TRANSCRIPT

I guess the trick with these things is if you don't ask the right questions in the first instance it's very difficult to get the right answer. So the CVRD, with the best intentions in the world, had been asking, and the MOT as well, consistently asking the wrong question, with good intentions and the question they were posing was, what will it take to fix the Kinsol and is it realistic do that and if so, what would it cost. And it never really occurred to anyone to ask the question, what will, what is the minimum that could be done in order to conserve the Kinsol and preserve it. And it seems a subtle difference, but it's a really important one. When you approach a task of that enormity, from the perspective of 'fixing' it, and your client, the person who's asking you, is a department of the Provincial government, you want to give a fairly robust answer and one that is quite safe and conservative. If you turn the question around and you ask instead, you know, how can we conserve this important bit of our history, or our cultural history, then it kind of frees you up to look at it from a slightly different perspective, and different options present themselves...So we would lay out three or four options...
and also what was most likely to deliver the end use that they were after, because they were quite specific about what they wanted to use the bridge for. That's important in this equation, because it's not just a heritage object, it has a purpose, and we knew that unless we could really deliver the working goods, and make it appropriate for that purpose, the project was never going to go anywhere...
Unless you can provide cultural relevance and use as a place, uh, objects are static and it's very difficult to convince people to throw money at them, and we're just fortunate in this instance that we have this really quite lovely object which is absolutely useless in terms of purpose unless it is rehabilitated and it's possible that in the instance of the Kinsol to enable that use which is part of the Trans Canada Trail network and as a pedestrian/equestrian crossing, in such a way that respects the history of the place, and that really is quite easily accomplished there.