TRANSCRIPT

Think of any imperiled architectural treasure which is currently languishing and we hope might be conserved; they'll all have one thing in common, which is that they are prohibitively expensive and there's an enormous amount of inertia which has been built up over the years and a general perception that it's just not really realistic. Otherwise, it would have been done. If it were easy, people would have been doing it for years and years. All of those projects, and the Kinsol, again, is no exception; they need to turn the corner philosophically before they can turn the corner materially.
And in this instance that meant, first of all, getting some traction behind the idea that it was safe and practical to do something as ambitious as fixing the Kinsol, and then secondly, that once conserved, people would use and enjoy it for, and that that would bring all sorts of other benefits to the Valley, benefits that could only come from conserving the historic object and wouldn't be available if one crunched it up and burned it and replaced it with something that looks kind of like it. That would have a different result, and that other result could be really positive, and there's good evidence of that in the Kettle Valley, for example, where the bridges were destroyed and replaced with lookalike bridges, that don't exactly match the original structures, and people go to the Kettle Valley and enjoy riding along the trails, and that project has been a great success, not as a conservation project or a heritage project but it's successful as a tourist venture. This is different, and what is so special about the Kinsol is that it is the original and there are very few of these things left around. So we can take this extra pride in having saved something of real significance, or real heritage importance. There aren't many around and as a result of that people will come for that reason. But the other thing too is that people usually look at these great decrepit structures or buildings or whatever they are and they just generally feel funky and gloomy about them because that's the overall vibe that has developed over time. And they forget that there's a remarkable opportunity in fundraising around heritage that doesn't exist on clear construction sites. So everybody wants the Trans Canada Trail crossing to be established and everyone accepts that it will be quite expensive to do that. To start from scratch, to fundraise for a new bridge after having spent a million dollars to get rid of the old one, which was kind of annoyingly in the way, is a pretty formidable task. To fundraise around a conservation effort and around the saving of an imperiled structure is actually a lot easier because it's pretty easy to get people excited about the idea of saving something which is beautiful and old and at risk.