Veterans Affairs Committee on March 30th, 2009

[The Chair, Conservative, David Sweet]

Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to our meeting discussing the Memory Project of the Dominion Institute.

I said to someone very commendably today that the Dominion Institute is one of those institutions that are the guardians of Canada's history, so we're very grateful to have Jeremy Diamond, and Marc....

[Marc Chalifoux, Executive Director, Dominion Institute]

My name is Marc Chalifoux.

[The Chair, Conservative, David Sweet]

Pardon, monsieur--and George MacDonell with us today to do a presentation.

Traditionally, we give witnesses approximately 20 minutes to make a presentation. Are all three of you going to make a brief presentation at the beginning?

[Marc Chalifoux]

Yes, Jeremy and I will make a brief presentation about the Memory Project and the Dominion Institute and our work. That should go for about 10 minutes for the two of us. Then Mr. MacDonell will speak of his own experience as a Memory Project veteran, which will go for no more than 10 minutes. We'll try to keep it to 20 minutes for the three of us.

[The Chair, Conservative, David Sweet]

Very good. And then we'll go to rotational rounds of questioning. We're going to be suspending our meeting at 5:15 p.m. because we'll have some committee business at that time, and we don't think you need to endure that.

Without any further ado, please feel free to go ahead and begin your presentation. Thank you.

[Marc Chalifoux]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

My name is Marc Chalifoux and I am the Executive Director of the Dominion Institute. With me are my associate Jeremy Diamond, our Managing Director, and George MacDonell,

who is one of our best and longest-serving and most devoted Memory Project volunteers.

Together, the three of us would like to walk you a bit through the work of the Dominion Institute, focusing particularly on our flagship program, the Memory Project, which connects veterans with young Canadians across the country. Then I'll talk to you a bit about some of the public opinion research we've done, as it relates to the topic of veterans. I think it might be of use to the committee beyond this meeting. It might help inform your future research and future work. Then we'll talk about the future of the Memory Project. After that, Mr. MacDonell will present his own experience of having served for upwards of seven years as a Memory Project veteran.

A few of you will remember and will have met us at our Memory Project breakfast at the Crowne Plaza on February 26, so thank you very much for agreeing to see us again. We appreciate it greatly.

I have a few words about the Dominion Institute. We're a national charitable foundation. We were founded back in 1997. Our aim, our goal, our mission is to build more active and engaged citizens, and we do that through better knowledge and appreciation of Canadian history. We see Canadian history as being history, but also as identity and democracy. So we build education programs that develop on those themes.

Since its founding 12 years ago, the Dominion Institute has been mentioned in approximately 4,000 print and television reports. For an organization with six full-time employees, this means the Dominion Institute has been mentioned on average twice a day in the newspapers. Our projects enjoy a certain visibility, part of which comes from our public opinion research initiatives.

The Dominion Institute was founded in 1997 on the heels of a public opinion poll conducted in conjunction with Canada Day. This poll revealed that half of all Canadians could not name Canada's first prime minister, a story that made the headlines just about everywhere. This lead to the development of a number of executive projects.

The institute has produced about 18 hours of television programming, mainly documentaries, and we've published 14 different books, including three best sellers.

Apart from the Memory Project, we are very interested in keeping history alive and making history relevant. We have a program called Passages to Canada, which brings about 600 immigrant leaders into classrooms to talk about the immigrant story as part of the Canadian story. We run an aboriginal writing challenge, for young aboriginals to talk about aboriginal history as part of the Canadian story.

So you can see a theme evolve in the way we approach history--to tell an inclusive story of Canadian history. That involves military history and Canada's role overseas, it involves the immigrant story, and it involves the aboriginal story.

One of our better-known campaigns includes our 2006 online petition for a state funeral for the last living World War I veteran, which collected about 100,000 signatures and led to a motion being passed in the House of Commons. We also worked on the Passchendaele film, which we saw as a very important educational tool to talk about Canada's role in World War I. It provided a multimedia approach to telling the Canadian story.

We like to think we're high-tech as well. Back in 2004 we developed the first text messaging campaign for young Canadians so that young people could become active citizens and active future voters.

Jeremy will talk a bit about the Memory Project, which is probably the program we're best known for.

[Jeremy Diamond, Managing Director, Memory Project, Dominion Institute]

Thanks, Marc.

Thank you, Mr. Chair and members, for being here today.

The Memory Project is a program that's closest to my heart. I started the institute about five years ago, working with our veterans. It had its own kind of humble beginnings. The Memory Project started in Toronto with about 12 veterans who were concerned with the erosion of historical memory when it came to our military history in classrooms. They felt that the opportunity for them to go out into classrooms and share their personal stories, their unique experiences, with young people was a really important way to connect with young people and to really complement the existing curriculum, going forward, with what they already had to learn with regard especially to the Second World War.

It became our flagship program when it started around 2001, with again about 12 veterans. It has since grown to about 1,500 right across the country. We've been represented in hundreds of communities in every province across the country, and nearly one million Canadians, over the past nine years. We're anticipating probably sometime in early fall, in the next school year, the one-millionth young person will host a veteran in a classroom, which we feel is a remarkable achievement. We hope that the students from seven or eight years ago who are now in university and even getting a little older...and at one point in the future, the children of the first high school students who hosted veterans may hear veterans 15 or 20 years from now.

In 2005 we continued to have a very strong partnership with the Royal Canadian Legion, and the Memory Project became the official in-school speakers' bureau of the Royal Canadian Legion. So the important partnership that we have with the Legion allows us to go to just about every community across Canada and encourage local Legion members to join the program as speakers, and then to also include their network of schools in communities all across Canada.

Our veteran volunteers are made up of just about every conflict and experience that Canadian military servicemen and servicewomen have experienced over the last 65 years, going from the Second World War to the Korean War, UN peacekeepers, Cold War era veterans, all the way up to those men and women who have recently returned from Afghanistan. They go into schools and share their stories, which are very recent--a year or two ago--with young people in a similar way as we have our Second World War and our Korean War veterans do that.

We facilitate over 700 veteran visits every year, again to probably about 300 communities, and it seems that every year we get more requests from teachers and more interested veterans to take part. So we know we're doing something right.

The federal government has been a very important partner and funder of ours over the years, to the tune of over $1.2 million from Veterans Affairs Canada and another $500,000 to $600,000 from the Department of Canadian Heritage, to ensure that we not only encourage veterans to go into the schools, but also train them and hold orientation or training sessions to discuss what's working and what's not working in classrooms. We also prepare them and provide them with some tips and suggestions on how to do their talk effectively.

The Memory Project digital archive was a spinoff of the speakers' bureau, where we encourage veterans to share their stories and artifacts with us to create a legacy project that could live on in classrooms and in communities for many years to come. Currently, we have over 1,000 oral history testimonials from veterans and more than 5,000 artifacts, like photographs, letters, and medals, that we've scanned and digitized. They're online at our website, where we know over the past number of years schools have been visiting to do projects on veterans from their local community. We're hoping in the future to make a real commitment to be able to record and digitize the memories and the artifacts of any veteran who wants to do so, so that we know their memories will live on for generations to come.

[Marc Chalifoux]

I mentioned when I started that the Dominion Institute made its first splash when it was originally founded, back in 1997, with a survey that measured Canadians' knowledge, or lack thereof, of their history. It showed that only half of Canadians knew who Sir John A. Macdonald was. It was our biggest headline.

From there we've been doing public opinion research over the years, but I don't want to bore you with reams and reams of data. I'd be happy to share any of our research with you. It's all available on our website. I want to show you three trends and to focus on three aspects.

One is what we've found over the course of the 12 years of the institute's existence among the general population with regard to their knowledge of military history. Then I want to talk a bit about Canadians' attitudes toward remembrance. And then I'll talk about a survey of our Memory Project: veteran volunteer.

Over the first 10 years of the institute's existence, we found that generally, despite our best efforts, unfortunately Canadians' knowledge of political history in this country has declined. If you look at questions such as how many Canadians know the year of Confederation and who Canada's first Prime Minister was, given a multiple choice, that's gone down.

What we found somewhat encouraging, particularly with regard to our efforts with the Memory Project, is that generally Canadians' knowledge of our military history, over the period of 1997 to 2007, went up. It went up slightly, modestly, but it improved. We certainly can't take all the credit for that. There have been popular education campaigns, which the committee would be well aware of: the 90th anniversary of Vimy Ridge; the Year of the Veteran, back in 2005. These efforts seem to be paying off. There has been a modest increase in Canadians' knowledge of their military history over the 10 or 12 years of the institute's existence.

On Remembrance Day, November 2008, we measured Canadians' attitudes toward commemoration. Last year, as you know, was the 90th anniversary of the end of World War I. We asked for Canadians' agreement or disagreement to a couple of statements. One was whether it's important to commemorate Canada's military history. We found 92% agreement with that, including 59% who said they strongly agreed with that type of statement. Then we asked whether we should be doing more to educate young people about our military history. Again, we found 90% agreement, including 53% who strongly agreed with that statement.

In the slide presentation I pulled aside the Quebec numbers, where we've seen the strongest variation. As I was doing interviews on our military history, journalists put it to me that Quebec marches to its own drummer sometimes on these things. I think the survey data will show that while levels of support for those statements were slightly lower, they were really only slightly lower.

The institute sees itself as a national organization that has a footprint in both anglophone and francophone Canada. I think the ground is fertile for the type of work and remembrance activities we do and that the committee looks into.

Last year we did a survey of our Memory Project veterans, and there are a few highlights. Those are things to bear in mind when looking at activities with regard to remembrance. There were 80% of veterans who said they were concerned about how Canadians will remember the Second World War when all the veterans have passed away; 78% said they felt that Canadians were fast forgetting the history of the Second World War; and 53% told us that people, more today than at any time in the past, ask them about their military experience.

With regard to the Memory Project, two-thirds, 63%, felt that in-school programs, like the Memory Project, were probably the most effective way to educate young Canadians about our military history. This is something we have found. We do the Memory Project for students and for teachers, but nine out of ten of our veteran volunteers have told us that speaking in schools as part of the Memory Project is their most rewarding and significant volunteer activity.

Jeremy, perhaps you could say a few words about the future of the Memory Project.

[Jeremy Diamond]

Thanks, Marc.

At this point we've celebrated eight years at the Memory Project, and I'd probably say that we're at a little bit of a crossroads. We have the luxury, so to speak, of having three generations of veterans alive at the same time--our Second World War veterans, our peacekeeping veterans, and our Afghanistan soldiers. What we want to do is to look at all of those groups. From the Second World War and the Korean War side, we want to encourage as many of those veterans as possible to come out and volunteer with the Memory Project while they still can. Veterans, as we know, are on average in their mid-80s, about 86 years old, so we all recognize that they don't have a lot of time to be able to make the effort to go out into schools. I think what we're finding is that the same urgency that we have with teachers wanting to invite the veterans into classrooms, we have with our veterans who want to do it as well. So the real effort going forward is going to be trying to engage Second World War and Korean War veterans to come and join us to share their story.

Secondly, I think we need to look at the next generation of veterans, the opportunity to engage the younger generation, what we call the new generation, but a different face--our UN peacekeepers, our NATO veterans, our Cold War era veterans, and especially our currently serving Afghanistan servicemen and women. We know right now that about 500 Second World War veterans are passing away every week in Canada. Canada is losing more than 2,000 a month. It's a remarkable statistic, but one that really illuminates the fact that at the same time as we're encouraging those veterans to volunteer, we need to be looking at other men and women who have made similar contributions to Canada's military history. And the way to do this is really to go out to them, to go out to a Canadian Forces base, to their regiments or their units, or speak with the executives of the Canadian association of UN veteran peacekeepers and NATO peacekeeping organizations to encourage them to join the Memory Project, to share their story, and to get it to young people.

But the way we're trying to solidify the Memory Project's place going forward as an important piece of education is to work with our schools and with our teachers. We have several significant anniversaries over the next year, as everybody in this room knows, starting with the 65th anniversary of D-Day this June and into next year with the 65th anniversary of the end of the Second World War in Europe and the Pacific. The opportunity for us to provide really top-rate educational resources and materials for teachers is going to revolve around those anniversaries and be a way for us to hook into the schools.

We recently put together a piece, which is in your packages, that went out to 50,000 teachers across Canada that talked about the significance of Canada at D-Day and at Normandy. We also provided the opportunity for those teachers to invite a D-Day veteran from their community to come and speak about those real life experiences. We've always said that the Memory Project and its veterans are real examples of Canadian history. They're real examples of what happened, what was experienced, and that really complements what students across Canada have to learn. This way it's done by real examples of what happened, shaking the hand of a veteran, thanking them for their experience, but also asking them real questions: what it was like, how did you feel, and what did you actually do? I think those are the things that resonate with kids the most.

[Marc Chalifoux]

That concludes the first part of our presentation. Now you'll be privileged--like thousands of young people have been across the country and in the GTA area--to hear from George MacDonell. George MacDonell is one of the best Memory Project volunteers we've had. He's a good friend of the institute. He shares his story. I believe he's reached out to kids in over 200 visits. If anyone can speak for the Memory Project more than Jeremy and I can, Mr. MacDonell can. His story is a wonderful story. He put it in a book that was published a couple of years ago, which is called One Soldier's Story. He brought a copy to give to the chair as a thank you for having us here today. It's quite a wonderful story.

Mr. MacDonell.

[George MacDonell, Veteran Volunteer, Memory Project, Dominion Institute]

Mr. Chairman and members of the committee, I'm honoured to be here today to discuss the wonderful work of the Dominion Institute.

I thought I'd share some of the things I've learned, some of which surprised me, about teaching military history to our students. I've spent about 200 hours in secondary schools with students in their last or second last year of high school. I'd like to share with you some of the things I've learned.

One of the first things I'd like to mention is that specially gifted teachers understand that military history and history in general are connected directly to our ideas of freedom and democracy. Teachers tell me again and again that our students think freedom is like oxygen: it's there, you breathe it, and it's free. They have almost no understanding of how we came to be free, of how we have preserved our freedom, and of the price we have paid.

When I tell the students that at the moment there are over 116,000 young Canadians buried in foreign lands due to our various struggles to retain our freedom, they begin to see the connections between our history and our military history and the fact that they are free. It comes as a great surprise to them. It's a matter of wonderment and great interest to them, and sometimes to young teachers, that our freedom is not free, that it has to be protected and preserved, as we know.

I also discovered when I went into the classrooms of Toronto, which has a very multicultural atmosphere with people from all over the world in our classrooms, that instead of having little interest in Canada's military history, the multicultural students have an enormous interest in it. At the present time, I'm being asked to go to Chinese schools in the big Chinese churches in the communities of Toronto, because Chinese leaders are interested in teaching their children that in 1941 Canadian troops were their allies in defending their homeland in Hong Kong. It is of great interest and comes as a great surprise to these Chinese leaders that their children know absolutely nothing about this and that they are now in a country that came to their aid in 1941, as you know, with disastrous results when the entire force was wiped out.

If anything, the multicultural students seem to have more interest in our history. Multicultural students want to know what it was all about. They weren't here, and often their parents weren't here, but they're really interested in how we have preserved our freedom, why we're different, and how it came about. This little country, in comparison to the great powers that were at war in World Wars I and II.... How did we behave? What did we do? What part did we play? Had it anything to do with our freedom? They love this country and they're fascinated. When it's question period time in the classroom, the first to put up a hand is somebody from India, Pakistan, Iran, Hong Kong, or wherever.

I thought you'd be interested in the fact that military history in the classroom unites our students even if they have come from very different lands. I thought I'd also share with you the fact that our teachers need help. It's a difficult job to teach about World War I, and especially World War II, out of a book. Young teachers are often not very confident about it, and the Dominion Institute provides valuable support to them. I see more and more of them turning to us for this help. The information and the technology that the Dominion Institute plans to use to help teachers is terrific. I have found that teaching the teachers is extremely important. The difference between the really gifted teachers and those who are not so gifted is amazing, and the difference in the classroom is significant.

I will outline for you how the Dominion Institute, through me, helps our teachers. When a school or a history teacher—usually the head of the history department of a high school—contacts the Dominion Institute, they ask for a veteran speaker, and the institute asks what sort of speaker they would like. If they would like to hear about the Battle of Hong Kong or the Battle of Vimy Ridge, we have special speakers for them. The Dominion Institute phones and asks me to speak at the school. When the agreement has been made that I will speak, I am given the telephone number of the teacher, whom I then call and arrange to see, usually at lunch, a week or two before the meeting is to be held. I ask her or him where they are in the curriculum, what it is they want to hear about, whether they want questions, and so on. We usually have lunch in the high school cafeteria, and there I often find out how well prepared the teacher is.

At this point, the teacher generally has some interesting questions for me, and we begin to discuss how we're going to present the meeting in about two weeks. The teacher will often take my book or some other reference and tell the class that this old man is coming to talk to them, and that they ought to get boned up on this stuff. They decide on the questions they want to ask me. This way, the teacher drums up a lot of interest and ideas, and it's much more fun than trying to read a history out of the written text. After all, they're going to go and meet this old man and they don't want to look like a bunch of dummies, so they have to read something before they can decide what to ask me. The next week they have a meeting, a regular class meeting, where they decide on their questions and pick the people who will ask them. Then the great day comes. The old man shows up with his 20 slides, and they spend an hour together discussing World War II.

This is all made possible because of the Dominion Institute. I couldn't imagine how we could do anything like this without their support.

I think I've said enough now. Those are some of my principal ideas. Students want to learn and become fascinated, and their teachers want to let them know that our freedom is not just like the oxygen you breathe. It has come at a big price, and we have to know our history to keep from making the mistakes of the past.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, David Sweet]

Thank you, Mr. MacDonell, on behalf of myself and the committee. We understand just how expensive freedom is, and we are grateful for your service and the service of many others in the history of Canada.

I know that members are just itching to ask more questions and get more information, so without further ado, I will go to Madam Sgro.

[Judy Sgro, Liberal, York West, ON]

Thank you.

We have to be very appreciative of the Dominion Institute for investing its time and effort in something that is so very important, not just for our youngsters but for all Canadians. The fact that we're in a combat situation at the moment has turned our minds to what has happened in the past, and I believe this has triggered some of the interest from some of the young people.

Mr. MacDonell, I wonder if you could tell us one or two of the most interesting questions you've had from some of the students you have spoken to. Does anything interesting or odd come to mind?

[George MacDonell]

The questions vary, and vary greatly. The students really are interested. They have questions about why Canada was turned upside down.

I give them a presentation to show what happened at the level of our politics, at the level of our social life, when our factories were now peopled by young women instead of young men. They're fascinated by it and wonder how we could do this. They find it so strange, living the peaceful life we have now. Their questions circle around the fact that it must have been a tremendous experience for a little country to do what it did.

The teachers often ask me about the dropping of the atomic bomb. It's widely held, by some who don't know the facts, that the Americans dropped the bomb to kill more Japanese. But they dropped the bomb to stop killing Japanese. That begins a great discussion of how the war in the Pacific really ended, the dilemma facing President Truman when the bomb was dropped, and the role of the Emperor in hoping that some excuse would be given to him.

When there is a Japanese child in the audience, I point out that the Japanese people were the victims of their military dictatorship, and that we should be careful that this never happens here.

In the Toronto area, with a lot of very mixed-race students, you get a wide variety of that kind of question. But by the time I get there, I must say, with the slides, it's a very quiet room. They're really fascinated by this whole subject of the past.

[Judy Sgro, Liberal, York West, ON]

No doubt they would be.

You mentioned to me earlier, Jeremy, that you had sent out a whole lot of kits to the various schools. How do you define the areas for this? You're not covering all of the schools across Canada, you're covering schools in specific areas, I would imagine.

[Jeremy Diamond]

We're doing both, I guess. We are trying to blanket everywhere, but over eight years we also know where our strengths are in terms of where our veterans reside. We also know where our weaknesses are in terms of where we need to make more of an impact.

We're very cognizant of connecting and establishing networks in areas outside of maybe six or eight major cities. We have strong groups of veterans and teachers in Victoria, Winnipeg, Halifax, and areas like that. In places like Newfoundland, for instance, and certain areas in Saskatchewan, we know there are veterans and we know there are teachers, but it's a bit more challenging to get out to those groups.

So we kind of blanket, but we also try to target areas where we know we need some more work to be done in.

[Judy Sgro, Liberal, York West, ON]

Is it possible to get a list of the schools, for instance, in various areas to do a follow-up of the kind of information you're mailing out to the schools to encourage their participation?

[Jeremy Diamond]

Absolutely. We have developed a really strong list of not only teachers but also administrators of veterans organizations, and we've been able to separate out by province, by community.

So yes, absolutely, we're more than happy to not only provide information but also, obviously, to kind of monitor it throughout the year and find out where we need to do a little bit more work and do more follow-up. Sometimes it comes easy. In some communities, teachers who have a great experience will tell five teachers, who tell five more teachers. Other times, when they have a good experience they don't tell anybody. We have a little bit more work to do.

But we know, with teachers especially, it's a very tight community. They know what each other is doing. Schools know what other schools are doing, and they sometimes try to one-up them. We're more than happy to be the recipients of that kind of competition.

[Judy Sgro, Liberal, York West, ON]

I would think, Mr. MacDonell, that when you go into the schools, especially Toronto schools--I represent a Toronto riding that's very multicultural--it would raise all kinds of discussions after you're gone. I would hope the teacher carries on with discussions about the ability of people to get along, and about what happens when they're not able to get along. Ultimately, we end up with a war and with the kinds of battles we're talking about.

I could see an awful lot of opportunities for the teachers to be able to take your comments and move them into a lot of other areas within our multicultural communities of Canada.

[George MacDonell]

As I said, the teachers use this experience to talk about Canadian values.

This is a wonderful way of asking why we lost all this life, why we spent all this treasure, why we put so much effort into this. It's because of who we are and what we are.

[Judy Sgro, Liberal, York West, ON]

I thank you so very much for putting so much into this. It's an honour to have you come here before us today. We appreciate that very much.

Do I have any more time left?

[The Chair, Conservative, David Sweet]

You have twelve seconds.

[Judy Sgro, Liberal, York West, ON]

So really quickly, does DND encourage our younger vets to go out into the school system? Is it something they are able to do at this point, or are many of them just not able to go out into schools and talk about these issues?

[Jeremy Diamond]

They are, and they are encouraged to do so.

Part of the understanding in the Canadian Forces is that we make a real effort to connect with communities. If you asked a lot of Canadians in communities that aren't military what our CF does, they wouldn't know. They'd think all the CF does is send people to Afghanistan, for instance. There is no other role for them.

I think it's partly an education process, not recruiting. By helping tell the story of what a Canadian Forces man or woman does in terms of training, in terms of the role they play on the home front, in terms of what it's like to be away from family, etc., the Memory Project is a great vehicle. Every year, we have more and more Canadian Forces members joining the Memory Project. We were here on February 26, and the next day we were involved with the Conference of Defence Associations Institute at the Chateau Laurier. We had 50 CF members come to that lunch and sign up for the Memory Project, wanting to tell their story about how they got into the service, what it means to leave their family, and what kind of impact they're making in these countries around the world.

They tell the story of the next generation of veterans, and I think Mr. MacDonell would agree that their stories are very similar to those of our Second World War veterans, even though they're separated in many cases by 60 or 65 years.

[Judy Sgro, Liberal, York West, ON]

Thank you very much. Congratulations. It's a fabulous initiative.