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COMMENTARY
August 17, 2011
The restoration
God save the Queen!Being of a patriotic disposition, these were my first delighted words on learning that our armed forces could have their names back. As Defence Minister Peter MacKay confirmed Tuesday, the Canadian Army, Royal Canadian Navy and Royal Canadian Air Force, names written in blood on so many pages of our history, are to be restored. The suppression of those magnificent names, and their replacement with the generic bureaucratic nomenclature of 1968, was a source of grief and discouragement to almost every veteran of Canada's wars and to the overwhelming majority of serving military. They obeyed because obedience to duly constituted authority is trained into the nature of a good soldier; and Canada has always had fine soldiers. And their pride in their traditions became sublimated. It survived as many things do, in adversity; silent in words, but revealed in action. The very fact that soldiers, sailors and airmen were an embarrassment to that flower-child age, that their calling was being twisted in the new "peacekeeping" jargon, that the forces were being shrunk and stripped whenever the politicians needed "easy" budget cuts, contributed paradoxically to esprit de corps for they retained their identity within their own beleaguered culture. This was brought home to me, a couple of decades ago, when I insulted a Canadian officer, quite unintentionally. He was my seatmate on a long bus ride. I made some remarks about the sad condition of a reserve unit with which I was then familiar; about how, by slightly cutting derisory per diems and expenses (for reservists already reaching into their own pockets for the most basic gear), the government was gutting esprit de corps. The officer bridled. And let me remember what he said: "Don't you doubt it. When we are called on, we will do our share of the damage." It was a revealing remark because the officer was, by instinct, so closely identified with those reserves, that questions of "budget" passed right over his head. His loyalties went so much deeper than that. We soon sorted out the misunderstanding - I took back the unintended insinuation that soldiers only work for money - and in the rest of the bus ride I learned a great deal more about the indifference and pettiness to which all the Canadian Forces had become accustomed. In Afghanistan and elsewhere since, they have shown the old Canada is not yet dead. Defeat had never been taught to our Canadian armed forces, and it is hard now to remember the shock of the 1968 "unification" scheme, as it was smugly announced by defence minister Paul Hellyer. Men and women so immensely proud of their uniforms and traditions were suddenly stripped of them all by Liberal politicians from Venus. My grandfather, who had ascended Vimy Ridge with the Canadian Corps in 1917, wept at this "desecration." My father, a Spitfire flyboy in the war after - who had been, incidentally, an habitual Liberal voter - was speechless. He understood perfectly the need for better integration of land, sea, and air. He could not understand why this was being used as pretext to turn our military into "a faceless ant army of little green men." He was of course alluding to the new, nearly unisex uniforms in a "soviet" shade of green unsuitable to the army and ludicrous aboard a ship. (The Liberals soon backed off slightly, under intense political pressure, granting a shade of blue to the "Maritime Command" and other little compromises.) Father and grandfather alike had reluctantly accepted Pearson's new red flag, noting its omission of any reference to the Crown, and generously assuming this to be an oversight, but the "unification" scheme made crystal clear the agenda behind all of Pearson's, and then Trudeau's, departmental "reforms" and "modernizations." They were quite intentionally, and systematically, replacing all of Canada's traditional symbols with new marketing graphics in the Liberal party colours and style. They called this divisive makeover a "national unity" program, directing the taxpayer's cash into a host of indoctrination campaigns, that subtly vilified Canada's older identity. They purposefully stripped all monarchical and other historical associations from Canadian public life, replacing everything with this slick new "brand" and putting the flat, red, content-free maple everywhere, even erasing the beavers. They raised a generation that would know nothing else but flat red maple. Eventually, they stripped even the proud title "Dominion" from our country's name - by that point (1982) quite openly vilifying all who objected. And we, as Canadians, shamefully let them do it. How I wish my father could still have been alive, to hear the wonderful news of this restoration, and so many other veterans who spent their last decades watching the bureaucratic takedown of their battle standards. How glad I am for the soldiers now serving, and especially for the sailors and airmen, who may rejoice. For now all we need are some ships and aeroplanes. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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