Veterans Affairs Committee on Oct. 4th, 2011

[Don Meredith]

Thank you so much, Chair.

And thank you also, honourable members. It was great to be here. Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Greg Kerr]

We have some time until the next witnesses are here because we don't start until quarter to, so we can take a little break, unless there is any particular business you want to take a look at.

Okay, we'll break until about twenty to ten. Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Greg Kerr]

Could we reconvene? Our witnesses are here and we have a quorum, so that allows us to perhaps wrap up a little early today. Our Liberal member is not here, and we only have one missing here, one or two, so that's fine.

If we're all comfortable, then, I want to say thank you and welcome to a gentleman who we've certainly seen before at the committee. We've talked to him many times. We're very pleased to have back with us Derek Sullivan, director general of the Canada Remembers Division, and also, of course, Peter Mills, director of the Canada Remembers program.

We're very pleased to have you here this morning, gentlemen. Also, as you are familiar with, we like to hold our opening comments to about ten minutes, if possible, which gives the committee a lot of time to do the questions and answers. If we're all settled, I'll turn it over to you. Please proceed.

[Derek Sullivan, Director General, Canada Remembers Division, Department of Veterans Affairs]

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.

[The Chair, Conservative, Greg Kerr]

Thank you, Mr. Sullivan.

Mr. Mills, you have a little bit of time to add to that if you'd like to.

[Derek Sullivan]

So I didn't use it all?

[The Chair, Conservative, Greg Kerr]

Well, it was pretty close.

No, I was going to say, if there's anything that you want to add beyond what the paper has.... Or are you ready for questions? Either way....

[Derek Sullivan]

No, I think we can go straight to questions.

[The Chair, Conservative, Greg Kerr]

Thank you very much. That was very insightful.

We now go to the NDP. Mr. Stoffer.

[Peter Stoffer, NDP, Sackville—Eastern Shore, NS]

Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.

Derek and Peter, thank you once again, and to your staff and all the organizers who did the commemoration of the Battle of the Somme and Beaumont Hamel. You guys did an outstanding job. When you have six Newfoundlanders crying at every cenotaph they're at...it really was quite emotional. So thank you so much to your team for what you've done.

I have a couple of questions. It says you administer the honours and awards for the First World War, the Second World War, and the Korean War. Do you administer the modern-day medals, such as for Bosnia and Afghanistan, that are lost or misplaced? Do you also do any of the South African and Boer wars? That's my first question.

Secondly, you talked about the program that allows some funding for new community-based cenotaph construction. Lloyd Swick, who will be appearing before the committee soon, is a World War II veteran who is setting up a community base, which I am part of, to have a monument for the animals placed at Confederation Park. The problem is that because it's at Confederation Park, DVA is not permitted to assist in the funding of that program. I'm just wondering if you have the answer why. If not, could you let us know later?

It's quite frustrating. If it was anywhere else but federal land, DVA could assist, but because it's at Confederation Park, where the aboriginal monument is and others are, they're being denied some access to funding. Could you elaborate on that, please?

Thank you once again for all that you do.

[Peter Mills, Director, Canada Remembers, Department of Veterans Affairs]

I can certainly speak to honours and awards, Mr. Stoffer.

In terms of medals issued for post-Korean War service, that's the responsibility of the Directorate of Honours and Recognition within the Department of National Defence. Veterans Affairs' responsibilities are limited strictly to the First World War, the Second World War, and the Korean War. As well, we do not have responsibility for anyone who served in the South African wars, just those three conflicts that I've indicated.

[Derek Sullivan]

I was speaking with Mr. Swick yesterday, most recently, and a number of times before, and you're absolutely correct that the community war memorial program cannot assist with that particular project. The reason is the program, like many federal government programs, has a stacking restriction. It does not permit the stacking of federal contributions from different departments or different federal organizations. So in this case, if the monument is placed on crown land, the provision of that crown land for the monument is a federal contribution, and therefore our program is not permitted to also provide a contribution to the same project.

[Peter Stoffer, NDP, Sackville—Eastern Shore, NS]

Thank you.

[Irene Mathyssen, NDP, London—Fanshawe, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Mills and Mr. Sullivan, for a very informative presentation.

I have to say, I was at Monte Casino this summer and it was very beautiful. The work you do with the Commonwealth is much appreciated by visitors from across the world.

This is a very impressive program in terms of outreach and in appealing to kids. I used to teach, and I know how important this kind of outreach is. You've touched so many bases with the Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter components. What else would you like to do? Is there something more? We're looking at commemoration in the 21st century. Is there some additional kind of programming that you'd like to add to your lexicon?

[Derek Sullivan]

Wow, that's like asking a child if they'd like anything in the candy store.

[The Chair, Conservative, Greg Kerr]

Within a minute, please.

[Derek Sullivan]

Yes, there are always more things we can do. But the important thing to remember—and this is a key part of how we carry out our work—is that it is not about the Government of Canada remembering or honouring Canadians. Our work is focused on encouraging Canadians to express their thanks to veterans for their service and their contributions.

Most of our work is in fact not directed to the Government of Canada, to remembrance activities of our own; rather, our most important role is that of catalyst. That is where we, through things like the partnership programs, can assist Canadians in expressing their thanks themselves. That isn't really something that requires a lot more tools.

What it really requires is for us to find innovative ways to connect with Canadians. That's really what we're trying to do through work right at the community level, as well as through both the advertising and awareness campaigns and through social media such as Facebook and the other resources.

[The Chair, Conservative, Greg Kerr]

Thank you, Mr. Sullivan.

Now we'll move to Ms. Adams.

[Eve Adams, Conservative, Mississauga—Brampton South, ON]

I'd actually like to follow up on that. You have been doing wonderful work in reaching out to kids and to the general population. The Facebook pages really have taken off.

But what more could we be doing? If we were going to modernize, if we could have a wish list and look to some other countries and some best practices that you've seen, what would be at the top of your list?

[Derek Sullivan]

Actually, that's interesting, because a number of other countries are looking to what we're doing. That's been gratifying most recently, but there are certainly opportunities. For example, we know that in the coming years, with the centennial of the First World War on the horizon—the 100th anniversary will take place over a five-year period from 2014 to 2018—other countries have some pretty ambitious plans, most notably Australia. They haven't finalized what their plan is, but they have a list of proposals and some of them are quite significant.

I guess if there were something we could do that would enhance some of the overseas work we do.... We have, as I mentioned, about a million visitors a year at the Canadian National Vimy Memorial and the Beaumont Hamel Newfoundland Memorial. That's a wonderful way to project Canada in Europe. If there were enhancements we could make to our program of operating both of those memorials, including the visitor experience there, that would be a tremendous enhancement we could take advantage of.

If there's one thing that I would really like to see within Canada, it is even more ability to reach Canadians through the media all year round, but in particular during the fall period. For the last number of years we've been working in a different way, really: we're trying to bring remembrance to Canadians, rather than trying to bring Canadians to remembrance. We've been partnering with professional and amateur sports teams to do tributes to veterans before sports contests, whether it's for NHL teams or all of the major junior hockey leagues. We've now moved into university sports--university football, university hockey--and we've had just fabulous reactions from them.

That's an area that I think is particularly important for us to continue to expand, because there you're making remembrance part of the everyday lives of Canadians, rather than trying to drag them to where remembrance is, at monuments and at ceremonies.

[Eve Adams, Conservative, Mississauga—Brampton South, ON]

Mr. Sullivan, that is incredibly important.

Do you have any information about that one-off program with the projections of poppies on the building? It's a very remarkable program. I think it's something that, if you ever visualized it, you would remember and speak of for years to come. Can you give us a quick overview of that?

[Derek Sullivan]

Yes. Last year we did something that we had never done before. In Montreal we projected a virtual poppy field on the side of the Bell Centre, home of the Montreal Canadiens, my team—

[An hon. member]

Hey--

[Derek Sullivan]

—and we invited Canadians to text a particular number. When they did that, a poppy grew in the virtual poppy field in this massive projection on the side of the building.

We've been looking into how we could do that again this year, and not just there, because hopefully we can expand it to other places in the country. It can be a little pricey, so we're looking at ways of doing that in the most economical manner possible.

[Eve Adams, Conservative, Mississauga—Brampton South, ON]

I find that fascinating. To me that seems like quite the commemoration and really speaks to 21st century commemoration.