As memories fade, Canadians mark 80 years since the end of the Second World War

OTTAWA - Relatives of war veterans gathered at the National War Memorial in Ottawa on Friday to mark the 80th anniversary of Japan's surrender and the official end of the Second World War.

Sweat poured down the faces of those assembled in the August midday heat as the Canadian Armed Forces bugler performed the Last Post.

Michael Babin, president of the Hong Kong Veterans Commemorative Association, said there are no living veterans remaining out of the nearly 2,000 Canadians who took part in the Battle of Hong Kong in December 1941.

He said the last known veteran from that fight died a little more than a year and a half ago, at the age of 106.

Cessation of war in Europe 80 years ago brought Winnipeggers together in record numbers

When the news reached Canada in May 1945 that the German army had surrendered, and the threat and horrors of the Nazi regime had finally been defeated, Canadians from coast to coast took to the streets to celebrate.

And as they often do in times of joy and jubilation, Winnipeggers gathered that day at the intersection of Portage and Main.

An image by famous Winnipeg photographer L.B. Foote captured the moment — troops, citizens and dignitaries congregated around a small grandstand erected at the famous intersection.

“It was a universal reaction, and a very spontaneous and organic reaction around the world on VE-Day,” said Bill Zuk, secretary of the Canadian Aviation Historical Society’s Manitoba Chapter.

National symbols can be problematic, and the Canadian flag has been through a lot in its 60 years

So, folks, where are we at on the Canadian flag? Is it cool to unfurl the ol’ girl again or what?

Thirty years on, is Quebec headed for another independence referendum?

MONTREAL - Ten years ago, Jean-François Lisée predicted that Quebec’s independence movement would be reborn.

“It could rise again given the right circumstances,” he said in 2015. “What could trigger it, I cannot say."

Three years later, as leader of the sovereigntist Parti Québécois, Lisée lost his riding and saw his party reduced to 10 seats when the upstart Coalition Avenir Québec, led by François Legault, swept to power for the first time.

The 2018 election was widely seen as proof that separatism was no longer a defining issue in Quebec politics, and pollsters speculated that the PQ’s days were numbered. The province’s new leader was a former sovereigntist at the helm of a conservative-leaning, nationalist party promising not to hold a referendum, and Quebecers rewarded him with a decisive majority.

Riel’s vision grows stronger

As the first visionary of Manitoba, Riel fought the rest of his life to stop British domination and destruction of Indigenous lives, while stubbornly maintain the independent and unique multicultural spirit that birthed this place.

Rise of FLQ in 1960s documented in Montreal cartoonist’s graphic novel

Ever since he was a teenager, Montreal cartoonist Chris Oliveros has been fascinated by the story of the Front de libération du Québec (FLQ).

In high school, his history class was shown Robin Spry’s 1973 National Film Board documentary Action: The October Crisis of 1970, which detailed the acts of terrorism, including the kidnapping and murder of Quebec labour minister Pierre Laporte, carried out by the militant separatist group in Montreal — under the auspices of liberating Quebec from anglophone rule — and the military response that followed. (The film is available to watch free online at wfp.to/6pe.)

“I was really struck by the fact that events like these, these incredibly tumultuous events, kidnappings and the army in the streets of Montreal, all of this could happen here, in the city where I lived,” says Oliveros from his Montreal home. “I was really blown away.”

Earlier this month, Montreal publisher Drawn & Quarterly (which Oliveros founded in 1990) published his graphic novel Are You Willing To Die For The Cause?: Revolution in 1960s Quebec, the first of two books about the FLQ by the 57-year-old cartoonist.

Liberal insider reflects on struggle to entrench Indigenous rights during the constitutional process of the early 1980s

The following is an abridged excerpt from Unlikely Insider: A West Coast Advocate in Ottawa, by Jack Austin, a former federal Liberal policy adviser, chief of staff to prime minister Pierre Trudeau and senator, with Edie Austin (McGill University Press, 2023). In the book the Liberal insider reflects on the struggle to entrench Indigenous rights during the constitutional process of the early 1980s.

St. Boniface Museum home to 30,000 artifacts, many connected to founder of Manitoba

St. Boniface Museum is home to 30,000 artifacts, many connected to the founder of Manitoba.

Manitobans take to streets in name of truth, reconciliation

A sea of orange flooded downtown Winnipeg, as thousands of Manitobans came together to honour residential school survivors, mourn those lost to the system, and mark the first National Day for Truth and Reconciliation.

On Thursday morning, outside the towering Canadian Museum for Human Rights, a historic sight: crowds of people in orange shirts honouring a group of Sixties Scoop, residential school and day school survivors gathered on the steps.

"We went there as beautiful children; we wake up every day with these memories,” Gerry Shingoose — herself a residential school survivor — called into a megaphone, looking out at the growing crowd.

"Today is such a beautiful day to honour each one of us."

Heavy hearts, happy hearts

The marchers arrive at St. John's Park at almost exactly the minute predicted. They arrive in a great orange wave, all wearing shirts the same colour. They arrive led by the drum, and the riders on horseback, and the tendrils of smudge that curl over Main Street, cleansing the path to the park where the powwow is underway.

"Are we all going to fit into the park, guys?" one young woman gasps, laughing as she surveys the scene.

In a way they do, in a way they don't. For hours, the people flow into the park from all directions. They flow by the hundreds, and then the thousands. They flow until the fields show less green than orange, until lines for the porta-potties stretch into the dozens, until the whole park is alive with laughter and conversation.

The crowd looks like Manitoba. It contains faces of all ages, all races. Most of the people here are Indigenous, but on this day they are joined in solidarity by people of all nations; a movement, generations in the making, to call for a way forward, to call for action on reconciliation, to call for justice for Indigenous people.

Portraits of survivors, tales of strength

Since 2013, Sept. 30 has been known as Orange Shirt Day — to honour the children who survived Indian residential schools and to remember those who did not return home.

It is also now the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation, which asks all Canadians to reflect upon relationships with Indigenous people, remember the harms of the past, and focus on ways to commit to healthy and positive growth throughout all communities today.

Here are six inspiring stories of Manitoba survivors of the residential school, day school, and child welfare systems:

Craig Block link to city’s Black history

Above a fruit seller in a small brick building on Main Street, a group of Black railway porters made history.

The Order of Sleeping Car Porters, formed in Winnipeg in 1917, was North America’s first Black labour union. Five years later, they established offices and a meeting hall on the second storey of the building, the Craig Block, at 795 Main St.

Now, the building has hit the market, without any historical status protections or a bronze plaque to commemorate its history.

History writer Christian Cassidy said he’s seen the building, which recently housed retail store Ma’s Fishing, go up for sale once or twice in the past. Each time, he worries someone will buy it and knock it down. It’s one of last buildings that links Winnipeg to the history of its Black communities.

Documentary tells story of Ukrainian immigrants who put lives on the line for adopted homeland

A new war documentary follows a journey of acceptance for Ukrainian-Canadians that came at a heavy cost.

A Canadian War Story, directed by John Paskievich, a Winnipeg filmmaker and photographer, follows the plight of Ukrainian immigrants, who first came to Canada in the 1880s and for decades settled on homesteads across Western Canada, including Manitoba.

Those settlers, and their children, would join the Canadian effort during the Second World War, and the film offers their stories of sacrifice, tragedy and eventually victory.

“The film isn’t just a series of veterans’ testimonials, like how it was to be in Hong Kong or D-Day. It was a coming-of-age story,” says Paskievich, who spent three years making the hour-long movie.

Canadian veterans' stories detail selfless sacrifice, struggle

The lives of the men and women who served and are serving in the Canadian Armed Forces are a mystery to many Canadians.

Remembrance Day may be a time when family memories of what a grandparent or great-grandparent did in the First World War or Second World War are vaguely recalled. Winnipeggers over 30 likely remember the flood of 1997, when the army was deployed to protect the city from the raging Red River, but what else have our Armed Forces done? Jody Mitic offers readers an answer.

In his 2015 autobiography Unflinching: The Making of a Canadian Sniper, Mitic told the story of his life in the Canadian Armed Forces: the physical and mental challenges he had to overcome, the years of training he endured, his deployment to Bosnia, becoming a sniper-team leader in Afghanistan, losing his legs to a landmine and overcoming this life-changing injury and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

Everyday Heroes is Mitic’s collection of 21 first-person accounts of life in the Canadian Armed Forces. He turns from his story to one “encouraging Canadians to get to know the men and women who wear the Canadian flag on their shoulders… to see beyond the uniform to the person.”

Map-based history of Canada a marvel

If you like maps, you’ll like this book; if you like both maps and crisply recounted Canadian history, you’ll love it.

Adam Shoalts is the author of a previous Canadian bestseller, 2015’s Alone Against the North, which recounted his exploration of the muskeg and river wilderness that is the Hudson Bay Lowlands.

The maps of his second book are springboards for his accounts of how this country’s vast expanses were charted.

Shoalts believes maps have been fundamental in shaping our view of Canada. He supports this belief by offering up pivotal moments in our country’s history via stories built around 10 specific maps, most of which, in turn, are the product of specific explorations.

While our 150th birthday party is a big, 'Dominion Day' began with respectful restraint

It’s safe to say what is now called Canada Day had modest beginnings in these parts.As far back as 1869 — two years after Confederation and one year before Manitoba was born — the July 3 issue of the Nor’Wester, the paper of record for the “Colony of Assiniboia,” dutifully reported that celebrations on July 1 were muted.

“Dominion Day was kept in our little town by the raising of the ‘Canadian’ flag upon the now celebrated staff — said to be 70 feet, be the same 20 feet more or less — which flag was liberal sainted during the day by an ‘Anvil Chorus’ adapted to ‘God Save the Queen’ and ‘Hurrah! for the New Dominion,” the paper noted. “The affair was wound up by a large bonfire in the evening.

“Not a gun was heard, or a funeral note or anything else,” the account added, “but then you see the H.B.C. (Hudson Bay Company) is keeping her patriotism like champagne, well bottled and wired down, for a future occasion, when we may expect to see it burst forth in a manner calculated to astonish the natives.”

Of course, these were the days of the Riel Rebellion in the Red River Colony. Not exactly the time to be popping that “champagne” in public. Besides, the majority of the less than 1,000 colony settlers considered themselves British. And a vast majority of residents, the Métis under Riel, were literally at war with the new Canada.

Canada’s autonomy took more than Vimy Ridge

Last month, on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the Battle of Vimy Ridge, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, as is his style, waxed eloquently about the terrible sacrifice of the soldiers who fought there and the battle’s larger meaning for Canadian history. But he went a bit overboard attributing to Vimy something that is not so: that Canada “was born” on that battlefield.

It is true that at Vimy, for the first time in the war, “the four divisions of the Canadian Corps fought together and drove the Germans off a ridge that dominated the terrain in the area of Arras in northern France,” as historian Jack Granatstein explains. Yet as he also adds, despite the 3,598 Canadians killed in the fighting, Vimy did not end the war, nor did Canada achieve autonomy within the British Empire.

This nation-building narrative was somewhat promoted in 1917 and then in 1936 when the Vimy memorial was opened, but it did not truly take hold for another generation. In 1967, on the 50th anniversary of the Vimy Ridge battle that coincided with Canada’s centennial, then-prime minister Lester Pearson reimagined Vimy as “the birth of a nation.”

The fact was that several months after the fighting at Vimy, Canada’s soldiers found themselves knee-deep in the mud in the area around the village of Passchendaele, near Ypres in Belgium. That battle had started at the end of July 1917, because the British commander, Sir Douglas Haig, had insisted stubbornly that the key to victory on the Western Front was capturing the Passchendaele ridge.

When war came to Winnipeg

If Day, the simulated Nazi invasion of Winnipeg, was a daring publicity stunt that involved weeks of planning, thousands of volunteers and garnered media attention across North America. Most importantly, it raised millions of dollars for Canada’s war effort.

The purpose of If Day was to drum up sales for Victory Bonds. Sold to businesses and individuals, often through payroll deduction plans, they were an essential tool for financing Canada’s war effort.

Dr. Jody Perrun has researched If Day and Winnipeg’s participation in Victory Bond campaigns for his book The Patriotic Consensus: Unity, Morale, and the Second World War in Winnipeg. He estimates that of the $22 billion the federal government spent fighting the war between 1939 and 1945, more than $12 billion was offset through the sale of Victory Bonds.

The promotion of the bonds was the responsibility of the National War Finance Committee in Ottawa. The short-term sales campaigns were initially quite centralized, with a national theme and propaganda products that were forwarded to provincial committees who used rallies, concerts and other tried-and-true public events to make up their portion of the national sales goal.

Vous auriez pu être résistant?

'Qu’est-ce que j’aurais fait dans la France occupée par les Allemands? Est-ce que je serais devenu un héros de la Résistance? Ou bien serais-je devenu nazi?"

Voilà les questions qui ont conduit le médecin Philippe Erhard à écrire son tout premier roman, The Ladders of Death.

Erhard est médecin à Winnipeg depuis 1982. Depuis qu’il a quitté sa pratique générale à la Clinique Saint-Boniface en 2008 pour se lancer en médecine sportive à la Clinique Pan-Am, le natif de Belfort en France, travaille à un rythme plus décontracté.

"J’ai enfin le temps de réfléchir. En 2010, j’ai publié un livre sur le mieux-être, Being — A Hiking Guide through Life. J’étais inspiré par mon travail de médecin et par des souvenirs d’une randonnée à pied dans les Vosges. Depuis, et de plus en plus, je suis mes propres conseils sur l’importance de ralentir son train de vie et de se laisser vivre!"

L’ impact d’une loi injuste et intransigeante

LE 10 mars 1916, le gouvernement de T. C.

Norris adopte une nouvelle loi scolaire.

L’enseignement du français devient illégal.

Normand Boisvert est un des acteurs clés dans la renaissance du français scolaire. Il nous partage son point de vue.

Témoignage de survivantes de l’Holocauste à l’USB

Le père Patrick Desbois, un prêtre catholique français réputé pour son travail de recherche sur l’Holocauste, en est convaincu: “Les génocides ne commencent pas avec les chambres de gaz. Ils commencent plutôt par des petits manquements de respect.” Des petites indignités comme celle qui restera gravée à jamais dans la mémoire de Régine Rubinfeld Frankel.

On est en 1942. La jeune Régine, âgée d’une dizaine d’années, est partie de la maison où sa famille se cachait, avec un carnet de rations, chercher des vivres dans la ville la plus proche. Au lieu de retourner à pied avec ses sacs — un trajet de huit kilomètres — elle a décidé de prendre le bus. Mais le chauffeur, une connaissance, exige qu’elle descende plusieurs kilomètres avant son arrêt, alors que la nuit tombe.

“Même maintenant quand j’en parle, j’ai envie de pleurer, parce que je me demande toujours pourquoi il n’y avait pas une seule personne dans ce bus qui a dit: ‘Laisse-la!’ ”

Régine Rubinfeld Frankel et sa sœur, Rachel Rubinfeld Fink, ont raconté leurs souvenirs lors d’une conférence intitulée “Plus Jamais”, présentée à l’Université de Saint-Boniface le 9 novembre.

Boom and gloom

Stefan Epp-Koop's We're Going to Run This City explores the dynamic political movement that came out of the 1919 General Strike, the largest labour protest in Canadian history, and the ramifications for Winnipeg throughout the 1920s and 1930s. Winnipeg was a deeply divided city. On one side, the conservative political descendants of the General Strike's Citizen's Committee of 1000 advocated for minimal government and low taxes. On the other side were the Independent Labour Party and the Communist Party of Canada, two groups rooted in the city's working class, though often in conflict with each other.

The political strength of the left would ebb and flow throughout the 1920s and 1930s but peaked in the mid-1930s when the ILP's John Queen became mayor and the two parties on the left combined to hold a majority of council seats. Astonishingly, Winnipeg was governed by a mayor who had served jail time for his role in the General Strike.

Winnipeg had grown rapidly in the early decades of the 20th century. The city had all the appearances of a boom town, tripling in size in the first decade. Businesses flocked to the city to service the growing population of Winnipeg and the Canadian West. Manufacturers, wholesalers, and retailers opened in the city, establishing it as the pre-eminent commercial hub of Western Canada. The city also profited from the growing agricultural production of the Prairies as the home of the grain exchange and many companies producing agricultural implements and supplies.

Optimism abounded, anything was possible. Civic boosters imagined Winnipeg as the "Chicago of the North," a world-class city. That became the commonly accepted narrative of the city's growth. Indeed, many Winnipeggers did become quite wealthy during those boom years, and there was significant economic opportunity for those who were able to access it.

Constitution Act, Treaty 1 at CMHR

The original Treaty No. 1 land agreement of 1871 and the 1982 Proclamation of the Constitution Act are two of 11 historic and rarely loaned artifacts on display at the Canadian Museum for Human Rights.

The documents can be viewed in the CMHR's Protection Rights in Canada gallery and Canadian Journeys gallery and are on loan until September 2015 from the Library and Archives Canada based in Gatineau, Que. The display has been open to public viewing since the museum's opening day on Nov. 11.

Signed at Lower Fort Garry by Chippewan and Cree First Nations leaders and Queen Victoria, the Treaty No. 1 agreement is the original document with affixed seals and ribbon.

"Just looking at the display in the case, we've got 250 years of Canadian legal tradition and human rights tradition in these documents. There is a really wide breadth of historical significance," said Heather Bidzinski, the CMHR's head of collections.