Thank you very much, Mr. Sweet.
We're here together. All of us will make just a few brief opening remarks, and then we'll be in your hands for questions, which we'll be delighted to take.
I'm Andrew Cohen. I'm president of the Historica-Dominion Institute. With me is Linda Brunet, who is managing director with Encounters With Canada; Marc Chalifoux, our executive vice-president; and Jeremy Diamond, who runs our national office.
I'll talk just briefly about who we are. We're here today largely to talk to you about what we do with veterans and in military history. Our background is very brief. We were, at one point, the Dominion Institute, which was founded in 1997 by three young men, including the Honourable Michael Chong, who now sits in the Conservative caucus, Rudyard Griffiths, and Erik Penz, and the Historica Foundation, which was founded in 1999 largely with the support of Charles Bronfman, formerly of Montreal, now of New York.
On September 1, after a long and interesting courtship that went on for, depending on how you count it, one, two, three, or four years.... It was not a marriage in which either party rushed into the arms of the other. Both decided in May, but on September 1 the Historica Foundation and the Dominion Institute merged. The reason that these two bodies came together...and when I say came together, I mean that the organizations were of different age, experience, and culture doing different but complementary things in the realm of history, citizenship, and democracy. At our core, as we went about reimagining ourselves and now go into the new world in which we are not two voices but one, our mandate, our mission, is indeed history, identity, memory, and democracy.
That is what we do. I'll soon pass the mantle to others who will talk about what we do specifically in these fields. We are about a $10-million organization. We run programs across the country. We have offices in Ottawa, Toronto, and Edmonton. We publish the Canadian Encyclopedia, which has between four million and six million hits a year. Linda Brunet will tell you about Encounters With Canada, the country's largest youth forum. We run a project called stories of the Second World War, and the memory project, which Marc and Jeremy will talk to you about, and we do the battlefields.
We have a number of elements in what we do, but at our core is a deep feeling that Canadians don't know enough about their past and they don't know enough about their citizenship. Our mission, our raison d'être, is to increase awareness on both those counts, to promote the idea of an active, engaged citizenry that knows its past and feels comfortable with it. I guess it would be fashionable to say you're all about the future in your organization, but in a sense we're all about the past. We like to think we're about the future of the past.
With that, I'll hand this over to Marc Chalifoux, who will give you a little more detail about what we do.