GoC Obstructive as always

[FSTO]

Once, just one bloody time could the GoC be proactive and give its CAF members the recognition and support they deserve instead of making these same people fight tooth and nail for it?

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/politics/article-rwanda-canada-veterans-forgotten-mission/

Same as getting our sunken warships a war grave designation to protect them from salvage pirates. This should be dead easy (an order in council would do) but we need to have lobbyists and petitions for the GoC to do anything.

https://globalnews.ca/news/4123354/matt-gurney-canadian-war-ship-graves/

All this fighting with our own government does nothing but foster anger and resentment from the people and their families who did the dirty business on behalf of same government.

 

[FSTO]

Why do the people who sign up to serve this country have to fight tooth and nail against the faceless suits to gain the support they are entitled to?

https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/metis-veterans-canada-aboriginal-1.5066577

Excerpt
They were the forgotten among the forgotten.
Nearly 20 years ago, when Veterans Affairs Canada documented the "discrimination and outright fraud" perpetrated against the country's Indigenous war veterans, it deliberately excluded former Métis soldiers.
David Chartrand, vice-president of the Métis National Council, said he could never understand "the insult," nor why senior Veterans Affairs officials fought so hard for years against compensating those former soldiers who risked their lives for Canada during the Second World War and the Korea conflict.
Bureaucrats were so determined to block compensation for Métis, in fact, that when the Métis National Council and other organizations wanted access to federal government files that could have proved their claims of systemic discrimination, they were blocked.
The department's own internal records dismissed the issue this way: "Métis veterans did not face the same administrative realities as First Nations veterans."


Veterans are much more entitled to their entitlements than many of the POS politicians that are elected to "lead" us.

 

[Rifleman62]

Agree with you. I am sure you are aware of this in Budget 2019: a one-time $30 million investment to recognize the contribution of Métis veterans in the Second World War. No mention of Korea. Weren't there problems with the Veterans Land Act?

One of Metis Vets died last month. He landed on 6 Jun 44, was overrun and captured by the SS on 8 Jun, (one of the lucky ones that didn't get murdered) survived being strafed by a P-51 as he was marched to the rear.

I met him several times. A quiet, polite man.

https://www.facebook.com/notes/canadian-army/francis-william-godon-1924-2019-m%C3%A9tis-d-day-veteran-passes-75-years-after-harrow/2066327373459230/

 

[TimneyTime]

Once, just one bloody time could the GoC be proactive and give its CAF members the recognition and support they deserve instead of making these same people fight tooth and nail for it?

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/politics/article-rwanda-canada-veterans-forgotten-mission/

Same as getting our sunken warships a war grave designation to protect them from salvage pirates. This should be dead easy (an order in council would do) but we need to have lobbyists and petitions for the GoC to do anything.

https://globalnews.ca/news/4123354/matt-gurney-canadian-war-ship-graves/

All this fighting with our own government does nothing but foster anger and resentment from the people and their families who did the dirty business on behalf of same government.

100% agree

 

[Cloud Cover]

Agree with you. I am sure you are aware of this in Budget 2019: a one-time $30 million investment to recognize the contribution of Métis veterans in the Second World War. No mention of Korea. Weren't there problems with the Veterans Land Act?

One of Metis Vets died last month. He landed on 6 Jun 44, was overrun and captured by the SS on 8 Jun, (one of the lucky ones that didn't get murdered) survived being strafed by a P-51 as he was marched to the rear.

I met him several times. A quiet, polite man.

https://www.facebook.com/notes/canadian-army/francis-william-godon-1924-2019-m%C3%A9tis-d-day-veteran-passes-75-years-after-harrow/2066327373459230/

RIP 

What brave men.

 

[FJAG]

Not to minimize this one issue, I think the problem we have is that we seem to be lacking any coordinated agency which is responsible for telling our story to the public.

When I first read this article I said to myself "well, what does D Hist and Heritage have on this?" My first problem was finding the website since the change to the new horrible public facing Canada/DND website has rolled out. If I hadn't known this was under D Hist and googled that I would never have found it. As expected, their website about the mission was superficial to say the least (as were all the other mission pages).

DND has various agencies that deal with past missions including at the Canadian Defence Academy. There are numerous scholarly papers and operational documents scattered throughout our system which are very informative but not outward facing on the internet in any easily searchable database or front end. (Just try going to the Canada.ca website and type in "Rwanda" and see what you get-- hint: 11,886 unsorted results [some of which actually had some useful information]) One has to hunt and peck ones way around to recover maybe 2% of what's actually available within DND. On top of that there is much additional information on much older operations in archives that's not in an easily recoverable electronic format.

We are quickly losing our history due to no one actually caring about making it accessible. And that's an internal problem not a general government one (well maybe the crappy Canadian Government website is but that's not a politician's fault -- that's a civil service issue)

Sorry for the  :highjack:. Just a pet peeve of mine.

:cheers:

 

[Colin Parkinson]

History and heritage. When I spoke of it, people acknowledge the issue but seem to befuddled as to what to do, it does not dealt with as it's not a priority. I am afraid we have become functionaires and lack people who could think of such things as this:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monuments,_Fine_Arts,_and_Archives_program

In the midst of the greatest war in Human History.

 

[Journeyman]

We are quickly losing our history due to no one actually caring about making it accessible.

One group making 'the good fight' is the Canadian Foreign Intelligence History Project (CFIHP) at Carleton.  They have started an online petition to get greater access to Cold War intelligence documents, which was noted in a Jim Bronskill (National Post) article yesterday.

[Excerpts only;  complete article at LINK

Researchers fight to publicize secret Canadian Cold War archive
[Alan] Barnes cites the importance of government transparency in urging people to sign an online parliamentary petition to the prime minister aimed at ensuring people will be able to see the documents.

The prime minister’s bureaucrats are hoarding a trove of decades-old records that chronicle Canada’s Cold War intelligence history, say security researchers who are pushing to make the files publicly accessible.  They’re puzzled as to why the Privy Council Office has not handed the extensive collection — which touches on everything from Iron Curtain defectors to possible Soviet invasion — to Library and Archives Canada for preservation and public release.

Many of the old paper documents are of great historical significance but have not been preserved or handled properly, said [Wesley] Wark, who teaches at the University of Ottawa. “They sit moldering away.”

Mr Barnes has noted that the article has already spurred an uptick in signatures.  As of this morning, it successfully passed the requisite 500 in order to be presented officially to Parliament (requiring them to provide a written response)… but the more the merrier.

Access to the e-petition is available here for anyone interested.

 

[Rifleman62]

Another new project outside of the GoC is Project '44  https://www.project44.ca/what-we-do

I have spoken to them with an offer to assist with our regimental history. They have no funding, not even a Canada Council grant. IMO a spectacular project. Look them up, join their mailing list (also on Twitter & Facebook) and see if you can help.

The Canadian Research and Mapping Association (CRMA) is a non-profit and Veteran led organization which specializes in digital preservation, collection management systems, and mapping military history.

 

[FJAG]

Both awesome projects that prove my point that the Government isn't doing enough especially when you consider the fact that The Library and Archives Canada Act mandates that the government preserve records.

When I worked for three years on the JAG's Information Management Project I was able to delve deep into the bowels of the field of the governments records management system and as far as DND was concerned that, at best, we used LAC as a dumping ground of barely organized information and at worst ignored the rules and procedures and had completely ignored the management of electronic records (In Halifax I was shown racks of large computer discs which were the records relating to the Frigate manufacturing program and advised that the media was all deteriorating which really wasn't a big issue because the computers and software needed to read the tapes didn't exist anymore)

At it's heart, history is a process that depends on records management to facilitate orderly retrieval. Whenever we get to budget and people management crises, records management personnel and systems are amongst the first to be cut.

That makes me wonder. When I worked on the Somalia Inquiry, there were massive amounts of records retrieved and fairly well catalogued and organized--I wonder what ever happened to them? To follow on, is anyone cataloguing and storing all of our Afghanistan experience?

:brickwall:

 

[dapaterson]

We've eliminated the clerks who did the low level information management, and made it part of everyone's job.  Of course, we don't train people to do it properly, so key Information of Business Value (or whatever the catchphrase of the day is) does not get properly recorded in systems of record.

Much of that (to me) appears to be the combat arms (& equivalents in the RCN and RCAF) assumption that they can do anything, without any training, so we can just eliminate all those pesky support positions and preserve their positions.  Of course, it's never that simple, and necessary expertise (whether in info mgt or other aspects) gets lost.

 

[63 Delta]

Rifleman62, thank you very much for the shoutout to our project. Funding is certainly a difficult venture. There are not a lot of government grants for history and heritage, and they require a history of previous projects which can make it difficult for new innovators to come along.

FJAG, your comments about losing our history is why we started our project. We realized that there was no one place to go to find a good and full understanding of the Battle of Normandy.

So, we created our own framework.

The foundation begins with original scanned maps from Normandy. 1:50,000 and 1:100,000 maps are geo-referenced and mosaiced into seamless basemaps.
War Diaries of the First Canadian Army are then meticulously OCR’d (converted from picture to text) and edited to reflect the original war diary.

The War Diaries then provide the location data of all the units of the First Canadian Army. These positions are plotted using the maps.
All of this data is then stored in proper databases.

What this will allow is anyone to view the entire Battle of Normandy, and focusing on the Canadian Army, really be able to understand what, when and where across the 87 days of combat.

To date we have:
1. Scanned 400 maps
2. Scanned 5000 pages of war diaries, documents, photos,
3. Converted 70+ war diaries to text totaling over 2000 pages and 1 million words
4. Plotted 20,000 positions including all units of the Allies and Germans at the Division level, and all the major infantry, armoured, engineer, anti tank, artillery, LAA, and recce regiments/brigades, as well as the RCAF Sqn airfields, and units of Force J and the RCN.

It's our feeling that if we can make our history a bit more accessible, and a bit easier to understand, it will draw in more Canadians. Not everyone wants to make the pilgrimage to the LAC, or head down to the Col Stacey building and go through the DHH catacombs.