I very briefly glossed over the statistics. I talked about the 1.7 million Commonwealth war dead from the two world wars, for which we are responsible. Fully 700,000 of that 1.7 million are named on memorials.
That means their actual grave was never found or it is deemed to be unmaintainable for whatever reason. That's a huge number. You get these cases every year. The most recent example is Private Johnston, who was just re-interred in northern France. There's a building site going on. Remains are unearthed or people are walking along the Somme, they trip over a set of remains. It happens all the time.
When I said that we get involved with these things, it’s because the commission is so well known in Europe and we have our offices there. Normally we get initial custody of whatever remains occur--if they're easily identifiable as war remains, be it through a badge or something like that. We then contact the appropriate government, and then that particular government takes whatever action they feel is necessary to go through the identification process.
Canada has been very aggressive, through their directorate of history and heritage at National Defence, in doing forensic audits to try to identify through bits of DNA, etc., for this to occur.
But there is no active program like the Americans have, for example, to go out and find or search for them, no.