December 1939: To England!

3-9 December 1939

Battalion sent away on embarkation leave from 2nd December until 0830hrs 8 December 1939. Went home. Unit lost their kilts and brass buttoned tunics except for the band and we were allowed to keep ours. It was quite a novel experience to appear in public in battle dress. The only exposure the public had to this uniform previously was in pictures in the newspapers. The Toronto Scottish left for England this week and it looks like we are to follow shortly.

10-16 December 1939

Church parade this Sunday to St. Andrews and this was the first time that the unit paraded as a unit in battle dress. At this time the Regiment resented the fact that the kilt was being taken away from them and I remember the controversy well. The main argument for retaining the kilt was the fact that the 15th Battalion wore the kilt at all times in the Great War in the trenches. I remember one sign erected in the barracks that stated "No kilt-No War." The regiment had a huge dinner- dance at the Maple Leaf gardens for the battalion and their dependents and over 5000 people attended. I do not recall, now, many details and it was not until I read the War Diary that I recalled it. I had quite forgotten it. On Thursday the 14th the Regiment had a final parade through the streets of Toronto from the CNE and East of fleet to York, North on York to Front and East in Front to Yonge, North on Yonge to Gerrard and West on Gerrard to University, South on Univeristy to King, West on King to Spadina, South on Spadina to Fleet and West on Fleet to the CNE and the Horse Palace. Confined to barracks.

The CO and two other officers left for Halifax as advance party. We left for overseas on December 16th. Confined to barracks all that day. Spent the day turning in bedding stores and generally cleaning up. Unit held open house from 630pm until we left. My mother and grandmother, father and grandfather, Edward, Milton and Patricia, Mildred (Edward's girl) Uncle Sam, Aunt Alma and Vern Clarke all came down to see me off. They stayed with me in the barracks until we left. Boarded the train and pulled out from the rail siding at the CNE at 10pm and you can well imagine the vast horde of people that came to see us off. It was a very emotional time I had no way of judging anything better and I certainly was not aware that it was not the usual type of sleeper car. The sleeping arrangements consisted of padded boards between the seats. That is how we left Toronto and started the great adventure of the war.

HALIFAX AND THE NORTH ATLANTIC

17-31 December 1939

The weather was cold and clear and we arrived at Montreal at 8am in the morning. We exercised at the West Junction at 11am and then we traveled through Quebec until 4pm when we got off the train for an exercise march ar Riviere-Du-Loup. We paraded through the town but had to abandon the march due to the icy condition of the streets. The reception we received from the people, as I recall was far from enthusiastic. On Monday the train stopped in Turo NS for another exercise march. This time the reception was a little friendlier. We arrived at dock side in Halifax at 5pm and immediately boarded the troop ship HMT Riena Del Pacifico. We were issued hammocks and allocated a space over the mess hall table to sleep. We slept in the same place as we ate. The other units on board were:

2 Field Park Company, Royal Canadian Engineers, Toronto
57 Field Battery, Royal Canadian Artillery, Quebec City
90 Field Battery (Anti-Tank) Royal Canadian Artillery, Frederiction NB
4 Field Ambulance, RCAMC, Port William Ont.

Tuesday morning we cast off from the dock and drew into Bedford Basin where we anchired for the next three days. As the ship was at anchor I was an excellent sailor. When it sailed on the ocean I was serious trouble with sea sickness. We left Halifax at 1000hrs on 22 December 1939 and the band played on the upper deck.

Gale force winds and rough seas started in 23 December and this weather worsened through Christmas and ir made the celebrations very difficult as there was so much sea sickness. I simply laid down and tried to forget I was sick. The weather started to improve on Thursday 28 December 1939 and I was finally able to get about. The ship was still rolling and pitching but I had become accustomed to it. I also think it was sheer desperate hunger which gave me the incentive to get around. Bill Elms seemed to take the rough weather a lot better than I did. Sometime in the past three or four days the Canadian Navy Destroyers left us and we only had the battleships as escort. We were met on the 28 December by an escort of 12 Royal Navy Destroyers and it was quite a sight to see them scurrying about the convoy. We had our first sight of land on 29 December when at night we sighted the lights which we were told came from the coast settlements in Southern Ireland, where there are no black out regulations in force as they are officially neutral. There was a flurry of activity and some rather pronounced bumps on Saturday morning and we were supposed to have been attacked by a U Boat. It turned out only to be a rumour, which can be quite convincing on a closed ship.

We stopped at the mouth of the Clyde River and it was here that the destroyers left us. General McNaughton came aboard to welcome us. We were held up by the tide but started up the Clyde River in the early afternoon. It was quite a site to see the various shipyards and factories and the funny little trains. We passed the liner "Queen Elizabeth" which had been launched and was sitting in the fitting dock. We tied up at the King George docks in Glasgow at 1430hrs and no one was allowed off the ship. Anthony Eden and Vincent Massey, our High Commissioner visited the ship in the afternoon. I seen them on the dock. We disembarked at 1030hrs on Sunday and the city of Glasgow Police Pipe Band played us off the ship. We boarded the train at 1100hrs and it was not until we got to Carlisle that we got any heat in our carriage. The meals served on the train are plain but adequate. The carriage is divided into compartments and is quite different to those in Canada.

New Years Eve was spent on the train somewhere in England on our way to Aldershot.

 From the Toronto Star December 1939.

Rex Murphy on Climategate

He can sum it up better then me

A New Low

For the Opposition Parties

Opposition critics boycotted a non-partisan ceremony Tuesday to mark the 20th anniversary of the Dec. 6 massacre at L'École Polytechnique in Montreal, saying they wouldn't stand alongside Helena Guergis, the Conservative Status of Women minister.
Liberal, NDP and Bloc Québécois MPs on the House of Commons status of women committee said Tory policies have set back the fight for women's equality and safety.
They pointed to the Conservative government's elimination of the court challenges program and to the move to abolish the gun registry – a move some Liberal and NDP members also support.
"We consider this (ceremony) a hypocritical gesture because her government has shown itself from the beginning to be hostile to all women's demands," said Bloc MP Nicole Demers.
Liberal MP Anita Neville said: "I find it difficult to stand beside a minister who chooses not to advocate for women, who chooses to follow the party line, who chooses to endorse the elimination of the long-gun registry."
Guergis did not speak at the sombre ceremony in the House of Commons foyer, led by a senior bureaucrat from Status of Women Canada.
About two dozen MPs and staff, including the NDP's Libby Davies and Liberal MP Judy Sgro, placed 14 roses in a vase in memory of the 14 women gunned down in 1989.
The Bloc did not send a representative.

Not the time to play politics, seeing how it was a non-partisan ceremony to remember the women who were gunned down 20 years ago. Nothing but distasteful on the Opposition's part. 

Bend Over for China!

Stephen Harper in China----->Liberals and others say don't mention Human Rights Abuses, Canada needs business.

Afghanistan Abuse Case----->Liberals and others say Canada isn't speaking out against Human Rights Abuses enough!

Just goes to show you how quickly people will throw their values out the window.

How to S@*T in a Bag in Afghanistan

Charles Adler: Canada's troops deserve honour, not criticism

Found today on the National Post. Sums all of it up!

There must be some days when you ask yourself the question, "Who stands up for Canada?" This is not so much a political question, as much as it is a moral question. Who talks back when all sorts of people go out of their way to trash the country? I have a feeling that when our country is run down over and over again by people looking for a cheap headline or a cheap political point, it's done by people who don't mind taking a piece out of our country's hide. For more than a week now, our country has been portrayed as one that doesn't care about the Afghan people, a country that turned a blind eye toward the torture of innocent Afghans.

The scenario is that our soldiers -- who have been in that hellish, brutish part of the world, where NONE of you want to spend one hour, never mind one year, two years, three years, how about the last eight years -- were just going into that wretchedly dangerous country and in a non-surgical way cleansing large parts of the country of innocent people hoping that in every stack of people there was a needle that would be a Taliban or Al Qaeda suspect, a bad guy.

The scenario is that our soldiers attacked these innocent people, rounded up these innocent people and then turned them over to barbarians working as Afghan security people, clumsy amateur sadistic mall cops who could hardly wait to beat and electrocute innocent Afghans. This is the scenario of what our military operation has been about in Afghanistan. And there are Canadians willing to believe that our forces are a bunch of unprofessional, cowardly doofuses who haven't got a clue as to who the enemy is, so they just hoover up everybody and then open the vacuum bag at some dilapidated, decrepit Afghan cop shop with a torture chamber in the basement, and that our Canadians just say to the Afghans, "Fill your boots, fellas. Go ahead and fry these freaks."

Now I do understand that the more refined among you, who loathe our military and loathe our foreign policy and loathe everything that Canada stands for,  I understand that the nuanced among you who sit on your fat arses in upscale coffee shops sneering at people who you think of as low rent fools, think I am embellishing some serious issues in order to dismiss the issues. I am not here to dismiss anything except your so-called feigned interest in our country's place in the world.

I talked to Jimmy's mother this week. James Hayward Arnal loved this country more than any of you quiche-eating, latte-loving, armchair quarterbacks. And he was enthusiastically in Afghanistan to help people. His mother Wendy, who is the one behind the Carpe Diem 88 foundation, which organized efforts to get our troops a bomb-sniffing dog. They cost $10,000 dollars each. These well trained dogs sniff for the kinds of roadside explosives that killed Jimmy and hundreds of his mates over the years.

One of Jimmy's personal effects was sent home to Wendy last summer -- his pillow. There is a story behind the pillow and that wonderful story has turned into another campaign to give our troops some measure of peace comfort. Pillows for Troops is what the cause is called. Ordinary Canadians who stay silent despite the relentless pounding our country gets, can now put their name on a postcard for just five bucks and a pillow and card will get sent to one of our troops so they can be more comfortable in that Godforsaken country and they can know that ordinary Canadians aren't in front of TV cameras running them down. They are buying pillows for the troops as a way of saying thank you for your service and God Bless Canada.

As I go through the entrails of what is said about our mission in Afghanistan I think about Jimmy's mom Wendy and the other Wendys out there who have been muted while the memory of their fallen sons is corrupted and contaminated by the professional chatterboxes and political types who want to continue to dine on the idea that the Jimmies didn't do the right things in Afghanistan to win the hearts and minds of the Afghan people. The Jimmies were just dupes of the horrible colonialist imperialist American-led effort in Afghanistan. You talk about torture. It is psychological torture for the moms of our troops whether they are living in Alberta or B.C. or Saskatchewan  or Ontario or Quebec or Atlantic Canada --They are being psychologically tortured by the slow-moving electrocution of the Canadian spirit. Ordinary Canadians in their homes at night watching the news are watching Canada being run down.

Is anybody saying on TV every night that no country in the world has put more skin in the game? On a per capita basis our little country, little in population, but still big of heart, has sacrificed more for the people of Afghanistan than any country in the world. Canada bled more and gave up more in World Wars One and Two than anyone else for the cause of freedom. Canada never asks for credit. Well I am one Canadian who isn't asking for credit. I am not asking. I am demanding that those who want to engage in torture, the torture of Canada's good name, stop it. At least balance the picture with the truth of what our troops have done for the men and women and children of Afghanistan. More than any other country per capita. When almost nobody in the world wanted to go to Kandahar province where the Taliban was born, where it was a festering sore, where it was torturing women and children -- when almost nobody from any country wanted to go to the most dangerous part of Afghanistan, Canadians went.

Our kids went in there and we did what we had to do to save lives and give people a chance at a better life.

Most of our kids survived. But too many did not.

Canada: The Enviro Villian

Why not Russia, China or India?

The greatest target of Monbiot's wrath is Alberta's oilsands, a multibillion-dollar investment that represents the second-largest deposit of oil on Earth. Extracting the oil is a dirty, expensive business, and has long outraged environmental activists.
Prime Minister Stephen Harper has come under harsh domestic and international criticism for his laissez faire attitude to carbon emissions reduction. At Copenhagen, Canada is promising to reduce emissions to 20 per cent below 2006 levels by 2020. The U.S. is promising a similar cut. Climate change scientists have called for a far more drastic reduction. In his book, Heat, Monbiot called for an immediate 95 per cent-plus reduction by developed nations.
A recent Harris-Decima poll showed that two-thirds of Canadians believe that global warming is the "defining" crisis of our time. A similar number thought that mankind will rise to meet it.
"It feels odd to be writing this," Monbiot closes his scathing column. "The immediate threat to the global effort to sustain a peaceful and stable world comes not from Saudi Arabia or Iran or China. It comes from Canada."

Queen to Visit in the Summer

Those Anti-Monarchists are out in full force!

The announcement of next summer's visit came after she met Prime Minister Stephen Harper at the Commonwealth summit in Trinidad and Tobago on Friday.
"The Crown endures as a symbol of our unique Canadian identity, uniting Canadians of every background and every region," Harper said. "Canadians hold Her Majesty and the royal family in deep affection and high regard, a sentiment which is clearly mutual."

The Canadian government will have a $50 billion deficit this year and people are going on about Prince Charles and Camila's visit costing $2.6 million?  Read on about Liberal Sen. Raymond Lavigne who, even though banned from the Senate, still collects his $132,300 a year paycheque. He was banned from the Senate for missusing $23,000 worth of funds. He's just one of a whole host of Senators and other Canadian politicians who fed at the tax-payer trough.

You don't even know how much getting rid of the monarchy will cost Canadians. Seeing how we can't get two-thirds of Parliament and two-thirds of each of all 10 provincial legislatures to agree on anything I think the Monarch will be around for a while.

Where Flying the Flag was (and maybe) Still is Illegal

Flag Wars in Caledonia

Videos of two flag-waving marches along the main street in Caledonia, passing a site that has been occupied by native protesters since 2006, were shown here in court Thursday, starkly highlighting the different reactions of police to aboriginal marchers and residents of this small southern Ontario town about 100 kilometres southwest of Toronto.
The first video shows Caledonia resident Randy Fleming walking down the side of a main street in Caledonia last Victoria Day - May 24, 2009 - with a Canadian flag tied to a stick. He saunters on to the edge of the occupied site, at which point he is grabbed by an Ontario Provincial Police officer, escorted a few metres off the site, and is then pounced on by several other officers.
An officer is seen taking the flag from Fleming. In the second video, taped on July 15, 2009, native protesters carrying Warrior Society flags and Six Nations flags walked down the middle of the street.

 I'm to mad to write.....

Those No Good Bastards

You know he had a point
Christmas tree grower turns to Mexico for workers

One of Nova Scotia's biggest Christmas tree exporters says he hired Mexican labourers this year because he can't find enough people locally to do the work.
Colin Hughes said he had no choice but to hire five workers from Mexico to help get his trees packed and ready for the peak export season.
He told CBC News there are not enough Nova Scotians ready and willing to do the job, which pays about $12 an hour.
"It's a lot harder to get dependable help," Hughes said. "They work for five hours and then they want to go home. We work seven days a week, nine- or 10-hour days. You gotta work — rain or shine."
This is the first time that Hughes has used migrant workers, though others in the industry have turned to Mexico for help before.
The Christmas Tree Council of Nova Scotia says its members share the cost of bringing in foreign workers with apple growers and blueberry farmers, who also struggle to find local labourers.
Adrian Sanchez, from northern Mexico, said it's hard work, but it pays better than anything he can get back home.
"It's pretty good," said Sanchez, one of Hughes's workers. "It's a bunch of good guys here."
Wages are only part of the cost of bringing migrant workers to Nova Scotia, and Hughes said it actually costs more than local help by the time transportation and boarding costs are factored in.

I find it hard to believe the excuse that no Canadians want to do the job in this economy, but maybe Gerald Keddy was right and we are just a bunch of no good bastards who don't want to work. We Canadians have gotten so prideful and entitled we think we're too good for some things.

Send Her Back

The Federal Court says the refugee board must reassess the case of a lesbian soldier who deserted from the U.S. army and fled to Canada, saying the board made mistakes in rejecting her bid to seek refugee status.
Judge Yves de Montigny said the Immigration and Refugee Board (IRB) erred in determining whether Pte. Bethany Smith, also known as Skyler James, had an objective basis for her fear of persecution.
"My first reaction was 'Oh my god, yes!'" said Smith Friday in Ottawa, where she now lives. "For now, it's like a great relief."

Smith fled to Canada in September 2007 from a U.S. army base in Fort Campbell, Ky. She applied for refugee status in October 2007, saying she was harassed and threatened by fellow soldiers over her sexual orientation and feared that her life would be in danger if she were deported and returned to the army.

The IRB rejected Smith's claim in February 2009. One of the reasons the board cited for rejecting her claim was that Smith had not done enough to seek protection from her own state and did not go to higher-ranking officials for help. Smith had testified that she felt senior officials were "in on it."

I have no sympathy for deserters, even this one and that is a lot for me to say as I'm Queer myself. I don't have sympathy for people who join an all volunteer army, knowing that certain institution has a policy barring Gays from serving and periods of less then tolerant behavior.  The US Military may have a policy baring Gays from serving but homosexuality is NOT ILLEGAL in the US, so where is the persecution? Read the side about her life story and you'll find she was about to be shipped out to Afghanistan. Is this all a convenient excuse to avoid duty? Canada's got enough phony refugees we don't need another one.


****Any disparaging and homophobic comments steaming from this article will be posted and mocked****

No regrets in Afghanistan

Gen. Rick Hillier says he never second-guessed himself after he vowed vengeance against "murderers and scumbags" in the Afghan mission.
The retired chief of defence staff spoke to a crowd of more than 400 about his views of the war at the Toronto Reference Library last night before signing his new book, A Soldier First.
"I never second-guessed that," he said. "We're talking about people who were killing our sons and daughters, who murdered older and younger people. That's the kind of people I was describing."
He denied allegations the Canadian military was complicit with the torture of captives.
Defence Minister Peter MacKay shrugged off calls yesterday for a public inquiry after intelligence officer Richard Colvin testified before a parliamentary committee earlier this week about the allegations.
"We don't want to be associated with torture or brutality whatsoever, but we can't ever guarantee it won't take place," Hillier said. "We detained some people who were the ones we took in the line of fire. There was a process. There was a process the Afghans have -- unless the judge says to continue to detain him, he was let go."

The Republic of Canada II

Great articles from the Globe and Mail on the Canadian Monarchy. Love it!

Article 1 says:

First, the Canadian monarchy doesn't simply mean the Queen is head of state with Charles waiting in the wings. It means that this is the way the country is governed; it's the nuts and bolts of how the country works. Second, changing that status would be political and legal agony because the Crown has metastasized throughout the Constitution.
The difficulty with the monarchy is that the two people who personify it – only the Queen and Charles constitutionally have relevance to Canada, the Queen as the legal personality of the state and the Prince as heir apparent – are at best transnational and at worst British.
But the institution itself is not a colonial hangover. It is thoroughly Canadian.
Its roots lie in the establishment of New France – Quebec – by King Francis I in 1534 and the claim made to Newfoundland by England's Queen Elizabeth I in 1583. The present Governor-General, Michaëlle Jean, is the 64th representative of the Crown since Samuel de Champlain.
Historian Jacques Monet says of the Canadian Crown, “It is one of an approximate half-dozen that have survived through uninterrupted inheritance from before the country itself was founded.”
The Royal Proclamation of 1763 issued by Britain's King George III is the legal basis for aboriginal land claims and assertions of self-government and is rightly known as the aboriginal people's Magna Carta. It established government in Quebec. It is a part of Canada's Constitution.
When the present Queen visited Labrador in 1997, Innu community leader Mary Pia Benuen told journalists, “The way I see it, she is everybody's queen. It's nice for her to know who the Innu are and why we're fighting for our land claim and self-government all the time.”
After the American Revolution, the so-called loyalists who came north weren't just poor-loser Anglos who wanted to keep their Little England on this side of the Atlantic. They were African-Americans, Germans, Iroquois – including 6,000 Mohawks – and Anglos.

Article 2 says:

At the National War Memorial on Wednesday, Canada's constitutional monarchy worked. The Prince of Wales and our Governor-General stood side by side, solemnly and in unison laying wreaths of remembrance and reviewing a parade of veterans and active servicemen and women. On a gorgeous autumn day, the sometimes creaky institution of the Canadian Crown came to life.
This was not a moment to be lost, for it reminded Canadians of why we have a Crown, how difficult it is to change, even for those who want to, and most importantly, how it befits a strong and independent Canada. Before our soldiers and Prime Minister were two powerful and intertwined symbols – Prince Charles, the heir apparent of our sovereign, a living symbol of our past, a link to centuries of history and tradition, and Michaëlle Jean, the Governor-General, the face of a new Canada, a symbol of our present and future and, in all but name, our head of state. Together they represented something greater than either could alone.

Seal Anyone?

Full of Omega-3!

Seal meat is about to join beef tenderloin and baked salmon on the haute-cuisine menu for MPs and senators in the parliamentary restaurant.
MPs say Parliament is taking a cue from Gov. Gen. Michaëlle Jean, who triggered a global controversy last May by eating seal meat while on a visit to Nunavut in a show of support for Inuit culture.
The parliamentary restaurant is one of the gems on Parliament Hill. Its alabaster columns vault toward a ceiling spiked with several domes. The spectacular view of the Ottawa River is available only to ministers, MPs, journalists and others who work on the Hill.
Members of the public can only enter the restaurant as guests of those holding a parliamentary pass.
Jean chose a more down-to-earth venue when she sliced and ate a raw seal heart from a carcass that had been laid out on the floor at a Rankin Inlet community festival on Hudson Bay.
Liberal, Conservative and New Democrat MPs say the addition of seal meat to the menu in the exclusive parliamentary restaurant will also be a significant boost for sealers battling a European Union ban on their products.

I'm Sorry, again, But Not Quite

Canada doesn't have to apologize for Britain's home children

Immigration Minister Jason Kenney says there's no need for Canada to apologize for abuse and exploitation suffered by thousands of poor children shipped here from Britain starting in the 19th century.
Australia has apologized for its part in the mistreatment of the so-called home children and the British government has announced it will issue a formal apology next year.
Kenney says he supports a private member's motion to declare 2010 the year of the home child, in remembrance of the "sad period" in Canadian history.
But he says there's limited public appetite for official government apologies for tragic events of the past and no demand for one in this particular case.
From 1869 to 1939, an estimated 100,000 orphaned or abandoned youngsters were taken off the streets of Britain and sent to Canada and other former British colonies with the promise of a better life.
Many were abused physically and mentally or put to work as child labourers.

I'm denying what happened to Home Children wasn't horrible but why should Canada apologize? It was a British program so why should we have to shoulder the blame? I have to agree with Jason Kenney, the public doesn't have a strong appetite for government apologies, I mean how soon it is before we have a Minister of Apologies?

Now this leads into that whole discussion of who should accept the blame. Are we to accept the sins of our Fathers? Are we still culpable for things that happened years ago? It's hard to say.

I know this much, I'm descended from Filles du Roi by the names of Madeleine Despres and Denise Leclerc.
These were young working class French girls who were shipped to Canada  (or New France, at the time) to marry French settlers in an effort to populate the colony. How much of a choice did these women get? And weren't they also offered a chance at a better life? Should France offer us an apology? Like many other Canadians I also claim Irish ancestry. My Irish ancestors were forced off their lands and starving due to the potato famine. They didn't have a lot of options so they came to Canada. Should Britain apologize?

I don't expect Britain or France to apologize because these events happened hundreds of years ago and I feel, except for a few crazies, that we're kind of over it. I'm proud of my ancestors because they helped build this country into what it is today.


I'm proud of my ancestors as they helped build this country.

Activists Against Everything

From Raphael Alexander @ the National Post

Harsha Walia, an " activist, writer, researcher and facilitator " who "has been active in a variety of voluntary social justice issues over the past decade including feminist, anti-racist, migrant justice, Palestine solidarity, Indigenous self-determination, anti capitalist, anti-poverty, and South Asian diasporic  movements" penned a piece about Remembrance Day in the Vancouver Sun. Only it wasn’t about Remembrance Day, which she writes is symbolic of those who are “most eager to create a steady flow of the dead to remember”, but about all of the other days of the year that should be memorialized for those who have suffered and died due to human and corporate greed,  military wars and occupations, man-made poverty and, let us not forget, that ubiquitous environmental devastation.
Indeed, according to Ms. Walia, Remembrance Day, and war memorials in general, tend to be sites of political and national mobilization, designed to manipulate you, the hapless patriotic Canadian, to conceptualize past memories of warfare and our war dead, in order to direct current wars and future military conflicts. Do you understand that logic? When you bestow a wreath at the grave of your fallen grandfather, you are enabling and perpetuating the western military-industrial complex, something which is anathema to the modern pseudo-leftwing movement and their self-despising existence within our borders.
Ironically, of course, it was the left that once saw fit to rise up against fascism in Europe in the twenties and thirties; leftists who went to Spain to fight in the Civil War. It was the left that saw the importance of an alliance with the military powers of the West and the corporate assembly plants that provided a mechanized Army to fight the Nazis. When faced with the peril of annihilation by fascism, the socialists rallied the working class toward supporting our government and our troops in that battle against the enemy.
Today’s so-called leftists, however, have never faced the peril of an enemy that threatens the planet. So comfortable are they within the free societies created by the men and women who fought and died for their luxurious existence, that they take the one day that we spare to give honour to them, and manipulate it into some kind of odious political revolt against our “militaristic” leadership.
Ms. Walia’s objection to our flag-waving, our respect for the uniform, our traditional military songs, and our patriotic tributes to  fallen soldiers, is to me a sign of a subculture that is rotting our society from the inside out, paradoxically rejecting the very things that allow them to stand free and criticize our civilization for having the wherewithal to fight and vanquish the Nazi enemy. These modern revisionists cast our soldiers today as villains in the international game of neocolonialism.

The Remodel of Canada

All for the better, I believe.

The Conservative government will redefine what it means to be Canadian this week by introducing a new guide to citizenship, a rare and significant attempt to reshape the national image.
The new document, which will be the citizenship study guide for the 250,000 immigrants who arrive in Canada each year, instantly becomes one of the country's most widely read and potentially influential pieces of writing. It will replace a document created by the Liberals in 1997 that the Conservatives criticized for its anemic presentation of Canadian history and identity.
No longer will new Canadians be told that Canada is strictly a nation of peacekeepers, for example. The new guide places a much greater emphasis on Canada's military history, from the Great War to the present day. It also tackles other issues of historical significance, from Confederation to Quebec's separatist movement, that were barely mentioned by its predecessor .“I think there's a growing sense that we need to have a deeper, thicker sense of our common citizenship and where we come from as Canadians,” Citizenship and Immigration Minister Jason Kenney said.
“If all you knew about Canada was from the current guide it would be possible to become a citizen never having heard of Vimy Ridge, Dieppe or Juno Beach and not knowing what the poppy represents, which I think is scandalous.”

Lest We Forget

I will be heading down to Victory Square today for the services here in Vancouver so I will post now.

In Britain they marked their first Armistice Day without any First World War Veterans. Bill Stone died at 108 in January followed by Henry Allingham, 113, and Harry Patch, 111, in July. A service was held at Westminster Abbey to mark the passing of that generation. Canada now has only one First World War Veteran left, John Babcock. 400 Second World War Veterans die every week and one day we will mark their passing. It is up to us to remember their service and sacrifices. Today I remember my family who served:

Pte. Jack Dow, 123rd Battalion CEF
PO Edward Dowe, 428 Squadron RCAF, killed Feb 1944
Capt. Frank Dowe, 48th Highlanders (WWII) career officer with Queen's Own Rifles of Canada
Pte. Edward Cullum, North Shore Regiment
CWO (ret'd) Ross Dowe, 442 Squadron