Thank you for the question, Mrs. Lalonde.
This is a complicated issue, I think, because of the tremendous degree.... Well, it's complicated, but not terribly.
I think the core issue—and perhaps I wasn't clear enough in my opening remarks—is that there's a tremendous amount of prior public knowledge about the First World War and the Second World War in our society. People know about them. People are familiar with Vimy. People are familiar with Juno Beach. In part, they're familiar with them because in Remembrance Week, the news media outlets carry stories from these places. The collective memory of those events endures, even as the generations pass on.
We don't do that kind of media engagement or education work to explain why Canadians deployed into Bihac or Drvar, or why they went to the Medak Pocket. Certain people know—people with family connections, people with special interest—but it's not mainstream knowledge. It's not part of Canadian curriculum.
One of the issues we're working on here at UNB's Gregg Centre is to try to find ways to integrate it into curriculum in every province. The simple way to do it is really an easy way to do it. That's why I mentioned, at the end of my remarks, that education is really the key. If people don't remember, if we don't have a national collective memory of this, we have to build something from scratch. We have to build a national education program, because otherwise there's nothing to remember, except by that small number of people who endured this.
I guess that's the heart of it. I think the work we all have to do together—those of us who are interested in recognizing modern veterans—is to identify good practices for public education. That maybe is the biggest difference with the way that we used to do things in commemoration.
