Mr. Speaker, this is National Veterans Week and Canada's native people as well as black Canadians, Japanese Canadians and French Canadians all gave up their lives as true Canadians in support of our country's quest to ensure that the fundamental principles of human rights would be respected and valued throughout the world. Too often their contribution, if acknowledged at all, is done so by addendum, by afterthought.
Black military heritage in Canada is still generally unknown and unwritten. The fact that approximately 600 black soldiers served in a segregated, non-combatant, labour battalion during World War I is one of the best kept secrets in Canadian military history, as is the service of several thousand blacks in World War II.
Nearly 150,000 French Canadians enrolled in the Canadian Armed Forces between 1939 and 1945. Japanese Canadians were turned away during the first world war—