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Results: 31 - 45 of 342
Sean Smith
View Sean Smith Profile
Sean Smith
2021-05-10 16:41
The thing that really hits home with Vimy is the memorial itself and parts of that memorial. You cannot look upon that single female statue looking towards Givenchy, and not be touched by it.
If only we had some means of bringing a part of that memorial to the people—those 11,258 names that are engraved on that wall—where people could touch and feel and understand, they could see names that say so-and-so served as such-and-such because they joined at 14 and celebrated birthdays fighting at Vimy Ridge. Those are touchpoints that you cannot talk about that would get that emotion across.
View Andy Fillmore Profile
Lib. (NS)
View Andy Fillmore Profile
2021-05-10 17:15
You're going to wear that rank out. I know you're so busy just doing everything you can all the time.
To my colleagues, please google “Last Steps Memorial Arch” and take a look at the work—the Halifax arch, the Passchendaele arch. They're remarkable. I liked how you described them as portals connecting the two sides of the ocean.
You've also raised a number of times the army museum at the Halifax Citadel here in Halifax. I would encourage members also, if you have a spare minute, to google it, or better yet visit the army museum there. It covers the entire military history of Canada, with incredible relics and artifacts, coming right up to contemporary wars. Another friend, an Afghanistan war veteran, Jessica Wiebe, is an artist. She has an exhibit in the army museum called The Art of War. Her drawings are absolutely heartbreaking and moving. I went to her because this idea of commemoration has to carry through different generations, different conflicts, and also through peacetime.
Canada and the world lost a number of people last year with the tragic helicopter accident that was assigned to HMCS Fredericton. We had the Snowbird accident with Captain Jenn Casey. We do need to find ways to commemorate all of these men and women.
I want to now tie that need to a recurring theme that comes up in our committee, which is youth. How do we activate youth, get them involved? As Master Corporal Smith said, we don't just carry the memory in us, we instill it in our kids. We put it in our youth and they carry it, and then they pass it along.
We heard ideas about curriculum, about travel. The Vimy 100, maybe there's something that could continue to go on for schoolkids.
Maybe I'll start with you, Lieutenant-Colonel MacLellan. Have you had any thoughts about this idea of youth, of travel, of commemorating people who have lost their lives in modern times?
Corinne MacLellan
View Corinne MacLellan Profile
Corinne MacLellan
2021-05-10 17:18
That's okay. My CO would have corrected you, for sure, but that's not my role.
Andy, thank you for recognizing Captain Casey. Jenn was a very close friend of mine. I feel her with me right now. One of the greatest honours of my life was to read the family's statement when she passed.
This would be so meaningful to her, that we're talking about educating youth. It was her daily job. She was a public affairs officer, but she also was very instrumental in the interactive programs on the ground for the Snowbirds in public education and media relations.
I'm trying to answer your question. It's hard for me to get it out because it's an emotional time. We're just one week away from the anniversary of her death, right now.
When she died she was doing Operation Inspiration and looking forward to the ways that we commemorate and at those unique things that we can do to engage youth. This is a legacy of hers.
What it inspired me to do was a program called Operation Bluenose. We asked everybody to light up blue the first weekend of the sailing of the Bluenose. It was to give everybody an opportunity just to shingle something for us all to hang on to. We had a rough go here in Nova Scotia in the last year. It was surprising to me, to see how many people.... Obviously we had the Cyclone thing. We engaged all of the families. We engaged communities. People were pulling out their blue Christmas lights and whatnot and putting them on their front deck in the middle of July.
I'm off topic a little bit. I know a lot of the witnesses here have mentioned ways to engage, whether that's through digital media or telling stories.
This will be my last comment. One thing we did during the Flanders work that I was doing was a poem exchange for In Flanders Fields between a school in Poperinge, which is very near where John McCrae's military hospital was, along with a school here in Halifax. Each class read a stanza and then they had a Q and A afterwards. Some of those kids are still in touch today.
That's a very long-winded answer to say I think there are so many ways that we can do this. But it is absolutely something that's not going to happen naturally. We have to put effort into it.
I'm so pleased to hear all of the people speaking here of the work that they're doing. I want to thank you all for your service.
Lee Windsor
View Lee Windsor Profile
Lee Windsor
2021-05-10 17:23
It's a complicated issue, to say the least. I think the differentiation between them might speak to what Lieutenant-Colonel MacLellan was just addressing about how to engage youth. In any given classroom, you have 30 kids with a variety of interests, some interested in humanitarian aid, when it comes to, say, a world issues class. Imagine a classroom could pick from a roster of missions and students pick the one that interests them the most. One is interested in peacekeeping and in the establishment of UN peacekeeping with UNEF I in Suez, one has a parent who was in Afghanistan and they want to learn about the Afghan mission and another is a second-generation immigrant from Central Africa and they want to know about the Congo mission.
So let the students make a decision about what they're going to study in the classroom, based on that personal connection, and let them talk to each other about what makes them similar and different. I think what's similar about them is that every soldier who's dispatched, every soldier, sailor or aircrew member, are all doing the same job. A veteran is a veteran whether you serve on active operations or not. But there is a difference in the way they serve, and I think it's time to be honest with Canadians about how complex and diverse that is. So let's embrace the diversity, but we're going to have to talk to people about it in a complex way, and not assume they're too ignorant to get it. I think Canadians are a lot smarter than we give them credit for.
View Rachel Blaney Profile
NDP (BC)
Thank you for that.
Mr. Gregory, you talked about some of the work that's being done. I'm very interested in the Walk for Remembrance and Peace. I'm writing notes very quickly, so if I've missed anything, I apologize.
Could you outline how that works? Is that walk something we're engaging Canadians to do in remembrance as well? I know it's important to have it there.
You talked a lot about youth. This is something that, of course, I'm very passionate about. How do we make sure youth remember? We only do things when we remember what the past is. This is so important.
Steve Gregory
View Steve Gregory Profile
Steve Gregory
2021-05-05 16:46
I couldn't agree with you more.
I have a deep concern that for our children, our youth, their world is getting smaller and smaller. To the extent that we can help them understand what makes peace possible and the role of our profession of arms, our soldiers, men and women, in making that peace possible, I think they'd have a different appreciation of the need for commemoration.
We're framing our communication to youth not about our military and not about remembrance for the sake of remembering soldiers; that's a difficult sell to high schools. It's the truth. As a matter of fact, in Bloomberg, Max Hastings wrote about the decline of education on military history in U.S. universities. It's catastrophic. In fact, in Canada, there are very few provincial curricula that include military history. The way to get to youth from our perspective is to pursue a conversation about what makes peace and productive, prosperous democratic societies possible, and what role the military does have in them.
It's hoped the Walk for Remembrance and Peace will be an economic engine that engages civilians in Canada as well as in Italy. It has had a lot of success. The governor of Sicily signed an MOU with the Italian military to dedicate all landing sites as heritage sites. That means funding is going to go to those sites for the purpose of establishing more communication with, obviously, the allies. For them, it's tourism.
View John Brassard Profile
CPC (ON)
Thank you, Mr. Chair, and thank you, all, for being here.
It's good to see a couple of you again. I think you were here, if I recall, on the benefits. No, it wasn't benefits. It was another subject that we were dealing with, but Sayward and Mr. Soulière, good to see you again.
Mr. Gregory, I want to pick up on what Ms. Blaney was talking about in terms of youth outreach. You talked a lot about the why. In previous panels that we've had we've heard about youth outreach and how important it's going to be for commemoration going forward. I'm wondering if you could speak to the how. Maybe a couple of others could weigh in on this too. How do we best reach youth in order to ensure that the type of commemoration issues that you're talking about are sustained for future generations?
Mr. Gregory.
Steve Gregory
View Steve Gregory Profile
Steve Gregory
2021-05-05 16:49
Thank you, sir.
We've had limited experience. We're at the beginning of a process. We ran the first International Forum on Peace, Security and Prosperity in 2019, and our last one was this past February. We had 831 participants, 23 countries, 22 military colleges. Ambassador Rae from the UN spoke to the kids as did Senator Loffreda. It was by all accounts a success.
We believe we can create the biggest peace conference in the world. That's our goal. We can do so by just grassroots knocking on doors. Just imagine some of the largest organizations with outreach to high schools. Their database of teachers is less than a thousand. There are 200,000 high school teachers in this country. In fact, that number is a little shy.
We have a lot of work to do with respect to creating a database of teachers in social science, in history, in ethics and in being a better citizen. Just to reach out to these individuals, we funded an ad that's going into Canadian Teacher Magazine. We're building a database through a number of collaborations. It's our expectation that it's going to be a ton of hard work calling on individual schools.
View John Brassard Profile
CPC (ON)
There are a lot of individual schools that take that on, on their own. Where I am in Barrie just north of Toronto, Simcoe County District School Board, for example, really engages with youth. There were a couple of thousand who went to Vimy 100, for example. If I hear you correctly then, it's just a matter of funnelling all of those resources into a one-stop shop where we can get that information out to those schools to help them participate. Is that correct?
Jean-Guy Soulière
View Jean-Guy Soulière Profile
Jean-Guy Soulière
2021-05-05 16:53
It depends on who you want to reach.
I haven't heard of social media being used to educate the youth. That is critical. If we could use social media to educate, that would be a start. For other generations, there are other methods.
We've found that we are reaching our membership through social media more and more, and we're talking about the older population. The younger population can't live without it, so maybe that's the way to start.
View William Amos Profile
Lib. (QC)
View William Amos Profile
2021-05-05 16:58
Thank you, Mr. Harris. That's tremendous testimony.
I'm going to pivot, given the limited time here, and ask an open question, a short one.
Mention has been made of the power of social media and the importance of connecting with youth. What do you think of the idea of connecting to younger Canadians through video game producers?
William Woodburn
View William Woodburn Profile
William Woodburn
2021-05-05 16:59
Mr. Amos, we've already been investigating, not necessarily video games, but actually getting active video into our ships. Someone could put their phone up to the ship, and the next thing they'd know, they'd be looking through their phone back into a battle of the Second World War. Things like that, which may be more specific to different items, I think would be tremendous in attracting youth to come and see what's out there. That's one idea.
View Gary Vidal Profile
CPC (SK)
Thank you, Mr. Chair.
I want to start by saying how much I've appreciated the testimony of all of you today. The information provided has been fascinating and valuable.
Solutions that come from the local community level, where it's your lived experience and you're seeing what goes on, are always more valuable than solutions being imposed on somebody from a distance somewhere. I appreciate the testimony you've brought and the comments in response to the questions you've already been asked.
For the Arctic Fresh folks, Mr. Recinos and Mr. Cendou, I so much appreciate your entrepreneurial approach to solving problems that talk about local economy and that talk about opportunity for people in your communities. That's a conversation I've been having for years in northern Saskatchewan, a long way away from where you are.
I could listen to you talk about what you've done for hours. I'm fascinated with what you're doing, and I appreciate it. However, I want to change the focus to hear a different perspective for a second, just for something new.
I looked at the information on your website, your story and your history. You talk about your three pillars, the pillars of health, community and youth. I want to drill a little bit into or ask your opinion maybe on the value of educating your youth relative to the context of healthy eating, the entrepreneurship, the.... It's so important that we educate our youth to make that long-term change in the context of all this. I'd be curious as to your perspective on that.
I'll start with Mr. Recinos first.
Chief Joseph, I want to prepare you that I'm going to come back to you and ask the same question in the context of your lived experience, as well.
Merlyn Recinos
View Merlyn Recinos Profile
Merlyn Recinos
2021-05-04 12:55
Thank you.
Definitely one of our pillars is youth, and it's really about how we build that capacity.
Not everybody grew up eating vegetables in our communities. Not everybody grew up eating this sort of food, so how do we build capacity locally so we're able to utilize those? Most of the stuff that is highly subsidized right now are things that we're used to eating in our southern communities, but not so much what has been historically eaten in our communities and now.
One of the things that we do is every time.... We do cooking classes at the community hall. We teach how to utilize different things, how to make different recipes. We incorporate traditional hunting food, like char, caribou and things like that, with other things, like vegetables and different things like that. I'll give you a quick example.
One time we had a bunch of broccoli in our community, so we started to teach how to make different types of broccoli salads. Before, in the sell swaps, everybody would sell poutine in the evenings. When people were trying to get a little bit, they were selling poutine. Now they sell broccoli salad with clubhouses. It's something the community really likes. They enjoy the different flavours, the different types of broccoli salads that can be made. You have to have that. You have to focus on that, building that capacity locally.
The youth are our future. We really need to focus on that, as well, but we also do it in a business capacity sense. We're teaching different youth from different communities how to start and run their own business. We partnered up with Makigiaqta. We cover their costs. We help them with logistics. We help them make partnerships with suppliers, and things like that, so that they can start operating their small business in their community.
Once people start to see that somebody else is doing it, they want to do it too, and it creates this ripple effect. Now you're learning how to eat, you're learning how to cook different things, but at the same time, you're also learning different activities that are going to be self-sufficient for you and your community.
Roberta Joseph
View Roberta Joseph Profile
Roberta Joseph
2021-05-04 12:58
As mentioned, youth are really key and an important part of our community. We invest a lot in our youth. Various youth have different interests, so we try to meet their level of interest. We had many youth who were interested in working on the farm and learning about agriculture through the training program. It's key and important to our community that one day they'll be taking over management of the farm.
We look forward to when that time comes, because we continue to invest in the farm heavily. It's important that we have some level of food security, and it's providing a much stronger and growing economy in our community.
Results: 31 - 45 of 342 | Page: 3 of 23

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