By the ’90s, it was recognized that Canada had fallen far behind other developed countries in its ability to preserve its audio–visual record. The National Archives of Canada, with the support of the Department of Canadian Heritage, established a Task Force on the Preservation and Enhanced Use of Canada's Audio–Visual Heritage and its 1995 report ( “Fading Away” ) put forward 20 recommendations for action with a view to creating shared responsibility and dedicated funding for this important activity. Five of these recommendations would (if workable) have been specifically relevant to Canada's broadcasters but a study undertaken by the CBMF/FMCR in late 2008¹ identified two problems:

• Broadcaster participation in the work of the Task Force had not been extensive, and
• their awareness of its subsequent recommendations was almost non-existant.

In the 14 years since publication of Fading Away, Canada has fallen even further behind in preservation of its radio and television heritage. As the CBMF/FMCR report observes,

It is indeed ironic that Canada, a country for whom electronic communication … was key to developing a sense of nationhood in the 19th century, remains the world's only developed nation with no coherent mechanism to preserve and celebrate its broadcast legacy..... We find ourselves burdened with a rapidly deteriorating and distributed collection of an analog programming record in need of digitization but with no plan, no agreed upon standards for preferred formats — and resources, even in the public sector, completely inadequate to underwrite the cost of transfer and storage.

Moreover, as Canada's broadcasters become digital operations … electronic media are becoming even more ethereal and less ‘real’ --- capable of being lost at the touch of a  “delete”  button. It is imperative that archival standards and new processes for capture, storage and access for digital radio and television programming be developed and introduced soon to prevent the existing analog gap in radio and television heritage from creeping forward into broadcasting's digital era.²

And this matters. Thousands of hours of valuable multimedia content, an important component of our Canadian heritage is at risk because of ageing media and technology. Our broadcast programming — news, music, comedy, sports, documentaries, drama and current affairs — records the social, political and cultural history of this country's evolution in the 20th century. Since much of this programming was paid for directly or indirectly by Canadians and because it constitutes the major electronic record of our recent history, it should be preserved for their benefit and future access.

The ageing of audio recordings, film and videotape and the obsolescence of videotape equipment has combined to produce a major problem: the extant material from the beginning of broadcasting to roughly the end of the 1980's is all now at risk. The overwhelming need for digitization is approaching both the broadcasting industry and heritage institutions like a tidal wave, growing bigger and more potentially destructive each year.

Just a few examples will demonstrate the need for attention:

• Audio recordings and 12,000 hours of ¾” video recordings of Parliamentary proceedings from 1969 to 1997 which include the Question Periods from ’77 to ’97 were handed over from the House of Commons to LAC. Most of them are badly deteriorated and if not transferred to a new medium within the next five years, they will be unrecoverable … and this electronic record of Parliament's vital operations will be gone forever.
• Financial pressures forced CBC Television to stop migration of programming from its vintage kinescopes to digital formats as of March 19, 2009. This leaves two-thirds of the CBC's kine collection — the oldest and most vulnerable of its holdings — untransferred and subject to continued deterioration.
• From 1956–2005, CTV provided local television service to BC's provincial capitol through its station CHEK–TV. For most of these years, it was the only local television service since CBC did not then maintain a station in Victoria. In 2003 it was discovered that CHEK's whole news archives — almost 40 years' worth of film and video — had been contaminated with vinegar syndrome as a result of unsatisfactory storage conditions. The visual record of four decades of life on Vancouver Island events was gone.

In fact, the broadcast heritage problem that now confronts Canada is a veritable tsunami, combining the backlog of decades of analogue audio and video material that is approaching the end of its lifespan and urgently requires digitization, as well as the development of a ‘going forward’ plan to efficiently collect and preserve the digital programming that is fast becoming the norm for producers and broadcasters alike.

¹FREEZEFRAME, a report on Audiovisual Preservation in Canada's private broadcasting, regional educational and community radio sectors, CBMF/FMCR, November 2008.
²Ibid, p. 19.