He had little reason to believe in his community, his military commanders or even his country. At the end of the Second World War, RCAF veteran Ed Carter-Edwards was repatriated to Canada. Honourably discharged, the former wireless air-gunner sought a disability pension for having survived a Nazi concentration camp.
“The trouble with you guys who went overseas,” complained a pensions official to Carter-Edwards, “is that you come back here and you think the country owes you a living.”
“We survived the Holocaust,” explained Carter-Edwards. “We were there.”
Like so many, whose post-traumatic stress disorder was dismissed in 1945, Ed Carter-Edwards claimed an additional $3.75 per month in disability pension. Here’s why. On June 7, 1944, the day after D-Day, his Halifax bomber was shot down. He eluded German soldiers, connected with the French Underground and nearly made it across the Pyrenees into Spain. But he was betrayed to the Germans.
“Who are you?” his captors demanded.
“A Canadian airman,” he admitted, showing his military dog tags.
The German ripped the tags from Carter-Edwards’ neck. “Now who are you? You’re a spy and will be shot.”
The Canadian airman was eventually transferred to Buchenwald concentration camp, near Weimar, Germany. Because he had no identity, he was beaten, deprived food, and was even injected with toxins. He was one of 167 Allied airmen (27 Canadians) wrongly imprisoned where inmates were systematically being exterminated.
Literally hours before their execution, the airmen were saved by a German air force officer who had the Buchenwald inmates transferred to Stalag Luft III, the Luftwaffe camp for detaining captured airmen.
“When I came home,” Carter-Edwards told me in 1992, “I set out to get the Canadian government and the media to acknowledge one of the darkest pages of our history.”
It took the better part of 50 years, but Carter-Edwards persisted – writing letters to the editors of every newspaper in the country, testifying before a Senate subcommittee reviewing the POW Compensation Act, and appearing in an NFB documentary, The Lucky Ones: Allied Airmen and Buchenwald. Parliamentarian Jack Marshall eventually led the charge to have Carter-Edwards and the other survivors recognized and compensated.
To the end, Carter-Edwards believed, “Canada would come through.”
I offer my veteran friend’s story as a counterargument to comments from some of my neighbours and their family members that they might not vote in the current federal election. They think the issues are way over their heads. They say they don’t believe the politicians running for office are credible. They’re simply apathetic, or what my colleague Roger Varley described last week as “a threat to democracy.”
I’ve read the flyers distributed by three of the contestants participating in the Candidates Forum sponsored by the Cosmos next Monday at 7 p.m. at the Uxbridge Arena. One candidate’s party proposes Canada withdraw from the United Nations. Another’s party plans to defund the CBC.
And all three promise to build affordable homes and fight Donald Trump’s irresponsible trade tariffs. Whether you support any of these promises or oppose them, choosing not to exercise your vote ensures that you’ll have no quarter to complain afterward.
I fear that my column preaches to the converted. Members of generation-Z, those Canadians born in the first dozen years of the 21st century, don’t read newspapers much anymore. If they read news at all, they do so on digital platforms and social media applications, which are largely unvetted and often full of misinformation.
Apathy runs rampant in their demographic. Data show that only 47 per cent of gen-Zs, those aged roughly 18 to 24, bothered to cast a vote in the 2021 federal election.
I listened to a panel of gen-Zs discussing their plight on a CBC Radio broadcast this week. All of them sounded highly educated; one even said that’s their problem. “We’re so well educated,” he said, “that the jobs don’t exist to employ us and housing and groceries will never be unaffordable.”
Another complained that she felt she couldn’t vote for the party she believed in because the election has become a two-party race where the winner takes all; she wants proportional representation, “so that I can actually cast a vote for a candidate who can win.”
All the gen-Zs in the broadcast see Canadian unity as an important issue, but don’t trust the generations ahead of them to preserve it. They accuse gen-Xs (born 1965-1979) and gen-Ys (millennials) as “a gerontocracy,” government ruled by the elderly.
If you don’t vote, however, you’re throwing away the freedom to choose, a Canadian birthright that Ed Carter-Edwards nearly died preserving. It was 80 years ago today, that Allied troops liberated Buchenwald concentration camp.