Remembrance Day should serve as a reminder that Canada is a country worth fighting for

National Post, 6 November 2021

An article by the National Post View

Remembrance Day, a day of reverence, reminds us that there is more to Canada’s story than shadows.

The fact that we are having a national conversation about how to lower and raise the flag less than a week before Remembrance Day is a vivid sign that Canada’s sense of both country and memory is flagging. It would be salutary if this Remembrance Day helped us recover something of both.

There is little question that 2021 has been a year of reckoning in relation to Canada’s Indigenous peoples. Reckoning is one form of remembrance — an important form, but not the only one. Reverence is also part of memory. Reckoning without reverence makes reconciliation difficult, leaving recrimination and revenge as options for dealing with the wounds of memory. Remembrance Day, a day of reverence, reminds us that there is more to Canada’s story than shadows.

On Nov. 11, Canadians will gather to honour, as countless plaques put it, the “memory” of those who died for “King and Country.” What then is that memory? How shall we remember that sacrifice? Was it praiseworthy in form, but blameworthy in substance? Do we admire the bravery of those who died, but condemn the country that they died for?

Such questions of memory and identity are more pressing this year than they have been in the past. The shared memories of a people are, in large part, what constitute them as a people. No memory, no identity. No shared story, no nation.

It was former U.S. president Abraham Lincoln who spoke, in his first inaugural address, of the “mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield, and patriot grave, to every living heart and hearthstone, all over this broad land.” They apply across this Dominion, too. The subsequent years of Lincoln’s presidency brought many more battlefields and many more patriot graves and memories almost too brutal to bear.

Thus it is with every country, and Canada is no exception. The memories that bind are both noble and ignoble; both celebratory and shameful. There is a tendency amongst all nations, again Canada is no exception, to gift short shrift to the shameful, in favour of the celebratory.

Canada is recalibrating its shared memory in relation to Indigenous peoples. Yet recalibration can go wrong, and then there is a need to recover balance. Canada is a noble country and those who died wearing her uniform merit our memory and our honour. We cannot honour them properly if we dishonour the country they fought and died for.

Continue reading at the National Post.