Canadians are now confronted with an existential crisis. We are faced not only with economic hardship but with fundamental threats to our sovereignty and as importantly, with profound moral challenges. How we will bear and endure harsh measures against us if they come to pass, and what are we willing to do to resist? And who or what do we look to for support?
Four of my uncles enlisted in the RCAF in 1940. By 1941 they were bombing Germany. By the end of 1942, when I was only a year old, three were dead and buried in Europe and one was a prisoner in Stalag Luft 3 who would survive the forced march of January 1945.
Now that we are threatened again after what was for me a lifetime of peace and security, I think about them more than ever. I asked my mum once why they went, she replied only “that’s just what people did.”
Is that what people would do now? I don’t mean getting into a stripped-down airframe to get shot out of the sky, that’s not the way things get done any more. I mean, more broadly, would we do what is necessary and what may be demanded of us not only to live in peace but also to prevent tyranny.
My uncles enlisted and trained in Canada, but once they got to England they flew under the authority of the Royal Air Force, because we were still a semi-colony of Britain. We are on our own now. No mother country across the Atlantic, and apparently no reliable ally to the south.
My uncles’ enduring legacy was their letters and diaries. From these I gained a pretty good idea of why they went, what they experienced, and what they thought at the time. They were very clear about the rightness of the cause for which they had volunteered, and why they themselves could not stay home and watch from the sidelines. Their purpose was not just a military victory on a far off continent, but the defence of civilization as they understood it. They were not teenagers when they signed up, nor were they desperate for a job. They were old enough to know the risks and what they were sacrificing in their immediate future.
In 1941 our Minister of Defence for Air characterized the thousands of Canadian airmen serving in England as “mainly third, fourth and fifth generation Canadians, bred in Canada, schooled in Canadian schools and with an intensely Canadian viewpoint.” My uncles, however, were first and second generation Canadians, but with no doubt about who they were: Canadians who happened to be Jewish. They knew that they would have to work hard for what they might get in life, and that they would have to endure slings and arrows along the way. Most importantly they knew that they lived in a country that had offered their parents and grandparents security of life and property and the opportunity for a decent life.
Perhaps as Jews they were more sensitive to the country’s inequalities and injustices, but they weren’t saints, and they weren’t entirely free of every casual prejudice of those days. Yet they had a vision of a better and more equitable post-war future and wanted to help build it.
They and a million other Canadian servicemen and women contributed mightily to the good life that I have enjoyed for eighty years, and that so many millions of others sought and found in coming to Canada since then. I was fortunate in never having to answer the call as my uncles did. I hated war in my youth, but I hated tyranny more, as they did, and as I still do. Tyranny might not look exactly as it did in their time, but the way it comes about has not changed much and we need to recognize that.
What will be the moral compass as well as the practical content of our resistance as individuals, as communities, and as a country? What bad things must be fought against right now, with all our might and dedication, and what good things might have to wait but nonetheless be planned for because their value does not diminish in tough times. I am forever grateful that so many of my parents’ generation knew all that and acted on it.
Let us do that in our time.
— Peter J. Usher