Ottawa, Ontario - 4 August 2014
Thank you, Shelly, for that kind introduction.
Thank you to Suzanne Sarault for serving as our emcee today.
Greetings to Chief of Defence Staff General Lawson, to Chief Warrant Officer West, to ambassadors and members of the diplomatic corps, to my colleagues from the Parliament of Canada, Royal Galipeau and Pierre Lemieux, members of the Canadian Armed Forces, honoured veterans and families, distinguished guests, ladies and gentlemen.
As Shelly said, a century has passed now since the dull roar of the guns of August was first heard and all across Europe, the lights of peace faded.
This great conflict on the other side of an ocean need not have involved us.
But then, as now, when our friends and the values we share with them are threatened, Canadians do not turn away.
So it was that in 1914, Canadian and Newfoundland volunteers – Newfoundland being then a separate Dominion – accepted this call to arms as a duty.
At the end of the summer of 1914, Canadians left behind factories, fields, forests and fisheries.
They left their homes, shops, offices and schools.
Men by the tens of thousands signed up to fight.
Men like Leo Clarke, Frederick Hall and Robert Shankland, who all lived on Pine Street in Winnipeg.
Men like brothers Bernard and Eric Ayre and their cousins Gerald and Wilfrid of St. John’s, Newfoundland.
Men like George Vanier of Montréal, a young lawyer who had considered joining the priesthood before hearing the call of duty.
And women like Beatrice McNair from Vancouver, one of 2,500 nursing sisters who served overseas.
The first Canadians left for Europe that October.
Many thought they’d be home for Christmas.
Some of them actually worried that they’d get over there too late to do their part.
As we all know, they were terribly, terribly wrong.
Though the commitment to war was uncertain, over 600,000 Canadians fought to defend our country, only eight million strong at the time.
The mud, the blood and the sacrifices that marked those years left more than a third of these Canadians dead or wounded.
Forgive me if I do not dwell on these numbers, the bitter harvest of suffering and death.
We have had a hundred years to contemplate this war.
Much has been written on this subject.
And yet, what it means to have lived in muck and disease, to fight through mud deep enough to drown a man, to lose thousands of lives in a single day to gain what could be measured in yards.
The sense of these things still eludes us.
We can only imagine their courage, their fear, the devotion they had to King, to country, and to comrades that drove them over the top to take the fight to the enemy time and time again.
So let us pass on and dwell instead on what they achieved.
Though inexperienced, these young men of 1914 were determined.
By the time the war was in its final days, they were admired by the allies and dreaded by the enemy.
They were called the shock troops of the British Empire.
It is difficult to measure heroism, but if the awarding of our greatest military honour tells the story, then let the records show that of the 98 Canadians who have earned the Victoria Cross, 72 of them did so in the First World War.
Three of those heroes were the boys of Pine Street: Corporal Leo Clarke, Sergeant-Major Frederick Hall, and Lieutenant Robert Shankland.
And so Pine Street in Winnipeg is now called Valour Road.
It’s also difficult to measure sacrifice.
Yet on the first day of the Battle of the Somme when Canadians and when British and Commonwealth forces suffered nearly 60,000 casualties, among those killed were all four Ayre boys.
A St. John’s newspaper ventured this: that “the price of freedom is paid in tears.”
The First World War decimated an entire generation of young Canadians.
So many communities like St. John’s.
So many tears.
Yet amid the appalling loss, by any measure, Canada as a truly independent country was forged in the fires of the First World War.
That is to say when the great nations of the world gathered, we must never forget that our place at the table was not given to us.
It was bought and paid for on the gas-choked battlefield at Ypres where John McCrae wrote his immortal work, In Flanders Fields; at Vimy Ridge, where Canadian men under Canadian leaders achieved a victory that had eluded so many others; in the drenched and cratered wasteland of Passchendaele, where Lieutenant Shankland earned his Victoria Cross; in the sombre and blood-soaked field hospitals, where Beatrice McNair would become one of the first Canadian women to receive military honours for gallantry, standing by her post and comforting her patients under constant bombardment.
As the allies relentlessly pushed ahead during the final hundred days of the war, an enemy shell cost Major George Vanier a leg.
But Vanier survived and continued serving his country, going on to become its first French-Canadian Governor General.
On each battlefield where Canadians fought, they made a bold statement.
No matter the price in blood and treasure, Canada would go all in to ensure peace and freedom for all.
Canada was of course young then, full of ideals.
We are no longer quite so young.
Still, our commitment to values has never wavered.
So as Canadians went to Europe 100 years ago when an old imperialism tore apart the continent’s peace, again in 1939 we entered the fray, this time to defeat fascism.
It’s why with our allies we joined arms across Europe after the Second World War to stem the tide of Communism.
It’s why we stepped in after September 11, 2001, when the defenders of liberty attacked the terrorists seeking to destroy us.
And it is why today we stand once again with friends and allies whose sovereignty, whose territorial integrity, indeed whose very freedoms and existence are still at risk.
Wherever, whenever those values we hold most dear have been threatened, Canada has been prepared to defend and preserve them.
And so the words of Prime Minister Robert Borden still speak to us today.
A hundred years ago this month he told a special war-time session of Parliament that Canada had gone to war, “not for love of battle, not for lust of conquest, not for greed of possessions, but for the cause of honour, to maintain solemn pledges, to uphold principles of liberty.”
And I say that nothing has changed.
For our Canada is still today loyal to our friends, unyielding to our foes, honourable in our dealings, and courageous in our undertakings.
This remains the character of our country.
Earlier today, we all gathered at our National War Memorial.
It was created to commemorate the Canadians who served and died in the First World War.
Those years – 1914 to 1918 – are there, forever carved in granite.
Over the past century other dates have been chiselled into the monument to commemorate Canada’s contributions from 1939 to 1945, from 1950 to 1953 and, now, from 2001 to 2014.
But these dates are not just carved in stone, they are etched in our hearts.
They remind us of what it means to be Canadian, as do other monuments, Pierre Lemieux
Here at home we have cenotaphs in every community, the National War Memorial, the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier.
A short while ago at the National War Memorial, I was informed that from this day forth the sentries at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier will extend their solemn vigil from Vimy Ridge Day every April until Remembrance Day each fall.
Now, let me conclude with this.
Ladies and gentlemen, these monuments will endure.
But monuments are not memories.
The last survivor of those courageous men and women who went off to war a century ago, John Babcock, passed away in 2010.
No longer can they tell their stories of courage and honour and duty.
But every time we take a stand to defend the values for which they fought and for which so many died, we remember their stories in the only way that really matters.
We hold these values dear, whether we have been here for generations or are newcomers to this land, in search of a better life.
Justice and freedom, democracy and the rule of law, human rights and human dignity.
For a century, these are the things for which our fellow citizens, including so many in this room, have fought.
And this is the ground on which we will always take our stand.
Lest we forget.
Thank you.
