Madam Speaker, I appreciate the opportunity to speak to this motion, but regrettably, this motion has been rendered moot by virtue of the minister's commitment to retroactively deal with the military personnel who were affected by the pay change on September 1, 2016.
This has had a 10-year history. The government was asked no less than 15 times in the past number of years to address these situations where personnel arrive on the field with a certain understanding of their pay and compensation package, and then while there, it is changed. The minister has done the right thing and addressed it. Therefore, in some respects, the motion is moot.
The government will be supporting the motion, and I am assuming the Conservative Party will support the motion. I do not know the position of the NDP, but I expect it will support the motion. In some respects, we are debating something that everyone agrees to. Whatever else I might say at this point, and possibly what has been said prior to this point, would be something less than useful to the actual motion that is on the floor of the House.
In the spirit of contributing things that are tangentially relevant, with the indulgence of the chair, I will go to a discussion about the value of our people who put on the uniform. No matter what they do, whether they are in Halifax or Wainwright or Kuwait, when they put on the uniform, they are taking a proud place in Canadian history.
As we approach our 150th birthday this year, it is worth remembering that in many ways the story of Canada's military is Canada's history. In August 2014, we marked 100 years since the First World War began. The world had never seen such a conflict. More than 650,000 men and women from Canada and Newfoundland served;, which is no small feat for countries with a combined population of eight million. Let us project forward and ask what would that be if we had a population such as we have now, somewhere in the order of four or five times bigger? We would have three million men and women in uniform in this kind of a conflict. It is unimaginable given the year in which we live, 2017.
Sixty-six thousand people gave their lives, and more than 172,000 were wounded. Many spent years away from home fighting from trench to trench across bloody battlefields in Europe which was pockmarked with shell holes. I hope as people come to Ottawa to celebrate our 150th anniversary they take advantage of that opportunity to go to the Canadian War Museum just down the street from here, and spend a day going through Canada's military history. It is a fascinating and honourable history.
This year a Canadian Armed Forces contingent will return to one of the most important and well-known battlefields in Canadian history, Vimy Ridge. At Vimy, regiments from coast to coast saw action together in a distinctly Canadian triumph, helping creating a new and stronger sense of our nation's identity. The success of our soldiers at Vimy is seen as one of the defining moments of our history, the moment when Canada came of age. Today on land granted to Canada by a grateful France, the Canadian National Vimy Memorial rises above the now quiet surrounding countryside.
At this point, if I may, I will tell a story about a Scarborough soldier. His name was Lieutenant Leslie H. Miller. He was a farmer, like many other people who enlisted in the Canadian military. He went to Vimy. He participated in that fight and he survived. When he climbed to the top of Vimy Ridge, the only thing left of an oak tree was the acorns that had fallen to the ground in the course of the battle. He gathered up those acorns and had them transported back to his farm in Scarborough.
If people go to the farm, which is located in the northwest section of Scarborough, they will see a huge stand of oak trees. These oak trees have been there for literally 100 years. People from Vimy Oaks are keen to have saplings from those trees planted on French soil at the foot of the Vimy Ridge memorial. It is really quite an interesting and exciting concept where 100 of those trees are planted along what will be an interpretive path from one of the villages in France right to the Vimy Ridge memorial. That work is actually being undertaken as we speak.
It is an interesting and challenging problem, because there is so much unexploded ordnance in the fields surrounding the Vimy Ridge memorial. That work is taking place. I want to commend the initiatives of Monty McDonald and a variety of other people who have taken it upon themselves to initiate this Vimy Ridge memorial and express it in a uniquely Canadian way by bringing the saplings that had been grown on Canadian soil and replanting them on French soil. In a uniquely Canadian way this expresses our commitment to the people of France, to the people of Europe, and our own nation-building exercise.
Vimy was not the only battle that shaped our nation. Just over two decades later, a new generation of service men and women returned to the battlefields of Europe and further afield to fight in the Second World War. They landed on the shores of Dieppe to face great adversity. More than half of their number were killed or taken prisoner.
They landed in Sicily and launched an assault, slowly retaking Italy back from the Germans. They landed at Juno Beach, fielding the third largest allied D-Day force. From there, they pushed through Normandy, to Belgium, and on to liberate the Netherlands. Those who have been to the Netherlands on the various memorial days know that still the Dutch greet Canadians with a special pride and enthusiasm and a special affection.
Meanwhile, in the icy waters of the North Atlantic and the Barents Sea, men braved the German U-boats to keep the vital flow of men and supplies open between North America and Europe and into Russia.
Not far from this very House there is a street named after one such man, Jerome Jodoin, who joined the navy with nine of his buddies in 1941. Before his 20th birthday he had sailed the Murmansk run four times over. When the City of Ottawa named a street after him, a fellow veteran and Legion comrade, Gus Este, was there at the ceremony. Mr. Este was one of more than 26,000 Canadians who answered the call of a recently formed United Nations to help maintain the international peace and security in Korea. He also served in Germany, Cyprus, Egypt, and as a member of the Canadian Postal Corps, ensuring deployed personnel could keep in touch with their families back home.
The Canadian military has a proud history, one that we all should take some pride in, particularly on this anniversary of our nation at 150 years and of Vimy Ridge at 100 years. We are a nation that does answer the call. We continue to answer the call. We have some of the absolutely finest soldiers. We hope that in passing this motion, we will honour their deployment by appropriate compensation.