National Trust Blazing Trail for Renewed Canadian Register

The National Trust is pleased to announce that it has begun work on a project to examine possible redevelopment options for the Register. This is an important inflection point – moving from raising the alarm towards finding solutions.

Photo credit : Screen shot from historicplaces.ca

The project will include technical, functional and governance considerations. We will be reaching out to the community to collect reflections and ideas. We are grateful to Parks Canada for their strong collaboration in this work and for their shared interest in finding a future path for the Register. Results will be shared later this spring.

Thank you to all of you who took the time to write to the Prime Minister, Ministers and M.P.’s. Your efforts have made a difference!

To the creative and talented folks who took action to save copies of the existing Register entries, thank you for stepping up to protect Canada’s heritage. While we hope that the redevelopment project will bring us all together to a single proposed new tool, these innovative efforts confirm that affordable solutions are possible.

Our immediate work now is to chart a path for what a renewed Register should look like. Once that is done later in the spring, there will be a renewed need to persuade governments to buy-in to this new vision and participate. We will need your help again. To be most useful the Register needs to be regularly updated with evolving information from all jurisdictions – a nation-building project for sure.

The voices of individuals, organizations and the media have been central to making the case that the Register is important. We are truly stronger together. Together we have moved the Register from certain oblivion onto a more positive trajectory for renewal. The work is far from done but the first vital step has been taken.