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This oral history is from an interview conducted by the Oral History cluster of the Landscapes of Injustice project.
What else could we do to really make it happen?and we formed a non-profit society. We lobbied and we brought in politicians and public service employees from Calgary and Ottawa. Everybody came to visit and everybody loved it. We sold it to the community. We had an open house in shopping centers and everybody loved it. Luckily, we had, when, um, the Mulroney government came in we had a member of the conservative party as our MP and because he supported Mulroney he was very influential in the cabinet. He was minister of science and minister of fisheries; I can't remember all the things. Anyway, he supported us a hundred percent and he was able to get us money for putting sprinkler systems on the waterfront, he saved the character of our buildings and then to save this building. Then there was a grant that was, I think, was called, uh, I don't know if this was the exact wording but there was a grant to promote different projects in Canada. So we got money to save this building, the sprinklers, all the, um, I don't know if you know anything about buildings but this building is on piles and there's a whole air, kind of, movement. If there's a fire, there's a chimney effect that happens to these fires. If it gets anywhere near, it draws air in from the bottom and goes up so we had to put bulkheads underneath to compartmentalize so you don't get that chimney effect and the, whole, underneath the sprinkler. The whole structure here is sprinklers. That cost millions of dollars to do and all that was done to this building. Right up to the beginning when we formed the society there was a vision, at that time, it would be nice if the community could be involved to actually run this place so we lobbied and made a proposal to the Park's Services and it was accepted. This is the only national historic site in all of Canada that is run by the local community. It's through various visions that we had. It's not totally my vision. It was a committee and a group vision but I was part of that group that promoted that. So that's why we have what we have today. So, um, and then as policies of government change I think there is a movement to make all Park's Canada sites free again. It used to be that we didn't have to charge admission fees to visit these sites but now you do. There's this change so that our funding has to be looked at because we feel that we do a service to all of Canada and not just to our community but the basis of having a community involved is that although my parents, my grandparents, and great grandparents were pioneers of this community, my promotion of the community has always been that anybody that comes to live here is a pioneer, eventually, because they bring their own interests and vision and things like that. So to build a community everybody has to become part of that because you are, really, a pioneer. So it's really to accept everybody and to build and so that's why I think we have a very strong volunteer system at this place which is one of the big successes of what we are trying to do.
Well, you didn't do this so I'm not going to help you.No, you don't do that. It's just one of these things that you always help each other. So there's that principle that's out there that I think has really helped to make this community what it is. Well, I think that's a great place to leave it. It's also getting really toasty out here. Yeah, isn't it? It's nice but it's a little bit too hot. We complain about the weather regardless, right? It's too hot, it's too cold.