations. They made it possible for us to know about – and eventually to see – people with whom we share citizenship in places we might never visit

It is unthinkable to me that Canada should end this decade and reach 2010 still marked as the only developed nation without an infrastructure dedicated to preserve and celebrate its radio and television legacy. As Directors of the CBMF – and Canadians who care about this country – it's our challenge to ensure that does not happen.