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 give him my great admiration.
All we do in our veterans program, as with everything else, is done bilingually, and with this focus, both present and past. The average veteran of World War II is now 89 years of age, and they are leaving us at a rate of 500 a week. So the time to pay respect to them and to hear their stories, of course, is now, not to wait. We send, sometimes, native French speakers into English communities, or the reverse, but we certainly tell those stories. I mentioned that we have 2,500 taped archival memories in our archives of World War II and the Korean War, which includes veterans from both language groups.
In particular, at the beginning the year we started to introduce more recent serving or currently serving men and women, or those who just recently left the forces, talking about their Afghanistan experiences as well. Again, of course, that represents the two groups as well. There's a very real linkage where we are now crossing all generations.
I was with Minister Blaney when he visited an Ottawa school recently. We had a 31-year-old who had done two tours of duty in Afghanistan. He was fluently bilingual—I guess, as they say, moitié-moitié in his upbringing—and he was at a bilingual school bringing out those experiences.
I often say that if you take a veteran of World War II and bring him into a classroom such as the one where my 11-year-old son is now...in 2039 my son will be 38, and he will be able to say, “I heard of the contributions of our great people in a war fully a century ago.”
Primarily, our focus is on telling those stories, but again, I want you to know that all we do in that is send veterans wherever they want. If it's a French school in B.C., whether an immersion school or otherwise, we will make sure they get somebody in French. If it's an English school in Sept-Îles or Baie-Comeau, they will get their presentation in that language as well.