As you may be aware, there are only three provinces in Canada where it's mandatory to study Canadian history. I think the first thing that we have to do, and what I'd love to see, is a national hearing where we invite the ministers of education to join us in one place and talk about why not.
When I think of commemoration, I really think more about education. This is really our history. I'm really, really concerned. When I go across the country and speak to schools and to school groups—since February I've been to 80 communities in Canada and spoken in 80 different schools—I talk about how it was when I went to high school. When I was a student, education basically stopped at the Plains of Abraham. That was Canadian history back in the 1960s, because of our publishing industry, etc., at the time. Now it's much more extensive.
The next few years, from 2012 to 2017, are going to see an awful lot of things happening because there are going to be an awful lot of 100th anniversaries coming up. It's going to be the same thing that happened in the 1960s, with all the great war films of the day, The Great Escape, The Longest Day. You're going to have revisionist authors on both sides of the oceans, talking about how the United States won the war and all they did and all the Europeans did in the war.
All the great gains we've made since the 1960s in Canadian history will be lost if we don't get our collective act together. I think the first thing we need to do is to bring educators and ministers of education together and talk about all of Canada's history and specifically what's happened from the War of 1812 onward. We'll be having the 200th anniversary of that. I could talk a long time about this.
I think what a lot of people do not understand about education is the fact that my own board of education, for example, from which I just retired, takes two years to get approval for me to do these trips. If a teacher wants to take kids to Vimy Ridge in 2017, he or she has to know all the itinerary and all the costs to be able to apply by 2015. I'm already working on that.
Governments have a different timetable, which doesn't work with education. We need a longer timetable, and so we have to start planning. Europe is planning now for all of the things that are happening, and we're not.