Mr. Speaker, today is one of those special days in this place when members from all sides of the House will speak with one voice, and that is to honour those who have allowed us to live in the best country in the world.
There will be no disagreement and no debate. There will be only one message: a sincere thank you to the generations of men and women who have worn our uniform, who have defended our way of life and who have made Canada strong and free and proud.
As we launch Veterans' Week, we think of the extraordinary contributions that ordinary Canadians have made in two great wars, in Korea, on peacekeeping missions, on military operations and in Afghanistan today, missions that have distinguished our soldiers, Canada's soldiers, as the best in the world. They are the best trained, the most disciplined and the most professional.
We live in a country blessed with peace, a country built on the values of generosity, democracy, human rights and the rule of law and we owe much of it, if not all of it, to our men and women in uniform, past and present.
In this place, words are all we have to express our gratitude, just words to describe their sacrifice, but words fail to capture the brutal inhumanity of war and the tragic loss of so many young lives on a scale that none of us can imagine.
Words cannot describe the sacrifice on Vimy Ridge or at Beaumont-Hamel. They cannot describe the horrors on the shores of Normandy, in the mountains of Italy or in the hills of Korea. They cannot capture the atrocities in Rwanda or Bosnia, and words alone cannot begin to tell the untold stories of Canadian bravery and determination.
In December 1941, a valiant group of Canadians arrived in Hong Kong with few supplies and no backup. Yet they stood in the face of relentless Japanese attacks for 17 long days. Again, words cannot describe the cruelty that eventually led enemy soldiers to overrun a makeshift hospital and assault and murder nurses and bayonet our wounded soldiers in their hospital beds. This all happened on Christmas Eve. These are actions that defy any level of human behaviour, even in war.
Our Canadian men and women still stood their ground with uncommon courage until the next day, Christmas Day. On Christmas Day, those still alive or still standing were taken prisoner of war. “Prisoner of war” does not begin to describe what happened to these young Canadians. It fails to describe the sheer torture and brutality that they endured. The term “prisoner of war” only proves that even in war we sanitize the language.
These Canadians were forced to perform slave labour on a starvation diet. It was truly a prescription for death. What continues to amaze me is that some of our soldiers walked away; they walked away from those camps on September 9, 1945, after 1,355 days. Almost 2,000 men and women had sailed to Hong Kong and more than a quarter of them never returned home, and some who did survive had to be carried out, only to die on the voyage home. Their story is worth retelling because after all of these years, some 65 years later, many of the horror stories from those camps remain untold.
The survivors of the Battle of Hong Kong still cannot and will not talk about everything that happened. Those still with us today will occasionally share a story with each other, but they have never told their families, their loved ones or their friends the whole story.
I keep asking myself this: How did these men and women, how could any human being, survive such suffering; what kept them going?
When we ask George Peterson, one of the men who did survive and one of those who did walk away, he will use only one word and he will tell us that they lived on hope. More precisely, they existed on hope. They did not live, they existed. They came from a country they loved and wanted to return to. They believed in a free world and in the mission. Most importantly, they had made a solemn promise to their loved ones that they would come home no matter what.
These stories remind us that the full cost of war is not limited to those Canadians who lie buried overseas. The full cost of war lives on from generation to generation and it continues to be paid today.
Mr. Speaker, you and I and many members of the House grew up with children of that generation of soldiers, children who grew up in families with fathers who struggled with the invisible cost of war, brought up by parents who suffered in silence.
What is truly astonishing is that even those who endured such hardships, even those who still bear the emotional scars of war, came home to build this country. Their contributions did not end on the battlefields. They came home and started businesses, they pursued careers, they went to work, they paid their taxes, they made the Canada we know today. They made our country. They made Canada great.
That is the remarkable story of our veterans. When we are in their presence, when we are sitting at a table and sharing a meal with one of these once young soldiers who are now in their twilight years, we realize that they are not just ordinary people. As we watch a frail and arthritic hand break bread, and just the way they look at their food before they eat it, the way they never take a meal for granted, we realize that these men and women are different. They are special. They are our nation's truest heroes. They did not seek the headlines, but they wrote the true story of our country, Canada.
Men and women like them are still writing that story, the Canadian story, and they are still risking everything to defend our way of life.
Each of us in this chamber knows it. Every one of us in this place has met families of our fallen soldiers from Afghanistan. When we are in their presence our eyes are instinctively drawn to that tiny silver cross that tells the whole story. These families have paid the ultimate sacrifice. When our eyes meet their eyes, we cannot help but wonder how pain and pride can coexist simultaneously in one set of eyes, but they do.
As we reach out to them, just a simple handshake is not going to cut it. These are truly powerful moments, because we know that for anyone who has lost a loved one the pain they bear is real and never goes away.
As we have heard in this place so often, for someone who has lost a loved one, every day is Remembrance Day. Yet amid such sacrifice, it is also true that, almost without exception, each one of these family members will tell us that if they were to do it over again, nothing would change, nothing. They still believe in Canada. They still believe in the mission and, most important, they loved and believed in their fallen sons and daughters, husbands and wives.
In the next few days all of us in the House will return to the towns and villages that we represent. We will go back to the men and women who sent us here and with them we will gather at our cenotaphs and at our memorials. The bugle will sound and pipes will blow and we will lay the wreaths and we will observe the silence. During that time of quiet reflection, we will thank them, we will remember them and we will say a silent prayer for those who continue to serve.
Lest we forget.