From Terry Cook, prominent Canadian Archivist:

My sympathies and empathy go to you in these severe cuts in archival operations, and the energies needed to counter them. With governments and citizens publicly advocating more accountability, justice to those who in the past were marginalized or abused, and the merits of community and national identity in our pluralistic world, cuts to archives upon which all three are based seem incomprehensible. Clearly a disconnect.

In my involvement with several lobbying campaigns federally in Canada, often jointly with historians and their associations, I found two things were important. As mentioned, the face-to-face meetings of those well connected and the well-phrased, hand-delivered, hard-copy letter were essential, and various posters before me have stated the same.

But the second lesson is not to be too quick to dismiss emails.  MPs and Senators told me it was the 80,000+ emails received, more than once, from our genealogical allies' massive and repeated emailing campaigns that turned the tide -- made someone in the Prime Minister's Office say: "Make this go away -- meet these people and work out a compromise."

And we did.