ON THE MAP

An interactive mapping project compiles the nation’s geographic memorials to Canada’s role in global conflicts

Exploring cartography

PPilot officer Lawrence “Larry” Love joined the Royal Canadian Air Force on his 18th birthday, midway through the Second World War. Just days after the D-day landings on June 6, 1944, Love’s Spitfire went missing over the beaches of Normandy. His tombstone lies in the Bretteville-sur-laize Canadian War Cemetery in Calvados, France, but his memory lives on in Canada. Love Island, a sliver of land in the middle of Lac la Ronge, Sask., was named to honour Love’s sacrifisacrififice. sacrifice. Love Island is one of hundreds of geographical names with ties to conflicts Canada has participated in. To help commemorate these places, the Geographical Names Board of Canada and Natural Resources Canada are collaborating to create Commemorating Canada at War, an interactive online map to be unveiled later this year. The map here, created by Canadian Geographic, shows 488 sites — highlighting the range of geographic forms, the conflflicts conflicts they honour and a selection of particularly notable memorials — collected so far. “Canadian culture is intertwined with its expansive geography,” says Connie Wyatt Anderson, GNBC chair. “I see naming places after conflflflicts conflicts and war heroes as an extension of our national relationship with remembrance and our connection to physical place.” Geographical remembrance means the land itself honours Canada’s fallen — whether it’s Alexander Shoal off British Columbia’s coast or Gravell Point, Nunavut — even when those individuals have faded from living memory. “Canadian acts of remembrance are quiet and serene,” says Wyatt Anderson. “Commemorating Canadian war dead by naming places after them follows a similar tenor. It’s solemn and underfoot, and beckons personal reflection.”