It should be something that you recommend. Even with our young generation in the Métis nation, we keep on educating and showing them immediately part of our cultural ways, and we honour the veterans at every assembly we have. It's just essential. It's part of our cultural ways, and we try to teach them to our young people because today sometimes we forget and we look at them as old people. We try to tell our young generations. They don't realize that these were just boys themselves when they left. Now they are old, yes, and they are struggling and trying to survive. The young generation, in all walks of life, sometimes forgets to show honour and respect, and to stop and say thank you. I think that's something we need to look at more closely. We can do that with books. We can do that with teaching at the school.
Let's be honest with ourselves. National Veterans Day in Canada is used as a damn holiday for some reason. It's not honouring any veterans. People are going shopping and just taking it as time off. They used to close stores at 12:00; now big stores are open all day. There used to be time when things were shut down. You could only get milk and bread and stuff from a store because it was a time to show honour and respect to the veterans of this country and to those who gave their lives for our freedom.
Our system has changed and again they are being forgotten. Even on the actual holiday we have in this country, they're not being given that honour, so maybe we need to really begin educating our young generation about the importance, because a war will come, but it will be a different kind of war. It'll be a pushing of buttons. It's going to be a different war, but there will still be a lot of people who will die.
People need to know that we have to show great respect to all those who still.... When people join.... You know better than I, clearly, that when your father joined or your brother joined, you realized immediately that they were joining on the premise of knowing that they might be killed. They were joining something knowing that they might never come back.
Today people get comfortable, as though we know there's not going to be a big war, but there might be. You might be going to Afghanistan. You might not be coming home or you might be psychologically defeated.
Therefore I think we should start writing books. I think we should go back and change the way we think in this country. Why is our national day for recognizing our country's veterans not being treated as it should be? We have the Legions doing prayers—I attend lots of them throughout different parts of my province—and that's it. It's over. Everybody goes home, has their little cake and sandwich, and they are gone. Nobody reminds themselves that if it weren't for those people, we could be under the power of Germany today.
Don't fool yourselves. It could have happened. What are we doing as governments? We're not going the extra mile to stop it and to psychologically change our young generation. As I said about that person and his wife and his two kids praying at that graveyard and not knowing who they're praying for, they did it because their father did it. Their father took them when they were young and they still do it, and they're teaching their kids to do it.
If we could have that in our soul a little bit, that kind of honour in this country, maybe we'd show a different respect and care to our veterans, even those who have passed on. We can't forget that day or that event. We should promote changing the very mindset of our country and truly showing respect to the veterans.