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 weeks we bring in between 100 and 130 students from coast to coast to coast. This is a very validly bilingual program, and we draw from every community you can imagine. I was there recently and met someone who had been organizing for us, for example, in Îles-de-la-Madeleine for years, and others from small towns across the prairies, and on from there.
The idea is not only to present a bilingual program, but also to engage people in different cultures, and of course also again to build up these relationships. I'm fairly certain it's had a deep impact. If memory serves, for example, I believe Mr. Kenney is one of those who took part in one of the early iterations of the program. It's 30 years old now. I also believe we do have other MPs, who I can't recall at the moment, who have been engaged in it as well.
This is the aspect of our programs that focuses on civic engagement. When you ask how we might engage otherwise, one occasion we had not mentioned is that 2014 will mark an anniversary of the 1864 Charlottetown Conference, as many or all of you will know. Prince Edward Island has a very ambitious and seemingly well-structured program in regard to that. We have had preliminary discussions with them about whether we would be able to move some of our sessions of our Encounters program to take place in P.E.I. These programs presently reside at the Terry Fox Canadian Youth Centre, which we own and operate here in Ottawa, a former school. If we could break that away from Ottawa for one of the first times in our history and locate it somewhere else, there would be an opportunity to learn about that.
If that were to be successful, we would similarly wonder whether there were other opportunities to move this program out of the national capital on occasion, while still keeping the same principles inherent within it.