Mr. Speaker, I cannot thank my colleagues enough for allowing me to rise today with the other parties in the House to pay tribute to our veterans and to take a moment to mark Veterans' Week, from November 5 to 11.
All of us are, at this moment, thinking of how we will mark Remembrance Day in our own communities and how we will, in the week leading to Remembrance Day, mark and honour veterans' extraordinary contributions. The lives we lead today in this country, as many members have said, would not be possible without the sacrifices of others and other generations, for the most part, although, as the hon member for Burnaby South just reminded us, we have veterans now and members of our armed forces now who need our support.
I am of that generation of baby boomers who were close. My dad and my uncle fought in the Second World War. I even remember as a child meeting my dad's cousin. My dad was British and he lived through the Blitz, but his cousin Victor was in the trenches in the First World War. We did not have the term “post-traumatic stress disorder” then. Everybody just knew that cousin Victor was not quite right. He never got over the First World War. He once said to the family that, if someone were to tell him they were afraid of teacups, he would understand. There is a trauma that never leaves one from the horrors of war.
I particularly want to pay tribute to day to Mary Greyeyes Reid. She was born in Muskeg Lake Cree Nation in Saskatchewan. Her daughter, Cheryl Greyeyes, is a friend of mine, and that is the only reason I know that Mary Greyeyes Reid was the first indigenous Canadian woman to join the armed forces. On Indigenous Veterans Day, I particularly think of Mary Greyeyes Reid, who faced, at five years old, being seized from her family and taken to residential school. In 1942, she joined the Canadian military and served overseas where, even there in the Canadian military at a time of war, she faced discrimination: both sexism and racism. She served with such distinction and honour, and we do plan, all of us, to find ways in our own communities to mark Indigenous Veterans Day on September 8.
This is the first time in many a year that we have risen in this place to pay tribute to our veterans when we are close to theatres of war in two places: in Europe and in the Middle East. There was that end-of-history moment when we thought the brutality of direct armed conflict, one country against another, belonged in a different time.
To our Canadian men and women serving now in our military, I thank them. We will be with them. We support them, and we must never let our veterans down.
We will wear the poppy and buy as many as we can, knowing that the Canadian Legion does such good work in our communities, and I just want to take a moment to pray for the war dead in the most neglected of all Canadian war cemeteries. I only know about it because of the former member for Cumberland—Colchester, Bill Casey. When a group of us, 18 MPs, toured occupied territories in Palestinian territories and in Israel, Bill Casey spoke to the Canadian government to ask it to please let us go to the Gaza War Cemetery where several thousand Commonwealth war dead, some Canadian, lie buried. Nobody from Parliament had gone to honour them for many years. It was too dangerous then in 2018, and the government would not let us go.
In this moment there are some in that cemetery who are marked as never identified, but they are not marked as unknown. Their graves read, “A soldier of the Great War...known unto God”. No one is unknown, but some are known only to God, and they are lying near another theatre of war, near Gaza, in the Gaza War Cemetery.
I will close with taking a moment, and hope all will join me, in a prayer for peace for the whole world, for Ukraine, for Gaza and for Israel. I pray that we will, before the next Veterans' Week, be able to go to the Gaza War Cemetery, that it will be quiet and tranquil, and that we will lay flowers on the graves of those known only to God.