Veterans Affairs Committee on Oct. 22nd, 2009

[Andrew Cohen]

Marc may want to answer that, but before that, I would make a general statement. I'm saddened to hear about what you've been seeing, because I taught in a university for eight or nine years and my sense was that awareness among young people was actually growing around Remembrance Day. I was impressed that there was a greater interest.

There was a period in the 1970s and 1980s, I think, when the military was seen as something bad in this country. We weren't in a shooting conflict as we are now in Afghanistan.

My sense in the past little while is that there has been a greater awareness and a greater appreciation, so I'm disturbed to hear what you're saying, particularly when schools say that they are multicultural and cannot talk about this. I find that odd.

We have made efforts with the provinces. Marc may want to address that.

[Marc Chalifoux]

Probably one of the things the institute is best known for is our polling. We've been doing polling on Canadians' knowledge and appreciation of Canadian history for 12 years now. Over the course of those 12 years—and I think I presented this the last time we were here—we've moved the dial forward on Canadian military history. Knowledge of Canadian military history has increased over the past 12 years.

Knowledge in other areas of Canadian history, such as political history, has gone down. There's more work to do, but our efforts are paying off. Efforts like the Year of the Veteran and the 90th anniversary of Vimy Ridge do pay off in the public consciousness.

In working with the provinces, we do advocacy work first of all. We've talked about the Canadian history report card, and that was a direct effort to lobby for changes to the curriculum, to have the teaching of Canadian history taken more seriously by every province. We assigned grades to each one. We also have a project, benchmarks for historical thinking, that works directly with the provinces to improve the quality of history education in the curriculum by using primary sources, by using notions of historical thinking.

As a very large organization, we have a number of tools and a number of levers that we can pull. Working with the provinces is clearly one. The most efficient route we have found is working directly with teachers.

[Judy Sgro, Liberal, York West, ON]

How do you advertise a program for teachers on the issue of the tour of the battlefields? How do you advertise that program to them? That's the avenue. The teachers have to take that interest. If you can get even one teacher per school, which is part of my campaign in the next while and which I've been trying to do since I've been on this committee.... I'll let you know what my success is following Remembrance Day week.

One point is the battlefield program and the other is that we rarely hear much about women when it comes to this whole issue of our veterans. I understand why the focus seems to be more on men, because more men have participated, but are you doing much to try to elevate the role that women played when it came to the different wars?

[Jeremy Diamond]

Absolutely. More and more, it seems, we get interest from women veterans who want to be involved in telling their story, and it's for that reason: they don't feel that young people know about it, or that young people think they know the “veterans story”, which often comes from a male perspective.

Being a woman and having extra challenges, let's say, during the war and in the 1940s is something that I think a lot of young people and teachers want to hear about. We are increasing the number of women who are involved with the program. We have a very good relationship with the Wrens, the Women's Royal Naval Service group, and they are very active in the community in sharing those stories.

Also, the Stories of the Second World War project is really aimed at becoming, as I said earlier, the definitive legacy or the definitive account. That includes as many stories as possible of women who were involved in the Second World War. You can't tell the story of the Second World War by telling it from only one perspective, so it's linguistic and it's cultural, but it's also gender as well in regard to making sure that all of those stories are told.

As for the connection we've seen by working with Girl Guides and other organizations, the connection made between a woman veteran and a young woman or a girl in elementary or high school is incredible, because initially they don't see that level of what that person went through. I think we're starting to do more of that and we're finding a really good response from it, too.

[Judy Sgro, Liberal, York West, ON]

That's terrific.

[Marc Chalifoux]

On the battlefields tour, that's exactly it. What we are trying to do with that program is to pass on that passion for military history that you can only get by seeing it first-hand. It's like the memory project, but for teachers. We get teachers telling us constantly that at the end of the school year, at the end of learning about World War I or World War II, the best part of the class for students was hearing first-hand from a veteran who was able to answer their questions and was able to talk with them, saying, “I did this” and “we did that”. That's what we're trying to do with teachers.

If we make it part of their professional development programs, that's how we reach out to history and social studies teachers. “This is part of your professional development,” we say, “come and see the battlefields, learn about it, and then develop lesson plans that build on that experience”. When you reach one teacher per year and they have five classrooms, they tell a colleague, and the next year they have five more classrooms. So there's the word of mouth and then we do all sorts of marketing campaigns to reach out to more and more teachers. Again, that operates as a bilingual program. We have a group of English teachers and a group of francophone teachers.

[Andrew Cohen]

You may be interested to know that we have a team of about 12 researchers conducting the stories of the Second World War. These are the people interviewing our veterans, and they're mostly all women, as it happens.

[The Chair, Conservative, David Sweet]

Thank you.

That's the expiration of your time, Madam Sgro. The same goes for Mr. Kerr. It's not a delight for me to say that.

Now we'll go to Mr. Mayes for a brief question.

[Colin Mayes, Conservative, Okanagan—Shuswap, BC]

Thank you.

When you're younger you get excited when you meet the rock stars who produce the music you listen to, and when you're older you get excited when you meet the authors of the books you read. I just want to say that the two books by Mr. Cohen that I have read were great, and they're worthwhile reading for my colleagues.

You mentioned that the institute is forwarding democracy. I think it's important that the story told is not only about events, battles, and personal experiences, but also about why they fought. This is kind of a follow-up to what Mr. Kerr had to say. There's a sense out there that if we had a big international group hug everything would be good, but history doesn't tell us that.

I'm wondering about communicating that to our educators and having that as part of your message: forwarding democracy and the freedom to vote, speak, and assemble. I went to Africa for three weeks this past summer. It was very sobering and motivating to me as an MP to see how great our country is because we stand for law and order, democracy, and most freedoms.

Could I get some comments on that?

[Marc Chalifoux]

We have seen a lot of civics teachers in Ontario in the past few years. Ontario is the only province that has dedicated a course to civics, in which young people learn the value of active and purposeful citizenship. Several high school teachers requested that the memory project speakers, the veterans, come into the classroom to talk about citizenship through their eyes. Part of that is about democracy building in other countries.

Teachers request visits on various aspects and we try to connect them with the right veteran speakers, so it's not only remembrance related. It's talking about Canada's role in the world. It's having a soldier who was on a peacekeeping mission or in Bosnia or Afghanistan talk about the work they did and what it means for Canada and Canadians.

We've also seen in the past that classrooms request visits during elections to talk about the importance of active citizenship and voting as seen through the eyes of a veteran. Veterans really have a unique perspective on the importance of exercising citizenship through voting.

[Jeremy Diamond]

We often reach out to ESL and LINC classes as much as we can to talk about certain issues that relate to new Canadians. We've had veterans go in to speak to them--a much different kind of audience--about the war. So it's not about bombing missions and troop movements; it's more about why they joined up and what it meant to go over there to represent Canada and fight for freedom. You're talking to a group of people who in many cases have come from war-torn countries themselves, so that dialogue is really unique. We seem to be getting more and more interest on that level.

We have another project called Passages to Canada, which is sort of a sister project to the memory project, but it encourages prominent immigrants or refugees, instead of veterans, to speak to young people about their experiences. We match up a passages speaker and a memory project veteran to speak about citizenship during Citizenship Week, on flag day, or at different times of the year. It's really effective and can be very memorable, not only for young people, but for new Canadians and adults as well.

[Colin Mayes, Conservative, Okanagan—Shuswap, BC]

Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, David Sweet]

Thank you, Mr. Mayes.

It's 10:05 and we have scheduled our business session, but I want to be sensitive if a committee member has a burning question he or she wants to ask before we thank those from the Historica-Dominion Institute.

I think you've already heard this from a couple of members. Thank you very much for your presentation and for the good work you do.

Mr. Cohen, what two books would Mr. Mayes be talking about?

[Voices]

Oh, oh!

[Andrew Cohen]

I have copies here if you like.

[A voice]

They're for sale at the back of the room.

[The Chair, Conservative, David Sweet]

Thank you very much.

We'll go in camera now.

[Proceedings continue in camera]