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.