Applicants for Summer Jobs program
must check a box on the form.
Agree with women’s right to abortion.
I read the job description
of a military chaplain.
Advise on ethical dilemmas,
spiritual and moral issues.
Provide care after major life incidents.
Not a word on reproductive freedom.
No box to check.
How would Liberals assure
the Chaplain agrees with the Charter?
By Shai Ben-Shalom
The First World War gave Canada progressive income tax, national trade unions, the Department of Health, votes for women and daylight saving time. The price was 61,802 dead and 172,000 injured. Was it worth it?
With the passing of all eyewitnesses to the cataclysm, Canadian culture has “systematically diminished the violent effects of the First World War,” notes The Great War. Politicians sense it is now safe to stand on tombstones to speak on patriotic themes that play well with focus groups. It is left to historians to correct the record.
Great War is drawn from a Western University conference that saw researchers, genealogists and others examine the cost and contribution. “Military triumphs and narratives of sacrifice will have to be weighed carefully against the brutal realities of the war’s human cost,” editors write.
“How, for example, will the 500,000 casualties sustained during the Battle of Verdun influence France’s efforts to honour its war dead and underscore national unity in the face of present-day economic turmoil and state austerity? Will the 1917 army mutinies fit into a narrative that emphasizes collective sacrifice for the survival of the Republic?”
Canada’s record is often twisted into mythologies. Great War documents the distortion.
“In the Canadian context of what is remembered and what is forgotten, the victory at Vimy dominates the national memory of the war while the sinking of the hospital ship Llandovery Castle – with the greatest collective loss of life of medical personnel in the war – received much less attention, perhaps because it fits less easily into the story of victory,” authors write.
On June 27, 1918 the Llandovery Castle with its Canadian crew was torpedoed off the Irish coast and sank in ten minutes; 234 passengers vanished without a trace. Survivors who crowded lifeboats were rammed and shot by a U-boat crew. “It was beyond doubt the most atrocious crime of the entire war for there could be neither rhyme nor reason for the brutal murders,” author Edwyn Gray wrote in his 1972 account of the U-boat war The Killing Time.
Great War similarly recounts the fate of the Newfoundland Regiment at Gallipoli, an epic so obscure it’s forgotten even by Newfoundlanders. In September 1915 the regiment landed in the Dardanelles. Of 1,100 soldiers only 117 were left standing four months later, a casualty rate of 89 percent.
The catastrophe was overshadowed by the more disastrous fate awaiting Newfoundlanders at the Battle of the Somme the following July where 90 percent of the regiment was lost in 30 minutes. “From that moment on the Somme battlefield was the primary place for Newfoundland’s national mythology,” editors note. “Gallipoli remained unremembered and indistinct.”
Canadians now subjected to official histories and propaganda deserve a fair accounting of the First War – honest, unflinching and compassionate. Only historians can do the job. The Great War is a start.
By Holly Doan
The Great War: From Memory To History; edited by Kellen Kurschinski, Steve Marti, Alicia Robinet, Matt Symes and Jonathan F. Vance; Wilfrid Laurier University Press; 440 pages; ISBN 9781-7711-20500; $38.99
Finance Minister François-Philippe Champagne misled Canadians on the size of his near-record 2025 deficit, Budget Office figures disclosed yesterday. Analysts said there is now a 99 percent chance the finance department will miss ongoing targets: “What credibility do you think you have on any fiscal matter?”
The Senate yesterday rewrote a hate crimes bill to restrict the public display of the noose. The amendment came on a personal appeal by Senator Wanda Thomas Bernard (N.S.) who recounted her own experience with anti-Black bigotry: “They yell profanities at you and tell you to go back to Africa.”
Cabinet’s $90 billion regional high speed rail venture will “change life as we know it,” Government House Leader Steven MacKinnon yesterday told MPs. MacKinnon acknowledged the service will be inaccessible to most Canadians, but said it would create “new worlds of intercity travel” for some Ontarians and Québecers: “You’re a businessperson, someone who wants to go to a hockey game or a baseball game and come back the same evening.”
Canadians’ faith in public institutions is in decline, a Treasury Board executive yesterday told the Commons ethics committee. The remarks during a statutory review of the Lobbying Act followed disclosure that several individuals in breach of the law escaped prosecution: “There are a lot of challenges in maintaining the public’s trust.”
A Canada Post experiment to save rural post offices by turning them into “community hubs” had mixed results, says a management report. The post office would not say how much it earned or lost on the venture: “Currently there are no plans to launch additional locations using the ‘community hub’ format.”
The Senate yesterday by a 41 to 32 vote quashed a proposal to criminalize Indian Residential School “denialism” under threat of two years’ jailing. The vote came moments after cabinet announced it opposed the amendment: “Senators may have already noticed the online backlash to the amendment has begun.”
Prime Minister Mark Carney yesterday in his first Question Period appearance in a week sat silently as Conservative MPs recited stories of jobless workers. Carney repeatedly wished Opposition Leader Pierre Poilievre a happy 47th birthday in an attempt to be lighthearted: “Will the Prime Minister stop being so flippant about the suffering he has caused?”
Heritage Minister Marc Miller yesterday in an abrupt reversal suspended a CRTC order tripling fees on Netflix and other video streaming services. The decision came 48 hours after Miller voted with 192 other MPs to sustain the fee hike: “Does this have anything to do with the United States threatening a tariff investigation?”
Repealing local development charges would boost housing starts by up to 14 percent in the costliest markets, CMHC said yesterday. A wide range of advocates from the Senate banking committee to the Canadian Human Rights Commission have criticized mandatory fees as a drag on construction: “Reducing development charges increases the viability of housing construction projects in all cases.”
Forty-eight hours after cabinet appointed a new panel on anti-Jewish discrimination, Liberal-appointed Senator Yuen Pau Woo (B.C.) yesterday asked in Question Period whether it was anti-Semitic to depict Israelis as sex criminals: “Is this why the government has been so silent on the United Nations’ inclusion of Israel on the blacklist of countries that engages in sexual violence in conflicts?”
Cabinet shelved as too costly a plan to develop a new index to raise seniors’ pensions, Access To Information records show. The Liberal Party 11 years ago promised to raise payments using a customized Seniors Price Index: ‘It would have resulted in small individual benefit increases at a high overall cost.’
Prime Minister Mark Carney in his first comment on the made-in-Canada recession yesterday acknowledged “choppiness” in the economy but again declined to attend Question Period to defend his record. “Data is going to be uneven,” he told reporters.
One of the nation’s largest Jewish groups yesterday dismissed as ineffectual the appointment of a Department of Heritage committee to investigate anti-Semitism. Heritage Minister Marc Miller acknowledged the committee was merely “a first step.”
