Shane O'Dea, Chair, Heritage Canada Foundation

Heritage Canada has run the gamut of activity in heritage preservation: from endowed trust properties, to heritage areas, to mainstreet, to eco-museums, to heritage regions.   And for a long period of time - during which many of us despaired of our organization - it almost gave up on heritage buildings to chase whatever was the latest government fad; that is, whatever fad provided funding.  Over the last three years we have undergone a re-assessment and are now beginning the implementation of a re-organization plan. And, while we have a number of workable programs, it is sometime since we have had a program that makes us a visible national force or an inspiration to our membership.

Some would argue that we have been overtaken by success; that we developed a national interest in building preservation; that what should be preserved is being preserved and that what remains we can afford to lose.  It is certainly true that Heritage Canada and Parks Canada, as well as the provincial and local heritage organization have ensured the survival of a remarkable number of buildings In the generation since Heritage Canada was founded.  It is also true that much of our railway heritage is now protected; that there is a limited, if not always effective, policy for the preservation of federally owned heritage buildings and that there are many working heritage areas across the country.  But it is in these heritage areas that we see the problems of success.  Many of these are, to varying degrees, protected by zoning regulations; a protection won after long battles to get municipalities to adopt and adhere to rational planning.  Now the battles are seldom over issues of building height or density or use; they are just over heritage; will the municipality protect the building we consider important or will it allow development as permitted by the zoning plan?

But what we have lost in this last generation am many of our old allies who came from across the social and economic spectrum.  And losing them, we have lost many of our social and economic arguments for the buildings we want to save.  More frequently now we are dealing not with demolition, but with alteration, renovation and that two-edged sword - personal taste. Our desire for the preservation, not merely of the form,but of the texture of the cultural landscape has put us in conflict with people who want their old house, but who want it to look neat and new; who think that narrow vinyl is better than 200 year-old alligatored clapboard.  So, having spent the 70s burying the notion of heritage as the playground of an elite, we are back there again as an elite because we are no longer in the forefront of the people, protecting neighbourhoods, affordable housing and a locally-based economy.

The preservation movement itself is in need of restoration -, we have to retake the agenda.  It is not that our roof is gone.  Far from it.  In most places across the country we have generally good legislation.  It is not that our sills have failed.  On the contrary, they have been strengthened: to the Venice Charter has been added la Declaration de Deschambaults and the Appleton Charter, a more than adequate foundation for any enterprise.  And to extend this analogy, the decorative detail is in good order: everyone is on the heritage bandwagon.  Builders, advertisers, governments, all use heritage as a means of selling themselves.  What is missing from our house are the people.  We have only occasionally had a broad based appeal and have only rarely had ordinary people at our side. We need to build a constituency in the way that the environmental movement has so successfully done, for without that constituency we are without power.  And, no matter what the quality of our legislation, without the people to encourage the politicians to act on the legislation, it is as a dead letter, moribund on the pages of the parliament.

What I am calling for is not just political power, those swells of enthusiasm that sweep an issue into action.  What we need is a genuine and profound sense of what heritage is.  What is needed is such a sense of heritage held by a majority of the people and by people from all backgrounds, not just a limited few.  What is needed is a sensibility that sees preservation as something other than an entertainment, the goal of a Sunday drive or a holiday diversion.  It requires the development of a public eye and a concomitant public commitment to the textures of the cultural landscape.

So let me talk of textures. Those of you who have been involved in the restoration of building know what I mean.  Textures are the ripples in old window glass, the scratches of a dog about a door, the reaching of old lilacsto the sky, "The sleeve worn stone of casement ledges where the moss has grown" (Archibald MacLeish "Ars Poetica").  These are the textures that speak of time, that tell a time.  And they tell it with  a truth and an authenticity that is, sadly, sometimes so lacking in our major restorations where money has swept away all that was real and replaced it by what is new and sharp and level.  And the old building is a ghost, a Platonic form that only haunts the new.  Doing this to old buildings is akin to what we do in new subdivisions when we level the land and remove the real, the indigenous vegetation to replace it with an alien species.  And so the texture of the natural environment is lost: the way that a group of trees shade colours in the fall, the way in which an outcrop of rock is sharpened in the setting sun, the way a border of grasses moves in the wind.

We need then to be aware that in bringing new life to heritage places we do not strip those places of their heritage and their life.  We need not just to be aware ourselves, but to create a more general awareness of what I have called the textures of heritage and to bring more people into our realm of sensibility.  How do we do this? To that question I have no answer but I do
think that question is the one we have to answer.  We have to explore new strategies for involving more people in the totality of heritage preservation.  We have to move beyond the economics and the politics at which we are quite good, to the direct involvement of a greater range of people in living in, restoring and valuing our heritage.  Without the commitment of the majority, building preservation will remain the toy of a minority and toys are to politicians as they are to children, something they grow out of.  Our historic buildings should be regarded as gifts forever given, as defining features of our nation's character, not just as the tokens of a moment's interest.