Madam Speaker, I join with my colleagues in the New Democratic Party caucus today in the House of Commons to pay tribute to Canadian veterans. We pay tribute particularly to those who made the supreme sacrifice: those men and women in the army, the navy, the air force and the merchant navy who gave their lives in World War I and World War II; those who died in the Korean war; those who have died in the course of peacekeeping operations.
Fortunately no one died in the Gulf war but as the member for Saanich-Gulf Islands indicated, there is evidence that people who served in the Gulf war have a variety of lasting effects which need to be acknowledged by the government.
That is why when we gather on Remembrance Day we pay tribute not just to those who died but also to those who came back, as the legion says in one of its creeds, after having given the best years of their lives.
A long time ago, just before my 20th birthday I was cycling with a friend through Holland. We came to a big monument. We had stopped at the Canadian war cemetery at Bergen op Zoom. We went for a walk through the beautiful place which has been kept wonderfully by the Dutch all these years. We realized what we had stumbled upon. We spent a couple of hours there because we were struck with the row upon row upon row of Canadians who were buried there. It struck me that at the time of their deaths they were about the same age as I was then, 19.
It was not until 10 years later that I had an occasion to visit the cemetery at Adagem in Belgium and another 10 years later I visited Vimy. The older I get, the more it is impressed upon me how young these people were, giving more meaning to the passage which is used at every Remembrance Day service: "They shall not grow old as we who are left grow old. Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn". If anyone has ever lost a relative not necessarily in war but to an accident at a young age, we all know what that means. Those people are forever youthful in our imaginations. They grow not old.
I was struck, as I always am, by images of those cemeteries, by the images of the Menin gate outside the village of Ypres where the names of 35,000 Commonwealth soldiers are inscribed who have no known grave. Every week the people of that town gather to do a last post ceremony at the Menin gate. They have been doing that since 1918 with the exception of the years when the town was captured during the second world war.
I say this because in Europe, whether it is in Holland, or at the Menin gate or elsewhere, people appreciate what Canadians and other Commonwealth and allied soldiers gave at that time. I think we in Canada could do no less. I often feel that we do not appreciate to the extent that we should what our veterans gave.
I hope this Remembrance Day and in Remembrance Days to come that future generations will be lucky as my generation was. My grandfather served in the first world war, my father in the second world war, but my generation was not called to war. I hope
that will continue to be said about my son's generation and my grandson's generation. We all should devote ourselves to that goal.