National Defence committee  I think one of the challenges the legions have nationally is that they have this great poppy fund that they do, but the mandate within their poppy fund says it doesn't fit their criteria to help injured soldiers or veterans. I mean, it's a perfect fit, and I think it's something

National Defence committee  I have one, and I think you guys will probably all remember it. Two years ago we had our winter sports clinic here, and we had one fellow who was extremely struck with PTSD. The whole family was falling apart. I remember his wife came to us and said, “You know, this is the firs

National Defence committee  I just did a presentation to all of the eastern Ontario schools for special ed, and basically it's exactly what you say. But we encourage all the schools to do it, because we have the facility. We just finished building—thank you to the federal government for the accessibility gr

National Defence committee  In the United States we call it “miracles on a mountainside”, and we can call it that here in Canada, too, because we have good mountains. It's just the chemistry that works. They're concentrating so much on trying to learn a new skill, and basically a lot of the stuff that's on

National Defence committee  Can I just interject—

National Defence committee  It's basically just by word of mouth. I'm trying to even find the right people in JPSU to be able to put it forward. We do have a number of names this year from JPSU, and we're certainly going to give them the information that's available. It's just more of the knowledge getting

National Defence committee  We have run an adaptive ski school in Calabogie for the past 10 years. We have 40 participants. We have 80 volunteers who basically work with.... It's an eight-week program, and we bring children from age 3, 4, 5, whatever, to teach them the same thing. What we're teaching here i

National Defence committee  I just wanted to add that when we first started this, when I came back from Colorado a number of years ago and I wanted to start this whole program, we talked about a national event, like we do in Snowmass, Colorado every year. We've done it for the last 28 years. We were told th

National Defence committee  I'll interject here. It's Soldier On that decides. This year they decided on one clinic in Canada, and they're running it at Mount Washington, but they're doing an international event at Whistler. But they decide where they're going to have the venue, so that's basically really s

National Defence committee  For this event, it's soldiers and veterans.

National Defence committee  What happens, if you're part of Soldier On and are part of their event, is that they go to the commanding officer and are granted that whole week with pay to come to the winter sports clinic. However, if they come through us, they can go to their commanding officer, but they may

National Defence committee  When we have a soldier who goes off to war and he's gone for 18 months and comes back with no legs, we feel that maybe there's a bit of trauma there for the spouse and the children getting their father back. What we have tried to do is to invite the spouse to also partake in tha

National Defence committee  As an organization, we do our own private fundraising, as I think Clay has indicated. We have a budget of $75,000 this year, and basically that money is used to house and feed all our volunteers, who actually donate a week of their vacation to come up and be part of this whole th

National Defence committee  We were able to find eight soldiers who could take part.

National Defence committee  That's one of the reasons we're here, to inform you. We have everything: we have all the volunteers; it's at no cost to the Canadian government, no cost to the participants. Basically all we need to do is find a way to get to these soldiers and help them. That's where we are righ