The work now falls to schools, families, newsrooms and communities
Every November 11, at the eleventh hour, Canada falls quiet. Traffic slows, classrooms pause, and poppies appear on lapels from Halifax to Victoria. The ritual is familiar, and that is both its strength and its danger.
In 2010, John Babcock died at 109, the last Canadian veteran of the First World War. Since then, that war has existed only in archives, museums and family stories.
The Second World War is following the same path. The young men who stormed Juno Beach are now in their late nineties or beyond, and each year there are fewer of them to stand at the cenotaph. The Korean War veterans, long called the “Forgotten War” generation, are also dwindling.
The numbers deserve to be said plainly, because they are easy to nod past. More than 66,000 Canadians died in the First World War, out of a country of fewer than eight million. At Vimy Ridge in April 1917, nearly 3,600 were killed in a few days, and thousands more were wounded.
“In 2010, John Babcock died at 109, the last Canadian veteran of the First World War”
In the Second World War, more than 45,000 Canadians died, including 359 on D-Day alone and 907 at Dieppe, a raid that cost the lives of so many for so little gain. Another 516 died in Korea.
In Afghanistan, 158 Canadian soldiers were killed, a loss many of us can still remember in real time. Add the Boer War, the peacekeeping missions and the Cold War era, and the toll passes 118,000.
Behind each of those numbers was a person: a farm boy, a teacher, a mother’s son, a daughter’s father who never came home.
When living memory fades, remembrance has to become something we choose rather than something we inherit. For decades, many Canadians learned about war at the kitchen table, from a grandfather who rarely spoke about it but whose silence said enough.
That generation is leaving us. Their grandchildren, and now great-grandchildren, are growing up with no veteran of the world wars to ask.
So the work falls to schools, families, newsrooms and communities. It means more than reciting “In Flanders Fields” once a year, though that matters.
It means teaching why these wars happened, what they cost, and how quickly ordinary societies can slide into catastrophe. It means taking students to a cenotaph, reading letters from the front, and telling the stories of the Black soldiers of the No. 2 Construction Battalion, the Indigenous soldiers who served with distinction and returned to a country that failed to honour them, and the women who served as nursing sisters. Remembrance is richer, and truer, when it is complete.
It also means connecting the past to the present. The same questions about sacrifice, duty and the price of peace are being asked again in Europe and elsewhere. A generation that understands what the cenotaphs stand for is better equipped to weigh those questions seriously.
Remembering is not about glorifying war. It is the opposite. We remember so that the cost is never abstract.
This November 11, take a young person with you. Let them hear the silence. Then tell them a name, and a story, so that it lasts.
Lest we forget.
