A commentary by a Victoria resident who was a public affairs officer for the Canadian Forces and then a Canadian citizenship judge.
Remembrance Day marks a national record of service, courage, and sacrifice at home, around the world, across generations.
Since Confederation, more than 2.3 million Canadians have served to defend peace and freedom at home and internationally. Canada’s eight Books of Remembrance, held in Ottawa, record the names of every Canadian who died in service to our country.
The books have more than 120,000 names. You can search for individual names at veterans.gc.ca.
Those who called Canada home and served in the conflicts of the 19th century and for the first quarter of the 20th century have passed into history.
It is estimated that about 7,000 veterans of the Second World War and the Korean War remain. The living memory of the North Atlantic, Dieppe, D-Day, the Netherlands, the Inchon Landings, Kepong and the 38th parallel will soon vanish.
But the sacrifice continues.
The service of contemporary veterans includes preventing international confrontation during the Cold War, with its many drills and exercises, as well as dozens of United Nations and other peace operations that included the full spectrum of operations from observation to combat and humanitarian aide.
Additionally, there is the immense body of work at bases, airfields and harbours across Canada to support those deployed at a distance.
That service has not been without loss.
Canada’s place in the world is determined by our willingness to bring Canadian values, courage, and pragmatism to places in need.
Today, Canadian Forces are in Eastern Europe, in Kosovo, Sudan, Cyprus, Congo, South Korea, the Middle East and aboard ships across the Atlantic and Pacific, maintaining freedom of movement on the oceans of the world.
From 2001 to 2014, more than 40,000 Canadians served in Afghanistan, where 158 military members and seven civilians were killed and 1,800 were wounded.
One in 10 receive treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder. Upwards of 100 who served in Afghanistan committed suicide.
There can be no distinction whether they died by enemy fire, sickness, training accident or by their own hand. We need to remember everyone who has died in the service of Canada with the same pride, reverence and dignity, no matter what their service and circumstance.
We have a duty to remember all those “who gave their tomorrow for our today.”
When we stand in silence, we quietly celebrate the military service and lives of our family and friends and all those who have served, and thank them.
How would your family have been impacted during the summer of 1914 and fall of 1918? Or September 1939 and August 1945, when the world was in flames?
Yes, they were different times. Dare we compare when the world was recovering from a flu pandemic, the high unemployment of the depression and a drought that reduced farm revenue, with the world of today when words like war, disease, inflation, drought and climate change dominate the daily news and discussion?
John McCrae, the author of In Flanders Fields, was characteristic of those who chose to serve.
Like all who enlisted, he was not a professional solder; he trained to be a physician. He passed up a fellowship in pathology at McGill University to serve in the Canadian artillery in the South African War.
Fifteen years later, 41-year-old McCrae again put his career on hold to serve as a battlefield surgeon in France. He died there, of pneumonia, in 1918. His story is one of tens of thousands of individual sacrifices that make up the debt we honour.
His scribbled verse was field hospital litter when he tossed it away on May 2, 1915. There are a variety of accounts of how the poem was rescued and eventually sent to newspapers in England.
But it might have been lost forever. Yet, here we are, 109 years later.
The freedoms we enjoy today in Canada were founded 800 years ago in the Magna Carta. They are entrenched in the rights of Canadian citizenship in the Constitution Act of 1982.
They did not come without a cost and they were not part of formal Canadian law for those who fought, and for more than 120,000 who died for these rights and freedoms we hold so dear. They were our fathers and mothers, grandparents, and for so many now, great-grandparents.
Most of us were born since the end of the Second World War. A smaller number were infants or young children during the war.
Each of us can defend Canada and our rights and freedoms by attending to our duties as citizens.
Canada only asks that we take responsibility for ourselves. Obey the law, vote in elections, accept jury duty, take leadership roles to make your neighbourhood and all of Canada better, and protect the environment.
By taking an interest in what the members of the Canadian Armed Forces, police and our diplomats are doing around the world, we defend Canada by being informed citizens.
We in Canada are free to live anywhere in the country, to speak without fear, free to worship as we please, free to stand up for what is right and peacefully oppose what is wrong; free to love whom we choose and we are free to choose who will govern us.
Three weeks ago, people in British Columbia ventured out on a very uncomfortable rainy election day. Several days passed before the result and collective decision was known.
There were no riots in the street, no shots were fired, no one was injured or died. In many countries across the world, that doesn’t happen.
Canada enjoys its legacy because of the sacrifice of those who have served.
This country didn’t happen by accident and it won’t continue without effort. While we might view the world with uncertainty, history has shown that Canadians have always found the resources to overcome hardship, to do the right thing and shine a light on injustice.
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