BC/YUKON COMMAND The Royal Canadian Legion

Transcription

1 BC/YUKON COMMAND The Royal Canadian Legion # Avenue Surrey, BC V3S 1L3 Phone (1) Fax (1) or visit us at November 13, 2013 TO: FROM: SUBJECT: All Branches and LAs For Information of Members of Command Executive Council Angus Stanfield, Command President Remembrance Day Follow-up Memo # Branches, executives, and members - thank you so much for your incredible community engagement this Remembrance Day season! This was an amazing year, and Command office observed greater community participation at ceremonies, extraordinary website traffic, and much increased and positive media attention. Citizens are interested in Remembrance, and you certainly stepped up to the plate to engage them. You are at the heart of ensuring that Remembrance Day is successful, and so please accept my warmest commendations! I would also like to note the significant effort Command officers and staff undertake to ensure that things go as smoothly as possible during this busy season. Concerning media in particular, staff and officers were available at all hours and put everything into ensuring that there was positive media engagement. There is a list of recent Legionoriented media articles listed on the branch corner that we encourage you to take a look at under the heading Legion In The News On the topic of news, attached is a fantastic, positive article published in The Ottawa Citizen discussing the Legion s importance nation-wide in ensuring the vitality of Remembrance. The article proudly states that the crowds at ceremonies keep growing by the year, and poppies are worn by millions. Why? Because of The Royal Canadian Legion, with our innovative practices such as student essay contests and veterans speaking at schools. I would like to thank branches that sent in updated information for the 2013 Find a Remembrance Day Ceremony page on the website. This page had nearly 11,000 visits in the days leading up to November 11 th. Typically the entire website traffic for the whole month is about 5000 visits, so this was absolutely remarkable. This page assisted citizens in finding local ceremonies throughout BC and Yukon, and also promoted learning more about The Legion once they entered the site. Perhaps this amazing number of visits to the website correlates to the higher than usual number of online Membership referral requests submitted. We received numerous membership inquiries and 22 membership referrals and have been forwarding them on to branches. This is excellent news! A note about the depiction of liquor in branches leading up to Remembrance Day. There was a media interview by CTV broadcast on November 8 th which depicted alcohol being toasted in a local branch. This toast was actually old stock footage, and the branch was not at fault. We can t control how the media edits and puts together clips, and it s a shame that this happened. We asked them specifically not to include those images, and I want to make that clear. Thank you to all branches for complying with our request regarding media both ensuring that you sought out Command assistance fielding media questions, and refraining from allowing liquor be filmed in your branch.

2 On Monday, our Dominion President sent out a Letter to the Editor stating how pleased he was with this year s Poppy Campaign. Please do take the time to read this Letter to the Editor and pass along to your family, friends, neighbours and colleagues. 2 Regards, Angus PR: IK

3 November 11, 2013 File: Dear Editor; Another Successful Poppy Campaign As we approach the final hours of our national Poppy Campaign, and on behalf of the millions of Canadians who have had the opportunity to wear a Poppy this year, I wanted to thank our more than 320,000 Legion members in more than 1,468 Legion branches across Canada, the United States, Mexico and in Europe for their support and dedication for this campaign. With an estimated 18 million poppies worn this year, the efforts of Canadians to remember the more than 117,000 servicemen and women who paid the ultimate sacrifice has been heard loud and clear. By making a donation and wearing a Poppy, Canadians of all ages support Canadian Armed Forces and RCMP Veterans and their families, but also many aspects of the communities where we all live. The Poppy Campaign makes it possible for the Legion to operate a Service Bureau which acts as an advocate for Veterans and RCMP members and their families to ensure their quality of life is the best it can be. Every year, the money collected through the Poppy Campaign is used to provide direct assistance for Veterans and their families who are experiencing financial distress. The funds are used to pay for food, accommodation, utilities, dental and optical services and hospital comforts. The Legion truly cares about all veterans, not just by advocating on their behalf, but by engaging in everyday activities to make their lives better. In fact, the 2012 Poppy Campaign provided more than $14 million in benevolence to Canada s Veterans and serving personnel. Again, thank you to the thousands of Legion members who helped with our Poppy Campaign and to the millions of Canadians who have proudly supported all Veterans. Whether they have served in the past or are serving to the Legion there is only one Veteran. We are truly grateful. We Will Remember Them, Gordon Moore Dominion President The Royal Canadian Legion

4 Column: The resurgence of Remembrance Day By L. Ian MacDonald, Ottawa Citizen November 12, 2013 It s an anomaly of Remembrance Day that even as the ranks of veterans are thinning, the crowds keep growing by the year. Where they once numbered in the hundreds, they are now counted in the thousands, in Ottawa and across Canada. Where poppies were once worn for a week or so before Remembrance Day, they now appear after Thanksgiving. The Royal Canadian Legion has a lot to do with that, with their student essay contests and veterans speaking at schools. The mainstream media, led by the CBC, have provided huge coverage. Don Newman anchored CBC-TV s Remembrance Day coverage for more than 20 years until 2008, and as he writes in his new memoir, crowds and television audiences began to grow after 1994 and the celebration of the 50th anniversary of the successful D-Day landing in Normandy on June 6, 1944, that marked the beginning of the end of the Second World War. We seemed to go through a period there in the 60s, 70s and 80s where the crowds really thinned, Peter Mansbridge was saying Monday night following a special on the CBC s main channel from the National War Museum on the coming centennial of the First World War. But the change began in the 90s after the D-Day specials and the VE (Victory in Europe) anniversary in But most of the credit goes to the veterans for going into the schools. The veterans of the Second World War are now three generations removed from today s schoolchildren, but they have made a magical connection. And the students essays speak of the bravery of ordinary Canadians, from the trenches of one war, to the beaches of the next. And now social media are driving interest in Remembrance Day. Ninety per cent of the posts to my Twitter account on Monday morning were tributes in 140 characters or less to the writers parents or grandparents. In our family, my father, Art MacDonald, was in the army for the duration of the Second World War. He joined as a second lieutenant and became the youngest major in the forces, in charge of electrical installations on the east coast of Canada. As for my mother, Marian Agnes Roach, she served on the home front as a nurse and later became the matron of the Queen Mary Veterans Hospital. My parents belonged to what Tom Brokaw later called the greatest generation, who fought the war, won the peace and created the prosperity we enjoy today. They had many friends from the war, but never talked about it. Because of his service, our first home was an apartment at Benny Farm in Montreal, a postwar federal housing project for veterans and their families. /2

5 - 2 - From the First and Second World Wars, down to the present day service in Afghanistan, Canadians have always punched above their weight. In a country of only nine million people, Sir Robert Borden raised one of the largest armies in Europe. Which, at his insistence, got Canada its own seat at the Versailles peace conference of In the Second World War, Mackenzie King hosted the Quebec conferences of 1943 and 1944 with Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill. The first conference settled the plan for the liberation of Europe, and the second the shape of the post-war world. As for Afghanistan, it is too soon to say whether our mission there has been worth it, in terms of helping the Afghans put down the roots of democracy, and making their schools safe for girls. It is not too soon to say that our men and women in uniform took on the most dangerous assignment in that broken country the Kandahar region, home of the Taliban. There have been far too many come home in coffins to CFB Trenton, where the 401 to Toronto becomes the Highway of Heroes. At least those soldiers have been buried with full honours. The Conservative government has come under fire for what a Globe and Mail editorial called failing to properly fund the Last Post Fund, a non-profit to ensure all former soldiers, some of whom are impoverished to the point of homelessness are given a proper burial. Ottawa has also been criticized for cuts to veterans funding and closing of Veterans Affairs offices. The Veterans Ombudsman says new compensation rules would, according to the Globe, leave more than 400 severely disabled veterans in poverty after the age of 65. If there s a problem with veterans funding, Ottawa should simply fix it in the next budget. The government can t honour veterans one day, and stiff them the next. A dignified end of their days is the least that s owed those who marched in the cold past the National War Memorial on Monday. They are among two million who have served, while more than 115,000 Canadians never came home. As for Remembrance Day, it has been become as big an event as Canada Day, not as a celebration but as an occasion. L. Ian MacDonald is editor of Policy magazine (policymagazine.ca). lianmacdonald@gmail.com Copyright (c) The Ottawa Citizen