In 1916, my father, an agricultural labourer facing his thirtieth birthday, enlisted with the Rocky Mountain Rangers and went to war. As the daughter of a veteran of the First World War, I am deeply offended by the rhetoric of the so-called freedom convoys. Let us be clear. When the crowds gathered in our capitals and at our borders liken themselves to the veterans of the last century they are deluded. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Soldiers did not whimper “I want my life back.” They voluntarily offered their lives to their country. Newly enlisted soldiers, and women serving in the hospitals and in ambulance crews, did not walk away from mandated vaccinations. They bared their shoulders for the jab and got on with the job their country needed them to do. They quarantined in cramped, miserable huts as waves of contagious diseases swept the training camps and recovered in isolation when the diseases struck them down. And some returned home years later suffering hearing loss and other disabilities from these infections and war’s wounds. As war drew to a close in 1918, soldiers fell to the scourge of influenza because then there was no vaccine to protect them. Far too many died.
When returning veterans were discontent with government policies, they organized to petition the government peacefully and effectively won for themselves and their descendants some of the best veterans’ benefits in what is now the Commonwealth.
Our veterans understood and acted on their understanding that with freedom comes responsibility to others. Freedom was won not by hysterical mobs braying individualism and scorn for democracy, but by veterans committed to their fellow citizens.
Jo-Anne Fiske
Fraser Lake
