Vimy: Blood, mud and Canada at its best

Peterborough was well represented this past weekend when the country looked back in awe and wonder at its place in some of the bloodiest battles of the First World War.

Memorial events in the city to mark the 100th anniversaries of the Battle of Vimy Ridge and less celebrated Battle of Hill 70 drew large, deeply respectful crowds.

Overseas, groups of Peterborough high school students were at the National Canadian Vimy Memorial for Sunday’s service, where they heard Prince Charles refer to the battle as “Canada at its best.” That remark has drawn some criticism. Canadian soldiers, fighting as one unit under Canadian command for the first time, succeeded where British and French armies had failed.

But their courage and determination played out in a charnel house of mud and blood. Nearly 3,600 were killed and 7,000 were wounded. The deaths of so many young men and the grievous injuries, physical and psychological, of so many who returned scarred families for generations.

Some question whether that really represents Canada “at its best.”

The critics take Charles’s words out of context.

What he said was: “This was and remains the single bloodiest day in Canadian military history. Yet Canadians displayed a strength of character and commitment to one another that is still evident today. They did not waiver. This was Canada at its best.” The Prince of Wales nailed it. He noted the bloody, awful cost of Vimy. Then came the “yet.”

And with that “yet” he might have answered a question that has been front and centre here lately: What are Canadian values?

There is no perfect answer. With any luck candidates for the Conservative Party leadership who promote the idea of demanding one will be firmly rejected.

But those who seek a defining Canadian characteristic as a beacon to rise to, rather than a standard for exclusion, could do worse than “strength of character and commitment to one another.”

If that is the Canadian way, it helps explain universal health care and the quality of our social safety net relative to what we see south of our border.

If helps explain 50 years of peacekeeping as the first alternative for our armed forces. So too the ability to hold two cultures and languages in a difficult balance that is the envy of other nations facing the same challenge.

It helps explain why a national policy of multiculturalism works and will continue to as more immigrants and refugees arrive.

And it holds hope that with “strength of character and commitment to one another” Canadians can work together to correct past injustices to First Nations.

It’s a matter of soldiering on, during war or peace.