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Commendation
On July 27, 2011, the Minister of Veterans Affairs for Canada awarded 19 citizens his annual commendation. Traditionally, the award is “presented to those veterans … who, in an exemplary way, have contributed either to the care and well-being of veterans or to the remembrance of the sacrifices and achievements of Canadians in armed conflict.”
Most of the 2011 recipients are veterans. Ted Barris, a civilian, also received the commendation.
(more…)
About Ted Barris
Barris is an accomplished author, journalist and broadcaster. As well as hosting stints on CBC Radio and regular contributions to the Globe and Mail and National Post, Barris has authored 16 non-fiction books and is a full-time professor of journalism at Centennial College in Toronto. He has also written a weekly newspaper column - The Barris Beat - for more than 20 years.Featured Posts
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It was a wonderful life
The day before the big opening, the French police, built a security fence around it. Workers set up wooden benches for an audience of 5,000. Rain left the glass and titanium-clad building on the Normandy beach glistening like a polished jewel. And inside the museum itself, Canadian army cadets removed the pins from nearly 44,000 poppies – the pinless Remembrance symbols would be dropped from an aircraft during the ceremony – symbolizing the number of Canadians killed in the Second World War. “I was on this beach 59 years ago,” Garth Webb said during the opening of the Juno Beach Centre on the June 6 anniversary in 2003. “And it’s just as big a thrill to be here today.”
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The right to know
The subject of Rob Ford’s reaction to reporter Daniel Dale’s investigation of land adjacent to the Toronto mayor’s property has come up in conversation a lot the past week. Some acquaintances of mine have described Dale’s poking around Ford’s backyard wall as provocative. Others find the Toronto mayor’s behaviour embarrassing. But I was taken aback [...]
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Cuts more than skin deep
Parks Canada guide, Sylvie, greeted our tour group to Beaumont-Hamel, this past spring.
As we arrived, she emerged from the information pavilion. She wore her identifiable green uniform, complete with department identification and Maple Leaf insignia. She offered a warm welcome and explained she would be our guide for the next half-hour. She was a long [...] -
That which endures
It surfaced a few months ago. We found it along an old, stone foundation during some renovations at our house (built in the 1920s). And while this piece of history wasn’t nearly as old as the house, it dated back nearly that far. It was an empty Coca-Cola bottle. You know, those short, stubby ones, sometimes made of blue-green glass, but more often clear – the ones that were a perfect fit in your hand. Our artefact came from an era when the Coke slogan (c. 1938) was: “The best friend thirst ever had.”
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Of fathers and sons
About three days into the tour, I saw the two of them walking and talking. Tony and Jeff Peck were pausing to look up at a wall of inscriptions. There in front of them the names of some 54,896 Commonwealth soldiers, for whom there are no known remains, lay chiselled in the stone. They are the so-called “missing” from the Great War. A couple of days later, father Tony watched son Jeff participate in the famous Last Post Ceremony under the same barrel-vaulted archway known as the Menin Gate. “They shall grow not old, as we who are left grow old,” Jeff recited to the hundreds watching in silence. “Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn. At the going down of the sun and in the morning, we will remember them.”
