On Monday afternoon, I met members of the Imperial Oil Annuitant Club for the first time.
About 70 of them had invited me to speak about the significance of remembrance during this the 90th anniversary of the signing of the 1919 Peace Treaty following the Great War. Among the retirees were no fewer than eight Second World War veterans and the widow of a ninth. Over lunch I spoke with one of the vets – 85-year-old Gerry O’Neill – who had left work and school in 1943 to serve in the Royal Canadian Air Force.
“No questions asked,” he said at one point. “Britain and Europe needed us.”
It was about that time the same day, a television host’s mindless comments began surfacing in the media. Greg Gutfeld, former editor of the men’s magazine Maxim, and now a high-profile personality on the late-night television show Red Eye, had decided to lampoon the Canadian military. Lt. Gen. Andrew Leslie, of the Canadian Forces, had recently suggested after seven years in Afghanistan, that this country’s national army needed a one-year “operational break.”
“The Canadian military wants to take a breather,” Gutfeld ridiculed on his March 17 broadcast. “To do some yoga, paint landscapes or run on the beach in gorgeous white capri pants.”
Not that Gutfeld, the ill-informed ringleader of a middle-of-the-night gossip show on Fox News, would understand such things, but Leslie added that the constant wear-and-tear of the Taliban insurgency in Afghanistan had taken its toll. The Canadian chief-of-land-staff indicated that in February one-third of all light-armoured vehicles had broken down, and that three-quarters of the army’s reconnaissance Coyotes, 73 per cent of its Bisons, 71 per cent of its Leopard tanks and all its tracked light-armoured vehicles (LAVs) were not in service.
Leslie suggested that his research – a concept probably foreign to the producers of Red Eye – indicated it was all due to lack of money and a dwindling supply of trained mechanics and technicians.
“A hiatus is needed to get their armoured act together,” Gutfeld jibed. Then, he turned to one of his equally air-headed panellists and chortled, “Isn’t this the perfect time to invade this ridiculous country?”
Now I don’t claim to have either the wit or wisdom of such high-priced U.S. TV talent. I don’t command nearly the attention that a nation-wide broadcast network, such as Fox, does. But I do have a little common sense. One would think if Gutfeld and his shoot-from-the-lip quipsters had taken even a single New York minute, they would have recognized the stupidity of their satire. They would have remembered that this country was the first to offer assistance to the U.S. in its war on terror in Afghanistan. They would have known that for seven years, Canadian troops have fought and died to maintain some order in the most hostile area of the country.
In addition, if he had a memory longer than his 60-minute telecast, Gutfeld would have noticed that Andrew Leslie has lineage in the preservation of freedom going back to his grandfather – Andrew McNaughton – who helped win the pivotal battle at Vimy Ridge in 1917, when U.S. troops hadn’t even begun training to assist German-occupied countries in the Great War.
What’s more, if Gutfeld had any command of basic arithmetic, he would understand that 116 soldiers killed from a country with a population of 35 million, has a greater per capita impact than the losses sustained by the U.S. with a population 10 times greater.
My conversation over lunch with Second World War air force veteran Gerry O’Neill, the other day, brought us to the recent deaths of Canadian soldiers Jack Bouthillier, Tyler Crooks, Corey Hayes, and Scott Vernelli in Afghanistan. O’Neill explained that a number of the retirees, that day, had planned to hear and see my presentation as a prologue to their departure for bridge locations along Hwy. 401 east of Toronto.
Many had packed Canadian flags, red shirts and (in the case of the veterans) their medals for display when the bodies of the four young casualties travelled along the Highway of Heroes en route to the coroner’s office in Toronto.
“We owe them a great deal,” he said to me.
I hesitate to think how O’Neill and the seven other veterans gathered around those luncheon tables might have reacted had they heard Gutfeld’s sophomore satire later that day. They would most certainly have given even New York gossip circles something to buzz about.
Then again, I suspect their Canadian sense of decency might well have exceeded Gutfeld’s utter lack of tact and dismissed him like the fluff he is.
