One body that could be useful would be the Council of Ministers of Education, where there is cooperation between the departments of education and the provinces.
Is there room for federal leadership? Yes, there are possibilities. I think the ideal situation would be one where the school system in every province in Canada is focused not just on training young people to become the workers and consumers of tomorrow, but also on training them to be the citizens of tomorrow. That piece often gets lost.
Learning about science and technology is extremely important. Learning literacy and numeracy skills is all very important, but learning about Canada's history, where we come from as a country, how our institutions developed, and how we developed and evolved as a country, that is extremely important. Otherwise, how can young people make sense of the big questions facing us as a country?
Without understanding what Canada's role in the world once was, how do young people engage in a debate about what our position should be in Afghanistan? How do you deal with questions of parliamentary reform or democratic reform if you have no sense of Canada's parliamentary tradition or how our parliamentary institutions evolved?
I'd say that as a baseline, as part of our Canadian history report card, we ask that every province in Canada mandate two courses in Canadian history at the high-school level. At the moment, only one province in Canada does that, and it's Quebec. It recently redeveloped its history program in grades 9 and 10 and it is an excellent course. It is one that could be taught across the country and it would be held in very high regard. British Columbia has a social studies course over a few years, which is excellent and is largely history.
Those are provinces to whose level I think we could aspire. They are provinces that take Canadian history seriously. I think part of taking that seriously is teaching it at the high-school level. A lot of excellent history education takes place in elementary school, in junior high school, and in middle school, but there's something about the high-school level, just before young people graduate from the last level of mandatory education, just before they reach voting age. It shows what we take seriously as a country or as an education system.
I'd like to see more provincial departments of education taking Canadian history seriously at the high-school level, history that starts at pre-Confederation, goes to the present day, and touches all sorts of aspects, from military history to social history to economic history and gender relations. There's so much. It's a rich history.
The story of Canada is a proud story and it's one that we should be proud to pass on in the classroom and on the big screen and the small screen. That's it. There's a role for the federal government there as well. There's a role for organizations like our own. There's a role for the provinces. It's a large field.