Thank you very much.
Usually, Mr. Chair, I say that I can speak for anywhere from twenty minutes to three days on remembrance. Today I'll try to keep it to ten minutes to respect the committee's guidelines.
Thank you very much for inviting us to talk to you about remembrance. Certainly any time of the year is a perfect time to talk about remembrance, but in the lead-up to Veterans Week and Remembrance Day, this is a particularly appropriate time.
The Department of Veterans Affairs has two business lines. One is, of course, providing services and benefits to veterans and assisting serving members in their transition to civilian life. The other business line is the Canada Remembers business line. The purpose of that business line is to ensure that Canadians are aware of the services, sacrifices, and contributions of our veterans and to encourage Canadians to take an active part in honouring those services and sacrifices.
Within the Canada Remembers program, there are a number of elements. There are national and international memorials. We are the stewards of some quite extraordinary cultural resources that belong to the people of Canada. We have 13 First World War battlefield memorials in France and Belgium, and we have responsibility for the Canada Memorial in Green Park in London, England. In addition, at the two largest of those sites, we have a student guide program that offers Canadian university students an opportunity to provide interpretive services to the one million visitors we receive at those two sites each year. We also have some responsibility, with other departments, for the National War Memorial and the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier here in Ottawa and for the seven books of remembrance, which reside here in the Memorial Chamber in the Peace Tower.
In addition, a really critical element of our work is public information and learning resources. We provide information to Canadians, in quite a wide variety of ways, about the military history of Canada and the service and sacrifices of our veterans. We have extensive information and material on our web site. We provide print materials, booklets, and historical sheets and that sort of thing, which are distributed throughout the country.
One of the most remarkable and most successful ones for really informing and engaging Canadians is the learning material we provide to schools, teachers, youth organizations, and veterans organizations across the country. We have comprehensive learning materials that are provided year-round, but each fall, in the lead-up to Veterans Week, we provide all 16,000 schools, as well as many youth organizations, with Veterans Week learning materials. These are particularly tailored to two groups: the kindergarten to grade six group, which get something called Tales of Animals in War; and the junior and senior high students, which get the Canada Remembers Times.
The sample kits provided to schools are also provided to all members of Parliament. Your offices would have received these in early September. Those are samples of the materials we have, and teachers order them in class packs of 30. Teachers have to actually do something, take an active step to request these. These kits have been remarkably successful, and teachers' feedback to us has been quite extraordinary. Two Veterans Weeks ago, in 2008, teachers ordered 2.3 million pieces of these Veterans Week learning materials. The following year there was a 38% increase to three million, and last year there was a further increase to 3.9 million.
So over the two years we had a 70% increase, and the evaluations by teachers have been very gratifying for the former educators who we have developing them, because 98% of teachers said that they were appropriate to the grade and learning levels of their students and that they were effective learning tools for them.
If you want teachers in these days, with a high pressure on curricula across the country, to teach about something, particularly remembrance, you need to make it easy. So we provide them with high-quality tools tailored to the curricula of the provinces and with comprehensive teaching guides so that they have lesson plans, etc., to be able to teach it. So we're very pleased with how successful that has been over the last few years.
We also have a number of online features and resources that are used by students in their research projects, such as the Canadian Virtual War Memorial, which is the official registry of all Canadians who have died in service to the country, as well as the Heroes Remember website, where we have thousands of hours of interviews with veterans of all eras, and those have been edited into clips that are available for viewing not just across Canada, of course, but around the world.
In addition, we have been one of the lead departments in government in venturing into the social media field. Two years ago we began Facebook pages in English and French on October 14, four weeks before Remembrance Day, and by Remembrance Day we had 170,000 friends, four weeks later. Over the last couple of years that has grown to now over 500,000 friends on the Facebook pages. As well, we have YouTube channels that allow us to post videos related to veterans as well as to link to videos made by Canadian students.
More recently we have smartphone applications that allow Canadians with smartphones or on the computer to find out what is happening in remembrance across the country, what events are taking place in their communities or near their communities--time, location, etc.
The most recent advertising campaign last year during Veterans Week was particularly important to us because a large part of it was the “I am a veteran” campaign to assist Canadians in understanding that veterans come in all ages and they're from all eras in Canada. I think those have been particularly effective, and those we will continue again this year with some improvements.
As well in Veterans Week, we have been challenging Canadians with a campaign that asks them how they will remember. It is intended to be a call to action to Canadians in asking them to take an active part in honouring service.
Across the country we work with communities and all sorts of not-for-profit groups to assist them in organizing remembrance activities, ceremonies, events, learning activities. We also have three funding programs that can assist here. The Community Engagement Partnership Fund can provide funding to not-for-profit groups that are organizing events anywhere in the country. We have the cenotaph and monument restoration program, which can assist, again, non-profit groups and communities in restoring some of the over 6,000 cenotaphs and monuments across Canada. And we have a new program that came into place last November that can assist communities in building new cenotaphs and memorials at the community level.
Veterans Affairs provides leadership in organizing ceremonies in many parts of the country, including many here in the national capital region. We have a benefit program as well within the Canada Remembers program, and that is the program that provides funeral and burial assistance to eligible veterans and all veterans' next of kin. On honours and awards, we provide new medals in the case of some veterans who did not receive medals when they left service, medals that they had earned. As well, we can provide replacement medals for medals that have been lost or in some cases stolen.
We are also responsible for maintaining the graves of Canada's war dead--110,000 Canadians died in the two world wars--and we do that through our membership in the Commonwealth War Graves Commission and our funding of the commission. As well, we are responsible for maintaining approximately 250,000 veterans' graves. These are graves of Canadians who came back from military service and subsequently died and for a variety of reasons their funerals were paid for by the Government of Canada or their grave markers were erected at the expense of the Government of Canada.
Mr. Chair, I'll leave it at that.