“This evening marks the formal opening of Canada’s international broadcasting service. The program is wholly Canadian in its creation and spirit.”

With those words Canada’s Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King inaugurated Canada’s Voice to the World on February 25, 1945. It was first known as the CBC International Service, and then as Radio Canada International or RCI.

The fact that RCI still exists is a miracle.

It is also a tragic story of an incredibly resourceful and impactful service that was stripped of personnel, resources and budgets, decade after decade.

Right from its beginnings RCI was much more than just a Canadian news service. Starting in 1947 it popularized Canadian musical talent by recording Canadian musicians, bands and orchestras and distributing these recordings around the world on the RCI label. Among them Glenn Gould, Oscar Peterson, Andre Gagnon, Pauline Julien, and Gilles Vigneault.

But there was more than music. There were Canadian dramas, documentaries, reports which were shared with broadcasters throughout the globe.

At the heart of RCI’s mandate was telling the world about Canada, in a way that a listener not familiar with Canada or the Canadian reality would understand. We did that in our two official languages of English and French, and in a number of different other languages.

We never had the resources of large international broadcasters like the BBC World Service, but not surprisingly, our dedication and honest reporting attracted millions of listeners around the world, and we were popular far out of proportion of our resources.

Budget issues were always problematic. But until the 1990s our relationship with Canada’s national public broadcaster CBC/Radio-Canada was that of a tenant and landlord. CBC/Radio-Canada provided technical, studio and office facilities – for a fee – and RCI independently produced programming for international audiences.

That changed radically in the 1990s. In an effort to minimize the impact of budget cuts on the national service in 1990, CBC/Radio-Canada took the budget earmarked for RCI, and announced it would close the international service. Protests in Canada and around the world eventually saved the service, but RCI lost half of its language services.

Two more attempts to shutdown RCI over budget issues in 1995 and 1996 failed. Then a period of relative calm continued until 2001, after the government of the day guaranteed some funding, and even provided money for capital infrastructure investments for RCI.

However, when that stopped, CBC/Radio-Canada once again started cost cutting at RCI and at the same time tried to change the international mandate of RCI.

In 2012, when the government of the day demanded a 10 per cent cut in the budget of CBC/Radio-Canada, the national broadcaster decided to cut RCI’s budget by 80 per cent, eliminating the RCI newsroom, several languages and services, which severely handicapped the capacity of RCI to fulfill its international mandate.

If that was not bad enough, CBC/Radio-Canada stopped RCI from broadcasting on shortwave and cut off listeners in China, among others, from Canada’s Voice to the World. RCI remained on the Internet, but with very few resources.

Thirteen years later RCI no longer produces original programming in Canada’s Official Languages of English and French. The texts on the RCI website are almost all copy pasted from the English and French websites of CBC/Radio-Canada, without any explanation for audiences outside of Canada.

With no RCI newsroom, the website lacks the urgency associated with a site that is regularly updated.

So what kind of future can we talk about as RCI turns 80? Certainly our funeral eulogies have been voiced many times. And our present usefulness questioned.

RCI cannot continue to find itself in a situation in which CBC/Radio-Canada priorities, or budget constraints, impact RCI’s capacity to serve international audiences.

Dealing with the future of Radio Canada International should not be an afterthought, or a low priority. That is what has happened for decades and it has been disastrous.

And this reflection should go further than just RCI, or Canada.

At a critical time when trusted sources of news and information are needed, RCI resources should be restored, because they are desperately needed worldwide, and should be provided without paywalls or fees to anyone interested in Canada and Canada’s position on world affairs.

Will this happen? We have been disappointed so many times over the last few decades.

Over and over, supporters such as former Canadian ambassadors, a former Prime Minister and so many other have recognized the importance of a truly international service. Sometimes we have come close to getting protection and recognition of RCI’s international mandate, at other times we have lost ground.

What is remarkable is the tenacity with which we have continued to fight for our service. Not because it was our job. It was more that it was a vocation. A deeply held conviction that as proud Canadians we wanted to share our reality, the good and the bad, with citizens of the world. And those listeners responded, and appreciated our programming. And that reaction in turn underlined the huge responsibility we had as journalists and producers to do as good a job as we could in telling the world about Canada.

Hopefully, we can continue to do that.