Thank you.
While clearly the Government of Canada has a leadership role to play in remembrance, remembrance is not just about ceremonies or events that are organized by the federal government. It is actually about Canadians themselves paying tribute to those who have served Canada and those who continue to serve Canada. Therefore, our focus in Veterans Affairs is on how we can engage and encourage Canadians to honour those who have served.
What we want to do is bring remembrance to Canadians rather than try to drag Canadians to remembrance. What we want to do is take it to where Canadians live, where they work, where they play, and make it a part of their everyday lives—not something you do just on November 11, or on June 6, or on April 9, but something you do every day.
As a result, we partner with a lot of organizations and other levels of government both in Canada and internationally, but particularly with community groups across the country so that remembrance is happening at the community level across Canada.
One example of how we do this is through our partnerships with sports organizations, both professional sports and also amateur sports across the country.
One of our partnerships, quite a natural one, is with the Canadian Football League. We have been working with them since 2007 to have pre-game veteran tributes at playoff games in eastern and western Canada. As well, with them, a couple of years ago we created a new individual player award in the CFL, an award given to a Canadian player who best exemplifies the attributes of a veteran: perseverance, courage, strength, comradeship, and contribution to community. This is an increasingly prized individual award among CFL players.
We also have partnerships with the National Hockey League and the junior hockey leagues right across Canada, as well as with midget AAA, and more recently with the Canadian Interuniversity Sport organization. Again, they hold in various ways tributes to veterans associated with the games that are played across the country. In this way, we are able to reach with remembrance a much broader range of Canadians than you might traditionally see at a remembrance ceremony.
As well, we've had a partnership for quite a number of years with the Royal Canadian Legion track and field championships. About 80% of the national team in track and field that goes to the Olympics has gone through this Royal Canadian Legion program.
In Veterans Affairs we have three programs where we can provide, in addition to the advice and collaboration with communities, funding to some remembrance activities at the community level in particular. We have two programs that support the restoration, in one case, and the construction of cenotaphs and monuments at the community level.
The third one is the community engagement partnership fund, where we're able to provide community groups, not-for-profit groups, with funding to undertake remembrance activities, whether they be ceremonies or learning events for youth across the country in a wide variety of remembrance activities. They're at the national level as well, where we fund, for example, the Historica-Dominion Institute memory project, where they have a speakers bureau with over 2,000 veterans who are available to go into schools across the country and talk to Canadian students about their experiences and why remembrance is important to them.
We also support the Juno Beach Centre in France, which is really Canada's face of remembrance of the Second World War in Europe.
Thank you.