Veterans Affairs Committee on Nov. 3rd, 2011

[Wladyslaw Lizon, Conservative, Mississauga East—Cooksville, ON]

What would you say are the greatest challenges you face in the work you do?

[Bradley Hall]

Well, I think the greatest challenge is really time and space. We have 1,200 employees worldwide. We work in 150 countries. In any given time, there are some places you can't go to. I've just come back from a couple of years in the United Kingdom, where I was called another great title, “director of outer area” in the United Kingdom, which basically consisted of all the war graves in eastern Africa, the Indian subcontinent, the Middle East, the Far East, and the Caribbean. I went to Iraq. There are 40,000 people on a memorial in Iraq. We have several war cemeteries there.

In the U.K., we were under some pressure, as it was felt that some progress was being made in Iraq, to go and do something about these graves. I went to Baghdad. I went to Fallujah, and we did a little bit of very rudimentary maintenance to make sure that at least the outline of these cemeteries were still there. Obviously we're quite aware of optics and everything else. We're not going to go into a war-torn country, rebuild the walls, and put in irrigation and everything else while the people just outside of it are starving.

But wars, disease—if you can think of the kind of work that you put into making sure that grubs don't come on your own lawns wherever you happen to live, you can imagine what we do around the world. It's natural hazards like that, and aging structures. I mean, many of our structures were built by the pre-eminent architects of the day just after the First World War; the Menin Gate for example, if you've ever been there, and Thiepval, which is the largest one in the world, on the Somme—they require constant maintenance.

[Wladyslaw Lizon, Conservative, Mississauga East—Cooksville, ON]

Is there participation and cooperation by the respective countries where these cemeteries are located?

[Bradley Hall]

Oh, absolutely.

[Wladyslaw Lizon, Conservative, Mississauga East—Cooksville, ON]

That would include maintaining them and also financial assistance.

[Bradley Hall]

Well, the financial assistance comes from grants from the participating governments. But we also are left, quite frankly, legacies from people from time to time, especially in the U.K., where there is a charitable status for donations to the commission.

But as for the countries themselves, occasionally there's something.... Before I got into the business, I put no thought into it, quite frankly. As a soldier, I'd go over somewhere and say, well, isn't France doing a good job, or isn't Canada doing a good job, or something like that. But every one of these other organizations where we operate often has its own war graves association. In Norway, for example, there's a little bit of quid pro quo. It's the same with the Dutch and the Germans.

So they help that way, but not necessarily with financial assistance.

[The Chair, Conservative, Greg Kerr]

Thank you very much, Mr. Hall.

We're now going to Mr. Casey.

[Sean Casey, Liberal, Charlottetown, PE]

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Good morning.

We know that the budget at the Department of Veterans Affairs has been decreased by over $200 million. The only witness who was allowed to testify told us that this isn't going to come from veterans. But it has to come from somewhere.

Do you know whether your envelope is going to be affected by this reduction in the DVA budget?

[Bradley Hall]

It will not be affected to the extent that...to what I spoke about earlier. We're talking flatline requests plus inflation plus exchange rates. That is all we are asking for.

In fact, our new CEO came over; we met with the deputy minister about three weeks ago. She certainly indicated that there would be no effect with that.

Veterans Affairs has been a very strong supporter of the commission. The funding formula in the percentage with the war graves was in fact proposed by Sir Robert Borden at the Imperial War Conference in 1917, and it has remained constant that way.

[Sean Casey, Liberal, Charlottetown, PE]

Over and above that $226-million reduction, the department, along with all federal government departments, is now going through a process where they have to submit a 5% plan and a 10% plan.

What indications have you received from the department as to whether you will be impacted by the strategic operating review that's presently under way?

[Bradley Hall]

None.

[Sean Casey, Liberal, Charlottetown, PE]

You received no indication that you will or will not be affected.

[Bradley Hall]

No, I'm sorry, I misspoke. We have received no indication that we will be affected.

As I say, we just came back from the deputy minister. We're going through the screening process of funding now. We expect the budget that we submit to the participating governments to be approved this year.

[Sean Casey, Liberal, Charlottetown, PE]

I understand that they're multiple funding partners. If your expectations aren't met--and the direction is that your commission is no different from the CBC or any other department that has to share the burden of the deficit--what will it mean to the other funding partners and to the work you do?

[Bradley Hall]

My short answer for the first part is that I don't know.

In the past, we've had years when one particular government maybe was not quite ready to ante up, and there was a lot of back and forth and everything else. Eventually we'd come to an agreement as to what was feasible from all the various partners. I don't expect that to change this year.

[Sean Casey, Liberal, Charlottetown, PE]

All right.

In your opening remarks and in the material provided, there's a reference to a five-year renewal that tasks you to conduct 12-year cyclical inspections.

Is this five-year renewal a binding contract that includes dollar amounts?

[Bradley Hall]

It is. Again just to clarify, cyclical inspections are how we do our job. We have these war graves in all these different cemeteries all over the place. We have a simple matrix set up to make sure that every five or six years we go around and make sure they're okay.

Veterans Affairs has provided us with a contract that is fixed at $700,000 Canadian per year for the next...it's now four years, since we're coming up to the end of the first year. From that money we have been tasked to do three things: conduct cyclical inspections of the veterans' graves that we have found and update the database, conduct maintenance of those graves within the envelope of that $700,000 that's been provided, and continue our research into other cemeteries around the country that might have veterans.

Mr. Stoffer might be interested to know that we just came back from a tour in Nova Scotia last year, to little cemeteries all over, and we found something like 400 veterans' headstones in little single cemeteries in the woods, behind somebody's house, or something like that.

When we did this project, we concentrated on the big ones in urban centres, then moved into the medium-sized places, and now we're into the smaller communities around the country.

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

Hear, hear.

[The Chair, Conservative, Greg Kerr]

Very briefly, Mr. Casey.

[Sean Casey, Liberal, Charlottetown, PE]

How would a 10% cut in that $700,000 a year affect your work on that project?

[Bradley Hall]

We would not be able to take care of those graves. I would probably sacrifice the maintenance versus the continuation of the checking on the status to make sure they're still there. So it would affect our ability to maintain those veterans' graves.

[The Chair, Conservative, Greg Kerr]

Thank you very much, Mr. Hall.

Now we're over to Mr. Daniel.

[Joe Daniel, Conservative, Don Valley East, ON]

Thank you very much.

Thanks for coming.

My question is on a different tack. As we're approaching the 200th anniversary of the War of 1812 and the 100th anniversary of the beginning of World War I, are there any special measures your organization is taking to commemorate these milestones?

[Bradley Hall]

Absolutely. Perhaps I can separate them first, though. We have no mandate for the War of 1812; it's outside our charter. But we are using the period 2014-2018 as an outreach and educational focus for our commemorative activities during that period. Incidentally, of course, within that time will fall the 100th anniversary of the establishment of the commission.

It's a matter of scale. Remember that the commission is a marking and maintenance organization, and we are tasked to do that. That is our major commemorative activity. We have five people in our head office in the U.K., and I have one guy who does 25% of his work in outreach here to do commemorative things outside that charter.

Veterans Affairs, for example, in their Canada Remembers division, I think has 50-plus people, or something like that. So there's no way we're going to duplicate the work that Canada does for a Canadian audience.

Interestingly enough--Brigadier Le Grys was here--we do a lot of de facto or default work for the Government of the United Kingdom, because 78% of our funding comes from them. Some of those educational activities we do include producing a cricket video, for example—I don't know if you're a cricket player--for incorporating cricket figures who were successful and who died in the wars and are buried overseas.

We did a thing called One Boy, which follows one 16-year-old from Leeds and his experiences in the First World War until his death.

We have done one for South Africa called Some Go Early. We're doing one now for Canada. We're in the process of clustering our sites and producing almost like a map of those cemeteries related to battles that occurred around the Battle of Arras, which of course was where Vimy occurred. Then you can see the various things, including where we exhumed the Unknown Soldier.

We have storyboards. We're on Twitter. We're on Facebook. We have commission newsletters. We have all sorts of things. The only gap in our coverage from a Canadian context is that the lingua franca of the commission is English, because we work in 150 countries, but my office tries to pick up the gap from the commission point of view for the francophone audience, the Quebeckers, the Franco-Ontarians, etc., here in Canada. Veterans Affairs Canada of course is established to do all this commemorative stuff in Canada's two official languages.

So we don't want to duplicate the work. Is that...?

[Joe Daniel, Conservative, Don Valley East, ON]

Yes.