We're here today to talk about the merger of the Historica Foundation and the Dominion Institute.
I will start off by saying that mergers are extremely rare in the charitable sector in Canada. What we've accomplished between these two organizations actually happens very seldom and is the exception rather than the rule.
The reasons for our merger, as Mr. Cohen indicated, were several months and several years in the making. We were two organizations that operated in a similar space, so there were obvious synergies between our programs—and we'll get back to those. We are also an advocacy organization, advocating for a better understanding and a better appreciation of Canadian history and Canadian citizenship, so the possibility of creating Canada's largest organization devoted to those themes was of great interest to us. And we are not-for-profit organizations. We do not have shareholders, so any reduction in overhead and administration costs that we can realize as a result of this merger is reinvested in our programming. Those would be the main reasons we merged.
I was talking about synergies between our programs. I think there is no area where this is more evident than as it relates to military history and programming related to veterans. From my colleagues Jeremy and Linda you'll be hearing about almost a dozen programs that target different audiences: students, teachers, veterans, and the general public.
The programs take place in different settings: in classrooms across the country, in Ottawa, and on the battlefields of Europe. They take place across different media, such as first-person accounts in classrooms, storytelling over the Internet, on the big screen and on the small screen, and with programs that run anywhere from a 60-second commercial to a one-week Encounters with Canada experience.
Jeremy.