Program strives to identify, properly bury remains of Canadian soldiers

A national program has been using several methods of investigation since 2007 to identify the skeletal remains of unknown Canadian armed-forces members.

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The federal Casualty Identification Program works to determine the identities of such remains, found at a site or in a pre-existing unknown grave, with the intent to give them a proper military burial.

The program works to ID more than 27,000 Canadian service members who went missing during the First World War, the Second World War and the Korean War.

Sarah Lockyer, who manages the program, said modern activities such as construction or farming can unearth previously undiscovered remains of missing military personnel. The program can also try to identify those already buried as unknown soldiers, "if there's enough identifying information on the headstone, such as a rank, date of death or a unit," she said.

"Typically, that type of research is kick-started by independent researchers who then submit the research, and then we're able to sort of confirm or refuse their hypothesis based on the historical information that's available," Lockyer told CTV News Edmonton.

When research suggests a Canadian occupies an unidentified war grave, the program confirms the identity and then requests a new headstone with the service member’s name.

Several techniques are used to identify remains, including forensic anthropology -- which is the main method of investigation that includes assembling a biographical profile using age, sex, height and information in personnel files -- dental information, DNA testing and stable isotope analysis.

Not every method is perfect, though. While dental records exist for Second World War veterans, none exist for those from the First World War. DNA analysis, while an insightful tool, has limitations and complications, said Lockyer.

"If the DNA testing is entirely dependent on how well the DNA has survived in the bone, I've had a number of different cases where the bone sample that I brought back to Canada, there was no DNA that survived in that sample," she said. "We have to either start again or maybe try to come up with a different way to see if we can identify this person."

Such a program helps honour those who served for Canada and allows families to discover what happened to them.

"I think it's the least that we can do when the remains are discovered, to do absolutely everything we can to try to return their names and their faces to them, and we do that," Lockyer said. "Unfortunately, we do have some instances where we were not able to do that, but we were able to give them a full military burial at minimum."

With files from CTV News Edmonton's Evan Kenny