Veterans Affairs committee  Certainly. Thanks very much. First of all, to reintroduce myself, my name is Brad Hall. I'm the secretary-general of the Canadian Agency of the Commonwealth War Graves Commission. It's a title that perhaps suggests a large staff and a large salary to match. I want to assure you

Veterans Affairs committee  First of all, let me go back to the non-repatriation policy that was given to the commission by the participating governments. It covers only the First World War and the Second World War. What Canada might wish to do, outside of this two-war period, is entirely up to Canada as a

Veterans Affairs committee  They did indeed. I assume it's because, as a UN action, there were some countries that weren't particularly well disposed towards the Commonwealth as a group. Therefore, they set up their own independent organization for that cemetery, which is in Busan.

Veterans Affairs committee  We are. We're very sensitive to the pressures upon which governments are finding themselves. Of course, although Canada provides 10% of the overall budget, the United Kingdom provides 79%, and it comes from the department that Brigadier Le Grys represents. We recognize that a

Veterans Affairs committee  No, we do not.

Veterans Affairs committee  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

Veterans Affairs committee  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

Veterans Affairs committee  Oh, absolutely.

Veterans Affairs committee  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

Veterans Affairs committee  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 in

Veterans Affairs committee  None.

Veterans Affairs committee  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 approve

Veterans Affairs committee  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

Veterans Affairs committee  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 Aff

Veterans Affairs committee  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.