It's an important question, and as I indicated earlier, your task is critical. I would reiterate, as I and others have said, how important it is that our national brand and our care of remembrance globally be recognized and financed to the extent that we can and that we need to. I would say that we need to, because I know that we can.
As it relates to how to do it, the world has changed in so many ways recently. That's important for us to lament in some ways, of course, but it's also for us to learn the lessons.
For example, you can see our ability today to meet virtually. All of us didn't have to sit on airplanes; we didn't have to take two or three days to do this and it's a very effective way to communicate. Let's think about ways we can do that to share the stories of those people who maybe, certainly if they're Second World War or First World War vets, or Korean vets, are not able to go to Ottawa to share their story. They're not able to go to Remembrance Day services, maybe even in their own town, but they could perhaps sit in front of a camera and do these sorts of things.
To the agencies that are here that are already digitizing those stories, I give you full credit.
I'll reiterate that point of the stories. The reason I think we commemorate is not just the collective great work that these people did; it's how much they gave up to do it. Many of us have lamented the fact that, woe are we, we have to stay inside for six months or a year and we haven't seen our family or our children. Imagine those young men, and women too, who didn't see their families for four or five years. Let's tell those stories about their experiences.
Sometimes when our young people, and we ourselves, are shown that experience in movies, they don't really show the trenches. They do not show the difficult days. They show the celebratory times in a French bistro or something like that. I think we need to be able to say, “Let's hear from these people.”
Another thing that's similar across all forces, the RCMP who serve in peacekeeping roles and North-West Mounted Police who served in roles overseas with different wars, is that they don't often come back and speak of it broadly and freely. Let's provide a space safe for them to do that so that we capture, in their words, and to the approval that they'll give us, their stories and their experiences.