When Brian Johnston and his wife, Colleen, chose Niagara-on-the-Lake as a summer home a decade ago, they were looking for vibrancy — culture, walkable streets and a sense of life beyond their front door.

They found it.

“With the Shaw Festival, the restaurants, the trails — it has everything,” Johnston says. “In my opinion, it’s the number one town in Ontario for that.”

But for Johnston — a chartered professional accountant by training and longtime real estate executive — a community’s strength lies not only in what it offers today, but in how well it understands its past.

That conviction led him and Colleen to support the Niagara-on-the-Lake Museum and its capital campaign to create a new multipurpose programming space, expand community-based projects, increase exhibition space and add much-needed collection storage capacity.

“Remaining the same is not a good plan,” he says. “Growth creates energy.”

With its acquisition of the neighbouring Janet Carnochan House in May 2024, the museum has taken what he describes as a transformative step forward in its goals. The next phase depends on continued community support, Johnston says.

With more than three decades in real estate development and corporate governance, Johnston has seen how institutions endure — through vision, discipline and steady investment.

His board service with the Bruce Trail Conservancy, which stewards a 900-kilometre trail system, reinforced that lesson. Protecting something meaningful requires long-term thinking, Johnston says.

With this expansion, he believes the museum is doing just that and has the potential to become an even stronger cultural anchor in Niagara-on-the-Lake’s evolving identity.

“The Shaw and the wineries are wonderful, but it can’t just be them,” he says. “The museum adds another layer. It reflects the region’s cultural heritage. It tells the stories.”

In a town shaped by the War of 1812, Indigenous alliances and its role as Upper Canada’s first capital, Johnston sees something rare: concentrated history worth preserving.

For him, supporting the capital campaign is an investment not just in buildings, but in continuity.