Official languages watchdog: Be careful how you do military anniversaries

[The Bread Guy]

This, from the annual report of the Commissioner of Official Languages just out earlier this week:

.... The federal government has announced that there will be a series of national celebrations to mark significant anniversaries over the next three years, leading up to the 150th anniversary of Confederation in 2017. These will include the 1OOth anniversary of the creation of the Royal 22e Régiment, the 200th anniversary of Sir John A. Macdonald's birth, the centenary of the First World War and the Battle of Vimy Ridge, and the 70th anniversary of the end of the Second World War in 1945. The climax will be the opening of the Canadian Museum of History as part of the 2017 celebrations.

I have always thought that anniversaries offer an opportunity for public education-an opportunity that is particularly valuable for those who came to Canada as adults and did not study Canadian history in school. However, it is important that these events recognize that there are conflicting narratives in Canadian history, that events like the First World War stimulate different recollections, with memories of heroic sacrifice co-existing uneasily with stories of conscription, anti-French ­Canadian insults and soldiers shooting on anti-conscription rioters in Québec City.

Indeed, the First World War had a divisive as well as a formative effect on the country. English­-speaking and French-speaking Canadians experienced the war in very different ways. Similarly, the Second World War is remembered in Quebec as much for the conscription crisis of 1942-when 80% of Quebec voters voted not to release William Lyon Mackenzie King's government from its promise not to impose conscription, while 80% of voters in the rest of the country voted todo so-as for anything else.

Thus, it is critical that these anniversaries become as much a time for reflection as for celebration, and for recognition that the events being remembered were often the source of bitter, divisive, even sometimes violent disagreement and debate at the time. Any attempt to treat them as moments of uncomplicated flag-waving unity will be unconstructive at best and, at worst, inflame ugly linguistic emotions ....

 

[JorgSlice]

Seriously?

 

[pbi]

These people never give up, do they?

Why couldn't he identify it as an occasion to celebrate the thousands of Francophones who have loyally served this country, or were killed doing it, during those World Wars?

How about the fact that Canada's service in WWI gave impetus to the Statute of Westminster that, in  1931, finally moved Canada from being a sort of autonomous colony, to being an actual country with control over its own foreign and defence policies?

Our history is what it is, good or bad. Hiding from it achieves nothing. What's next? Pull down the National War Monument because it might offend people in Quebec?

But, what I'm really pissed about is that he forgot the PPCLI 100th.

 

[medicineman]

But, what I'm really pissed about is that he forgot the PPCLI 100th.

He couldn't translate PPCLI into ILCPP?