Veterans Affairs Committee on Nov. 15th, 2011

[Greg Owen]

That's a great point, and the costs of travelling overseas have come up today a couple of times. I'd like to take the opportunity to identify that for you.

The cost for a student to travel overseas next year for eight days in Europe—flights, meals, busing, from when they leave their airport to when they get home—is about $1,900, which is a lot of money, but with planning, it's certainly quite achievable. Then you add departure fees and taxes on top of that, which takes it up to about $2,500. We do our best to keep those prices down and to make sure that students can have the opportunity to be there.

[Sean Casey, Liberal, Charlottetown, PE]

Madam Mousseau, is that close?

[Susan Mousseau]

Yes, it's perfect.

[Sean Casey, Liberal, Charlottetown, PE]

I'm interested that you started your presentation by saying that you're a charitable organization, but when you talk about ongoing remembrance ideas, you talk about some projects that you're funding, like the Lest We Forget project and the development of Juno Park.

How is your organization funded, and where do the funds come from for these initiatives that you see going forward?

[Susan Mousseau]

We were beneficiaries of Walmart's fundraising activities. They took us on board five years ago. We don't know if we're going to be signed on again for another five years. They do five-year increments. Their fundraising activities in the last four weeks leading up to Remembrance Day raised over $800,000 for the Juno Beach Centre Association. In addition to that, we do receive $500,000 a year in funding from Veterans Affairs, and the rest of it comes from private donations and receipts from the centre itself.

[The Chair, Conservative, Greg Kerr]

Thank you very much. That's the time.

Now we're over to Mr. Lobb for five minutes.

[Ben Lobb, Conservative, Huron—Bruce, ON]

My first question is to Mr. Owen or Mr. Robinson. In your presentation, you touched upon the possibility of doing tours for the War of 1812. What other tours do you do in Canada, looking at different....

[Greg Owen]

We have a very active program that brings students to Ottawa as part of their national history programs. Typically we will take students to Montreal and Quebec City as well. We have the opportunity for students to travel to the maritime provinces and learn about history from the maritime perspective. Those travel opportunities are primarily in eastern Canada, but we do have teachers from western Canada in particular who choose to travel within their own provinces or neighbouring provinces.

[Ben Lobb, Conservative, Huron—Bruce, ON]

In addition to students, I think the baby boomer generation has taken a second look and is also becoming increasingly interested in the different battles and learning about all of the various components of them. Obviously your business is focused primarily on students. For the boomers out there who are interested in doing a tour, what's the best way for them to do that, or can they participate in your tour?

[Greg Owen]

They certainly can. We do have an opportunity, and many parents take the opportunity to travel with their student as part of the tours their school might be taking, either as a chaperone or as someone who becomes a traveller on the trip.

We also provide the opportunity around specific events, for example, around the Vimy program. We work to develop tours that would be unique to adults so they could participate at the same time as students. There's certainly the opportunity for people who have graduated from school to make those pilgrimages. I know for example that the Vimy Foundation and, I believe, the Juno Beach Centre as well also host groups at other times of the year that are organized by different individuals. For example, I think the Young Presidents' Organization had a group at Vimy earlier this year.

[Ben Lobb, Conservative, Huron—Bruce, ON]

Okay.

Mr. Houghton, obviously next year's the 95th anniversary of Vimy Ridge, and five years from then it's the 100th. It's an opportunity not only to remember those who fought for the country and made the ultimate sacrifice, but it's also probably your best chance to educate the Canadian public as to why we need to remember these people and remember the dates.

What can you tell this committee about what you're doing over the next five years to put your stamp on the 100th anniversary?

[David Houghton]

Thanks.

You're right, the ball is rolling, and I hope we can keep up with it. We've been pushing this thing for the last five years. Now it's starting to roll, and that's good news. This is not about empire-building on our behalf. If we got everybody in the country to know about this, we'd shut our doors. It's like finding the cure for whatever it is your charitable cause is for, if you know what I mean.

We are carrying on with our pin campaign, and we'd probably reflect that to the greatest degree, because it's something that people can do without having to travel. It's something that adults can do very simply as a sign of respect and pride—and as I say, it's ubiquitous, from sea to sea.

There are other opportunities, as Dave mentioned, for adults to travel. We are spending a great deal of money right now on revamping our website. One of the things we plan on doing is facilitating...because we're not in the travel business. Our students who win the Beaverbrook prize go over, but we leave the student travel business to the pros for large groups and so forth.

That said, often adults don't know where to start. We're going to build in a section on our website so that if it's your wish to go to Vimy, we'll suggest some sites you should take in--Juno Beach, Passchendaele, and so forth--and give you the travel times and so on and so forth. We'll try to simplify planning for people who are keen.

Just briefly, I want to say that I was over there this year in June. One of the participants on this trip, among a group of adults in this fundraising endeavour, asked our executive director if she could find this woman's great-grandfather's grave. Our executive director, who lives in Douai, is expert at this. She found it on her iPhone within moments and drove to the grave. There are dozens of gravesites all maintained by the Commonwealth graves commission. She took a photograph of the grave and e-mailed it home to the individual.

This woman said that within half an hour of having made the request, which was just good luck, she saw her great-grandfather's grave. It was the first time anyone in her family had seen it. Then she asked her executive director if she could show her where the grave was so that she could make a visit. Without her knowledge, the executive director arranged for the entire group to go. We hired a piper, and when the woman saw the piper waiting in the field, she turned to us and said, “He can't start playing, because I'm going to start to cry.”

This was her great-grandfather, a man she'd obviously never met because he died there. We held off on the piper.

She brought out a newspaper article about her great-grandfather who left behind a widow with three children. The children lived in abject poverty as a result of his death in France. That's not atypical. That is what happened to many, many Canadian families as a result of the loss of the breadwinner. At any rate, she had this newspaper story about him, and about his wife leaving England to move to Canada.

The piper started to play, and one of the participants, who was a new friend to me, said, “We're at this boy's funeral 94 years too late.” When you look across the sea of graves, you realize that very few of these graves have been seen by the family members. These boys died overseas; they were buried there. The family never got to see them.

So that was a very powerful moment.

[The Chair, Conservative, Greg Kerr]

Thank you very much for that.

Ms. Mathyssen.

[Irene Mathyssen, NDP, London—Fanshawe, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you very much for your presentations.

As a former teacher, I'm quite interested in the piece around the students.

Mr. Houghton, you were talking about the Beaverbrook Vimy Prize and the variety of media used by the students to create projects, including videos, essays, etc. Could you describe some of what you've seen? I'm very interested in knowing some specifics about the kinds of products our students are producing.

[David Houghton]

I am too, because I haven't seen any yet. In other words, this is the first year we've taken anything other than through the formalized application process. We have on our board pedagogues who are experts at this sort of thing, and they've told us that we're discouraging many bright students. It is an academic challenge, a scholarship-type of thing. They pointed out that there are many clever students, but they're clever in different ways, so why are we requiring them to do another essay and so forth?

Our object, by the way.... And I'm not interested in sending 1,000 kids over to France, as we could never afford that. We leave that to EF, and others like them. But our object is to try to get 1,000 kids or 10,000 kids to apply for the scholarship, because in doing so, they learn something about what we want them to do. In effect, we've gained what we want by the student having applied.

The idea of changing the application process is just to solicit applications from students who would otherwise never make the effort to do so, because it's laborious. It's learning.

[Irene Mathyssen, NDP, London—Fanshawe, ON]

You said these students followed up with presentations to the Rotary Club and to other students.

Is there any way that we, as parliamentarians, as the Parliament of Canada, could encourage a wider viewing of these remarkable works? It would seem to me that, in celebrating what the students are doing, we are providing the ultimate commemoration, and also an encouragement that would go beyond anything we could conceive of.

[David Houghton]

That's probably something these two gentlemen could discuss.

We only have so many students going over, but perhaps that's something that could become part of the program that you have, Dave. Or maybe it is already. I don't know.

[David Robinson]

That's a somewhat easy one, and I would love to see more of it. I'd like to see greater cooperation between us and the elected representatives. We'd gladly provide the contacts with the schools that we have going so that you could contact them and share information.

In answer to your question, the reason the school boards approve these trips is that they're cross-curricular. They really go to different areas. When the teachers and I speak, we talk about how while you're away you're still responsible for your work, but that you should approach your teachers. For English class, you can do a journal. For your media class, you can do a film. So we see a great deal of incredible work. In math class, people would think, “Geez, how can you talk about what happened in World War I and math?” Well, that's easy, as you talk about the mathematics of artillery attacks.

I mean, there are so many incredible things that these kids are doing in videos. Go onto our YouTube site and see some of the things the kids have done. They're absolutely amazing. I would love to be able to see the MPs share the success of the schools and what they're doing.

We can provide that cross-reference for you. That's an easy one.

[Irene Mathyssen, NDP, London—Fanshawe, ON]

This is a continuation of the question by Mr. Stoffer in regard to the Korean War veterans. The reality is that Canadians have been involved in a number of areas of the world, doing remarkable things in terms of peacekeeping and protecting civilians. Now you've said that the infrastructure is not there in Korea for the veterans.

I wonder if any thought has been given to looking at the contributions of what we call modern-day veterans. In so many ways, they feel excluded. They feel forgotten. It's a reality that we owe them a great deal, and yet they're not remembered as they should be.

[David Robinson]

I don't know how good a job I did when I spoke.

On all the tours I do, every student is matched with two soldiers, depending on what the tour is about. One thing we say explicitly to the families, the teachers, and the students is that if they are related to any soldier who took part in any military action our country has been involved in, they should represent those soldier to make it most meaningful and personal, because those are the soldiers whose pictures they're going to be wearing on their shirt at the ceremony. The soldiers don't have to have been at Vimy or World War I or Juno Beach. If you know somebody who was in the Boer War, the Korean War, or on peacekeeping in the Middle East, or in the current operations in Afghanistan, wear those names. We do try to make it relevant and most meaningful.

[Irene Mathyssen, NDP, London—Fanshawe, ON]

So you're finding that they are making the connection between modern veterans and those we think of traditionally?

[David Robinson]

I had a veteran in Sudbury break down and cry when he said, “Can my son represent me?” I said, “Absolutely”, and he said, “Thank you”, and I said, “No, I thank you”.

[Greg Owen]

We also have teachers who choose to bring modern-day veterans into their classroom to speak about their experiences. We've had the opportunity to have Afghanistan veterans participate in some of the activities students are taking part in. It continues to be an opportunity for us to recognize their contributions. Clearly, it's much more difficult for people to visit the sites where they've given their lives and served our country. But there's certainly an opportunity to ask those veterans to help share those experiences directly with the students as well.

[The Chair, Conservative, Greg Kerr]

Thank you very much.

Mr. Daniel.

[Joe Daniel, Conservative, Don Valley East, ON]

Thank you very much.

Thank you, folks, for attending.

My question is more about the long-term planning, as one always has to plan a fair bit now. It's great news that you're taking students over for these tours with veterans. Sadly the veterans are reducing in numbers at an alarming rate. So as we move into the future, five and more years on, we may not have many veterans to take on these trips. What's your plan on how to engage the younger people in this in the future, and how would you engage more of the newer veterans in this process so that they keep the motivation going for the younger folks to learn and understand these events?

It's open to anyone.