Ted Campbell on the desire of the Royal Canadian Legion and Veterans Affairs Canada to change Remembrance Day to focus on veterans, rather than the war dead:
… given its mandate and, indeed, its very name, Veterans Affairs Canada manages, again, to totally misrepresent Remembrance Day, according to a report by CBC News. I’m not concerned that “at least half the participants in the English sessions did not recognize In Flanders Fields, nor did any of the Montreal participants.” Perhaps it is only right and proper that we have stopped teaching a poem that was intended to challenge those who, over 100 years ago, could still join the fight.
But the ‘message’ that Veterans Affairs seems, to me, to be trying to propagate, again, is that Remembrance Day is, somehow, all about veterans … that’s arrant nonsense. We veterans, I guess I count as one although it is not how I define myself, are there, as we should be, only to honour those who died, those who never got a chance to become veterans because they were blown to bits or died in a burning aircraft or drowned at sea or lay for hours, in no-man’s-land, wracked with pain, waiting for the blessed relief of death. That’s why we go to the cenotaph, once a year: to remember the 100,000+ Canadian men and women who were killed in our wars, large and small, from South Africa in 1899 (arguably, from North West Canada in 1885) until today. But, today, there is a movement, spearheaded by civil servants and the Royal Canadian Legion, to change the focus to honour their clients: veterans, like me … even at the expense of remembering our dead.
[…]
For myself, no matter what anyone else decides, I will continue to observe Remembrance Day for what it is meant to be, not what the bureaucrats and the Legion’s management want it to become; and if we have a Veterans’ Day I will stay home … I don’t need anyone’s thanks for my service; you paid me well enough, as much as your elected representatives thought fair, anyway, and I always tried my best to be worthy of my hire.
