Our new Remembrance Day motto: ‘Lest we upset’

When a country is blessed with a government like Canada’s, it’s difficult to know how to approach Remembrance Day. 

On Nov. 11, people across the country will gather for services, except in Abbotsford, where access to the cenotaph and ceremony will be restricted to parade marchers, veterans, and dignitaries. This is due to a “Drug War Survivors Protest Camp” occupying the area between city hall and the Abbotsford Police Department. 

Despite a trespass notice in September and a B.C. Supreme Court decision in October, the camp remains, benefiting from a lack of enforcement and a court ruling that their removal must be gradual.

This year, “Lest We Forget” might be replaced with “Lest We Upset,” as we seem increasingly reluctant to do or say anything offensive or disturbing.

This extends to military chaplains across the country, who are barred from praying at Remembrance Day ceremonies. Chaplain General Belisle last year issued a directive on “spiritual reflections in public settings” for mandatory military events, including Remembrance Day. Previously, chaplains were allowed to recite a prayer if they included a preamble inviting others to reflect or pray according to their own beliefs. After the controversy caused by the directive, a one-time exception was granted last year, with a committee set to review the policy. However, the committee hasn’t completed its work, so the prayer ban remains in effect this year.

Last year, Bishop Scott McCaig of the Military Ordinariate of Canada said he had spoken with many chaplains since the directive’s publication, and they were “very discouraged. Morale has been very negatively affected.” 

As he did last year, Bishop McCaig will celebrate a Solemn Mass of Remembrance at Notre Dame Cathedral Basilica in Ottawa to honour all who have died in service to Canada.

The 8:30 a.m. Mass coincides with the feast of St. Martin of Tours, the principal patron of the Military Ordinariate and a patron saint of soldiers. A relic of St. Martin of Tours will also be available for silent veneration. After Mass, many participants will head to the National Remembrance Day Ceremony at the nearby National War Memorial, where they will be safe from prayer.

Of course, it isn’t only veterans and those honouring them that the federal government is concerned about. It has also fired a “shot across the bow” of crisis pregnancy centres, as one director put it, requiring them to publicly declare their stance on abortion to maintain their charitable tax status. The pregnancy centres already do this, but the government appears eager to signal to abortion rights groups that their concerns are being heard, since they’ve been complaining about crisis pregnancy centres without cause for years. 

It’s increasingly bizarre to live in a country where some people have the government’s ear while others don’t. This is evident in Ottawa’s handling of the residential school issue after the Kamloops announcement, which later turned out not to be an announcement. Nonetheless, it led to a wave of church burnings and, now, a federal report recommending criminal sanctions against “deniers.” 

Kimberly Murray, appointed by Ottawa in 2022, was tasked with recommending ways to identify, protect, and honour unmarked graves linked to Indian Residential Schools. Her final report includes an Indigenous-led Reparations Framework for Missing and Disappeared Children and Unmarked Burials. She recommends criminalizing the “wilful promotion of hatred against Indigenous Peoples by condoning, denying, downplaying, or justifying the Indian Residential School System or by misrepresenting facts relating to it.”

Murray states, “With the rise of denialism relating to the missing and disappeared children and unmarked burials, the need to develop historically literate citizens is more urgent than ever.” She defines denialism as rejecting or misrepresenting the well-established facts about the Indian Residential School System, falsely presenting itself as a correction of the historical record.

A “denier” is anyone who challenges the “intent, outcomes, and impacts” of residential schools, with such views deemed “the deliberate falsification of history in service to a political or ideological agenda informed by hatred and/or discrimination.”

She urges the federal government to incorporate these provisions into Bill 63, the Online Harms Act, to address “harms associated with denialism about Indian Residential Schools.”

The Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops responded that it is reviewing the report and will present its findings this month. Considering the surge in restrictions on speech across the country, they would do well to look for ways of responding beyond listening and sympathizing. It’s going to get worse, as Terry O’Neill reports this week on Page 9.

The growing intolerance against Christianity worldwide is becoming impossible to ignore. A British man was convicted of silently praying near an abortion clinic, and it’s not difficult to imagine it happening here.

The head of the Catholic Civil Rights League of Canada says Catholics should prepare for rising censorship from secular forces. A European Christian human rights observer is sounding the alarm about European legislation that cracks down on “hate speech,”  without defining what hate speech is. Like denialism, one can imagine it encompassing anything a government deems offensive.

As governments get bolder about censoring chaplains, pro-life groups, and religious voices, extending their control online, the real deniers are likely those who don’t want to admit that what’s coming could read like a preface to Orwell’s 1984. 

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