Today we pay tribute to the volunteers of Canada. I will describe our plans to honour those volunteers with a new award. And finally today, we will unveil the name and symbol of the new award, and recognize the persons who submitted them. More than five million Canadians volunteer for a group or organization. In Alberta, the rate of volunteering reaches an astonishing forty per cent.
Unpaid volunteers give their communities more than a billion hours of work every year.
If you count all the informal volunteers visiting the sick or elderly, or organizing community clean-ups, or otherwise giving unpaid help from the goodness of their hearts, then the number of Canadians volunteering is very impressive. Volunteers help others in nurseries for the new-born, in palliative care for the dying, and everywhere in between. For example, the retired policeman in Quebec City who organized a distress telephone line, to talk to the troubled and head off possible suicide. And I remember the many volunteers at the Rehabilitation Centre for Children in Winnipeg, where a team of experts has enabled boys with artificial hands to play hockey. Compassion and charity dominated the ancient culture of aboriginal Canadians, and compassion and charity distinguish the Canadian character today.