Canadian Heritage committee  It's about the creation of a conversation, which is a phrase similar to something Dr. Rabinovitch used in a different context recently. You have to get people talking about something, for ideas and exchanges to flow. I'll give you an example. In the last Heritage Minute we rel

Canadian Heritage committee  Fundamentally, we as Canadians don't know our history. We don't know enough about Sir John A. We have polled repeatedly on this over the last 10 years, and we've not shown any significant improvement. People don't know that Sir John A. was the leading Father of Confederation. Som

Canadian Heritage committee  Mr. Chair, members of the committee, I want to thank you for this invitation to appear before you today. The Historica-Dominion Institute is Canada's largest organization dedicated to making history and citizenship issues more well known. Our board of directors includes some o

Official Languages committee  Thank you, Mr. Wilks. First of all, on a personal note, my admiration and respect for your son.... I was actually in Afghanistan in a different war about 20 years back for a very short time. I have a very small appreciation of the amount of time he spent there, but enough to giv

Official Languages committee  First of all, thank you for your question and your comments, which I appreciate. I am prefacing that because I think my answer won't be entirely satisfactory to you. As Mr. Jedwab mentioned earlier, one of the challenges is that education is a provincial jurisdiction, so that me

Official Languages committee  Sometimes, slightly different approaches are needed. As I mentioned earlier, for example, we tried to operate within specific language groups, in studying the black Canadian community, focusing on the Haitian community within Quebec and then elsewhere. But then you bring up the

Official Languages committee  That is my example.

Official Languages committee  Thank you, Ms. Bateman. Mr. Godin, you mentioned the former Katimavik program. One could say that with the current program, we share the spirit and some of the principles of the Katimavik program. As I mentioned, Encounters with Canada is every week of the school year. For 30 w

Official Languages committee  You have raised a few points that are important to us. The challenges in Toronto—

Official Languages committee  You mentioned several important points. From time to time, in Toronto, I get the feeling that you can hear every language on earth except French. Right now I'm learning a bit of Russian. Well, it's easier to find people to practise that language with than to find someone to speak

Official Languages committee  If there are programs to help, for example, not-for-profits that are assisting in fields of national interest, such as these efforts—a training program that would help us, when we look for professional historians, to give them training in a language if they're not up to speed in

Official Languages committee  I'm happy to begin. First, of course, we're an independent institute politically. I'm not here to speak to overall policies of the government. I certainly think that 2017, in the linguistic area as well as in other areas, does offer much to celebrate. But I'm also not here to

Official Languages committee  First of all, thank you, Mr. Chair and members of the committee. We're very grateful for the opportunity to talk about who we are, how we can contribute to celebrating Canada's sesquicentennial, and the role of our two official languages and language communities within that co