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 context.
The Historica-Dominion Institute is the largest independent organization in Canada dedicated to promoting history, identity and citizenship. We share the past with Canadians by showing them how it influences our present and our future. We are also helping Canadians be better informed and more engaged.
We run, on average, 10 to 12 national programs a year, and all of those are bilingual. Our best-known products, as some of you may know, are the Heritage Minutes. There are 66 of them now. Over the last 20 years, they have covered everything from the history of young Irish orphans coming to Quebec—and keeping their names while picking up a new language to live in—to Jacques Plante, the great goaltender, inventing the goalie mask. Some of those minutes are iconic. We'll actually immodestly suggest that in teaching Canadians about our heritage, we think they've become part of it themselves.
Some of our other projects include the Memory Project, which has been in the news to a good degree recently. It records veterans—primarily World War II and Korean War, although now some veterans of the Afghan conflict as well—talking about their wartime experiences for an online archive. We bring veterans and current servicemen and servicewomen into classrooms and community groups. Just in the last month alone, we have arranged more than a thousand visits, coast to coast to coast, to schools in this country. We've archived more than 2,500 Canadian war testimonies that will exist long beyond the lifetime of any of us, well into centuries beyond.
Another of our programs, Passages to Canada, arranges for volunteer speakers to tell their stories about their diverse backgrounds—how they came here, what they found here, how they've lived here—in talking to students and community groups.
The Canadian Aboriginal Writing and Arts Challenge invites aboriginal youth to interpret an aspect of their heritage through art or writing.
The Canadian Encyclopedia is the definitive online and regularly updated source for reliable, verified information about our country.
Here in Canada, we offer Encounters with Canada, the largest youth forum in the country. Every week of the school year, more than 100 teens from across Canada discover our national institutions here in Ottawa, meet accomplished Canadians, develop civic leadership skills, build lasting friendships, and live an extraordinary bilingual experience.
All of those programs that I mentioned are, of course, bilingual.
We also regularly poll to measure knowledge and attitudes among Canadians in order to identify areas of interest, ones where we feel we need improvement as a country and citizens, and programs to address those needs.
We not only support official bilingualism, but we also live it. More than 70% of our national office staff in Toronto is bilingual. Our historians, who are mostly in their 20s or 30s, all have PhDs or masters degrees. Almost all of them are bilingual. One of them is also the official historian for the famous Van Doos of Quebec.
We understand that linguistic duality involves representing and speaking to linguistic groups in a culturally sensitive environment. For example, in creating our Black History in Canada Education Guide, we prepared English and French versions. In the English version, we offered expanded focus on the black community's historic presence in Halifax. In Quebec, on the other hand, we looked at the Haitian community in particular.
At the same time, we teach essentials to both language groups. For example, our most recent exploration into black history in our Heritage Minutes is the story of Richard Pierpoint, a former slave who at the age of 68, in 1812, formed the coloured corps of former slaves who fought in the War of 1812.
We know that Canadians are sometimes unaware of contributions of members of the other official language group, so we looked for ways to educate, improve, and engage, and to consider subject material in this context.
The year 2014 will mark the centennial of the First World War. We also note that the Van Doos was founded in the same year, when French Canadians really started to feel at home. In two years, it will also be 400 years since the French explorers who settled in Quebec started to invest in and build on Canadian lands as well as the lands of what is now the United States. We should celebrate that.
When we mark, for example, the 200th anniversary of Sir John A. Macdonald's birth in 2015, we should also remember his partner, George-Étienne Cartier. In modern times, the fact of having two official languages has shaped everything from our role at G-20 meetings, where our bilingual prime ministers often bridge the gap between unilingual leaders of some of the world's other biggest countries, to our success in bringing immigrants here from other countries.
While English, as we know, is the lingua franca of much of the world, the French fact is of specific interest to potential newcomers in places ranging from France itself to other parts of Europe, Africa, and the Caribbean. These are elements we celebrate, bilingually again, in our Passages to Canada program.
That's one of the lessons of citizenship, as well as history.
We're here to help and to promote these issues. We have a pool of bilingual historians, as I mentioned, and activity coordinators from across the country. We have contacts everywhere at the grassroots and national levels. We understand the languages, and at the grassroots the community is engaged.
The government has recently indicated that it may wish in future to engage not-for-profit groups to assist the public service in some projects. Don't forget us if you do.
Canada is open to people of all languages and all cultures. Having two official languages enables us to reach more people and to send a positive message to the whole world.
Canada's bilingual heritage is not only part of our history; it is also linked to the future, as it opens us up even further to the world. Those goals are central to us at the Historica-Dominion Institute, as we know they are to Canada, and that's why we're so pleased to speak to and support these efforts.
Thank you.
Thank you.