Matt Gurney

by **Spider** Thu 11 Nov 2021, 9:40 am

Canada's soldiers are always there for us. The least we could do is be there for them

Author of the article: Matt Gurney
Publishing date: Nov 11, 2021

As Canadians mark Remembrance Day, it is worth recapping a point that ought to be obvious but is often overlooked: while the day has come to serve as a time to remember veterans of all our wars and missions, it began as an observance of the end of a particular war. One hundred and three years ago today, the guns on the Western front fell silent after four years of carnage during what was then called the Great War. Sixty thousand Canadians were among the millions lost in that world-altering conflict, which the people at the time hoped would mark the end of war. Alas, as we know now, it simply set the stage for the larger conflict that came a generation later. The world still hasn’t fully sorted out the consequences of that one.

Our veterans of the First World War are all gone now, of course. The last one passed away in 2010. Indeed, it’s getting harder to find Second World War veterans, especially those who remain in good health. As a child, school assemblies on Nov. 11 would almost always include a Second World War veteran in a blue jacket with a chest full of metals. These men (and a woman, one year) seemed ancient to all the kids sitting on the gymnasium floor, but really, they were probably just barely entering their retirement years, or even still working. If the weather was good on any given November 11 back then, there was a very real chance they were taking time away from the golf course to talk to a group of school kids who couldn’t even begin to imagine the things that they had seen and done.

And now those veterans are leaving us at a horrible clip. There are, of course, younger sets of veterans Canadians can and should keep in their thoughts today. Thousands of Canadians served honourably during the Cold War, or in peacekeeping missions around the world. The Korean War veterans are a bit younger than those from the struggle with Germany and Japan. The darker moments of the 21st century have given us a younger, though smaller, group of veterans, many of them remain in service today.

But it’s that earlier war that should loom large in the minds of Canadians today. For the second year, normal observations and activities on Nov. 11 will be curtailed by the persistence of this terrible pandemic. One need not be a particularly well-read historian to recall that the last major pandemic to sweep our Earth was in the immediate aftermath of the First World War. And if one is looking for a reason to celebrate and honour our military, we don’t need to recall distant battlefields and barely remembered campaigns. We can simply think of the times throughout these last 20 or so months that we have been forced to look to the men and women of the Canadian Armed Forces to go into horrible messes at home and bail out health- and elder-care systems overwhelmed by COVID-19.

It would be nice to think that the experience of this pandemic, the shared cataclysm that we have struggled to cope with in large part because we had let our guard down and convinced ourselves that preparedness was not something worth investing in, would force Canadians to reflect on what is and is not, or what should and should not be, priorities for our governments. Most Canadians living today are the beneficiaries of an incredible unearned inheritance of peace and prosperity purchased by the sacrifice, sometimes the ultimate sacrifice, of prior members of prior generations. It is a fact of life that human beings tend to forget the lessons of the past, and that only gets true the further back into the past we reach. We make a point of saying we won’t forget, but we all know that isn’t true. We do forget.

So on this Nov. 11, remember who stepped up when COVID overwhelmed our long-term care homes and ICUs. Our desperate civilian leaders had only one place to turn, and they were not disappointed. Our military personnel came forward, as they always have, in war and in peace, to serve their country, and they did so knowing full well that as soon as the crisis has passed, the public will go back to hardly thinking of them at all. We will impose no political cost on the politicians that chronically underfund and underequip the very same Canadian Armed Forces that was there for us when we had nowhere else to turn. We shrug as report after report emerges of terrible dysfunction and misconduct at very top of the military in which 100,000 Canadians serve, and don’t seem particularly bothered by the fact that the government was in no particular hurry to move out a defence minister who was clearly not willing or able to stand up for the troops who stood up for us.

We could choose to do better. We have been given every reason to make that choice. That’s up to us now. Our veterans and armed forces members ask only for respect and the opportunity to serve to the best of their ability, knowing they’ll be taken care of should tragedy befall them during their careers. This isn’t unreasonable and impossible. How many times must our military do right by us before enough Canadians will demand, from all the parties, that this country do right by them?

Because we could. We could choose to. Let’s not wait another century to start.

NATIONAL POST