Remembrance Day Ceremonies

Loved by some, dreaded by others, Canadians have almost uniformly experienced the same Remembrance Day ceremonies across the country.

As put by former educator Matt Moire, “there’ll be a student who reads In Flanders Fields, and then students who act out some scene of a young Canadian family where the father has to go off to war and the children cry, and some kind of video montage with photos of crosses and soldiers fighting are shown, and then the choir will sing; it’s down to a science, really.”

Those who choose to attend public ceremonies experience much of the same, with the majority of ceremonies being held outside at significant local monuments opening with bag pipes and closing with gun fire and salutes. The national Remembrance Day ceremony is held at the National War Memorial in Ottawa and has been televised in all provinces since 2011. But with little deviation year to year, do Canadians still feel the need to attend and tune in?

According to a study produced by The Historica-Dominion Institute, attendance at such ceremonies is on the rise, with 3 in 10 Canadians planning to attend and a whopping 80% who expect to observe the two minutes of silence. This rise in attendance has been linked inconclusively to the number of young Canadians impacted by the war in Afghanistan, with 27% of Canadians surveyed personally knowing a soldier who had served in the Afghanistan conflict. The study also showed that 85% of Canadians believe that Remembrance Day should be a statutory holiday, a majority believing it would give the day and the task of remembrance more significance.

There has been some speculation during the negotiation process of at what point Afghanistan veterans, and those of less well-known conflicts, will be incorporated into, and potentially speak at, Remembrance Ceremonies. “All the forms of remembrance that we use, the cenotaph and the two minutes of silence and the various rituals were largely created during or directly after the First World War and at that time people’s views of that war were very different one might argue than how we view them today,” explains Geoffrey Hayes, an expert in Canadian military history.

Attendance at these possibly outdated ceremonies is expected to be high as Canada enters the centennial of the beginning of the First World War this year. But what will dominate the conversation is unclear; our participation in a war 100 years ago or our removal from Afghanistan, Canada's longest war?