Who We Are
The Cold War Historic Vehicle Society, a Charitable Museum, was established to provide Canadians with access to artifacts from the period of the Cold War (1946 – 1995) in an educational fashion through the display and demonstration of its extensive collection of military vehicles.
Operating from locations in Ontario and Quebec, the Society provides vehicles and artifacts, along with knowledgeable volunteers, to a wide range of community events, and participates in other cultural activities when requested.
The Society was started in 1993 by like minded private business people who recognized a need to have working artifacts to commemorate and educate people about our collective history from this period. The Society has now grown to over a dozen vehicles of different types, representing many nations from around the world. With a full time restoration and operations staff, the Society restores to accurate operational condition diverse types of historically significant vehicles, both wheeled and tracked, ranging from light general service vehicles to tanks and armored personnel carriers.
Along with the preservation of these artifacts, the Society maintains a significant knowledge base of Cold War history, literature, and technical details of the automotive engineering employed during that era.
This information and the vehicles themselves are available to researchers as well as film, television, and theatrical productions and other community groups on a request basis.
For further information about the Cold War Historic Vehicle Society and our activities, please contact us.
Our Board Members
Jeff Mierins
Founder and President
Paul Isaacs
Managing Director
Kevin Schenk
Media Coordinator
Lead Volunteers/Armoured Vehicles Section
Robin Craig
Dave Deblois
Dumaresqu de Pencier
Peter McMurchy
Jim Mills
Mo Sottile
Derek Strebe
Devorah Sugarman
Nicholas Tilgner
Terry Warner
ABOUT US
The Cold War Historic Vehicle Society
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Education Programming
The Society’s primary goal, its reason for being, is to educate the public about the period of recent world history known as the Cold War that existed between 1946 and 1995.
This primarily ideological struggle between western capitalist countries and eastern communist countries saw the greatest expenditure in resources, and brought the entire human race closer to outright extinction than at any other time in recorded history. The struggle, while avoiding full-scale engagement between the main powers (although as history now shows, limited unit level engagements did in fact occur), was characterized by many “proxy wars” between these ideologies. These wars of influence have indeed shaped the world as we know it to this day.
With the normalization of the relationship between the two ideologies in the early 1990s, and the rush to place that period of history in the past as quickly as possible, important “lessons learned” about how the world dynamic has been shaped have been lost, or not fully understood.
By using the Society’s extensive collection of former military vehicles and artifacts from this period of history, we are able to transport these to the public space, such as schools, historical events, or in participation with other museums. This provides tactile educational experience so the public can handle, touch artifacts, and, in some cases, get the chance to step inside armored vehicles to obtain a higher level of understanding while being able to converse with knowledgeable historians.
Film and Theatrical
Use of the Vehicles and Artifacts
The Society is registered with the Ottawa Film Office. To take advantage of the unique vehicles and artifacts, and to further ensure that these are placed into the public space as educational items, the Society, as part of its charter, makes these vehicles and artifacts available on a case-by-case basis for the Film and Theatrical industry. As we are a charity, we offer them on a cost recovery basis, and can provide these on a short- or long-term basis, either in static background or operational roles. The Society can provide experienced crews, such as drivers, mechanics, and historians, to assist production companies or theatrical groups to ensure the vehicles and artifacts are presented as accurately as possible.