The demands of the corporation's mandate are such that despite major public investment, there's never been enough money to do it all. Since 1974, the corporation's budget in constant 2007 dollars has been effectively stagnant, while the costs of programming, distribution, and new technology have been increasing year by year. So priorities have had to be established, and in that process, heritage preservation and the celebration of people and programs have generally had to take second place to the demands of production and other pressing corporate imperatives.
Nevertheless, in the 1990s, Radio Canada, very much to its credit, launched a major heritage project. Construction of state-of-the-art storage vaults began in 1997, followed by digitization of its radio and TV program archives and development of an effective and efficient cataloguing system. About the same time, CBC began work on the development of its own preservation programs, and by 1998, the pressure was on to transfer their radio and television programs from the original recording media to more contemporary formats. For a major program producer like the CBC, with its multiple networks, this indeed is a daunting task involving hundreds of thousands of hours of radio and television programming and including vast stores of news material, such as news magazines, which clearly document many key aspects of Canadian history. They also make up the largest and most significant portion of the corporation's regional collections and will likely be the fastest-growing genre.