Midweek’s annual Remembrance Day show is an honour and a privilege for those who put it together, and our stories range far beyond just poppies and parades — though we cover them too. This year’s show went from Quilts of Valour to Vietnamese refugees, with so much in between.
That awful early morning feeling with a show ahead … and an empty line-up board — but producer Meagan Gillmore and the crew filled it up!
To open, reporter Camille Vinet (one of this show’s hosts) found out about plans for the Remembrance Day ceremony at the National Military Cemetery that’s part of Beechwood Cemetery. It was online last year, but this year the public once again could gather to honour and mourn together. Then Cassandra Yanez-Leyton (our other host) introduced us to John Moses of the Six Nations Delaware Band, a veteran himself and the son of a veteran, who spoke of what it meant to serve a country that for so long wouldn’t view his people as equal citizens.
Midweek’s Sarah O’Leary found out from a local florist what goes into special wreaths and bouquets for Remembrance Day — spoiler alert: real poppies are out of season, so those red flowers are usually a kind of daisy. Who knew? Then Ralph Jean-Jacques interviewed a young member of the Reserves about what this time of year means to him, and why he’s chosen to serve.
Sarah was back to tell us about the ways the Royal Canadian Legion involves children and youth in remembering and understanding the experiences of past generations — and people around them today — and Zac Delaney met with a group of folks who are showing thanks to veterans in a particularly warm way: by sewing quilts for them as comforting gifts.
Hosts Cassandra Yanez-Leyton and Camille Vinet amid the mics
Front lines and battles come in many forms, as we’ve been shown so clearly over the past two years. Midweek’s Maia Smith had a deep talk with a local hospital nurse about the strains of working through the fight against COVID-19 and the toll it has taken on her and her colleagues.
Much of the nursing burden in pandemics and in wartime has historically fallen on women, but Midweek’s Ariel Harker brought us a story on how the Second World War marked a major shift in roles for women beyond the wards and into many jobs that had always before been done by men.
Reporter Ben Andrews contributed a pair of stories about German prisoners of war in Ontario during the 1940s — the first on a talk at the Osgoode Township Museum on how POWs helped keep local farms operating, and the second about the memories of a man in North Bay who recalls interacting as a young boy with pleasant foreign strangers who lived in the odd camp nearby.
The disaster of war forever changes the directions of lives struck by it, but out of destruction, new histories are so often built. Midweek’s Zoya Davis sat down with a young Canadian whose family were among the many Tamils who fled to Canada during and after the Sri Lankan civil war in the closing decades of the last century. He recounted the impact of this strife on his own family, and told Zoya how this led him to his current path in life.
Many thousands of other Canadians can trace their histories back to those who fled Vietnam after the end of decades of war there, and Midweek’s Cindy Tran told us the stories of both their flight from danger and their struggles to establish themselves in this new home.
Finally, we ended the show with the mournful bugle call that has traditionally signalled the end of the day in the British soldiering tradition: The Last Post. Through Midweek’s Erin Wai, we met Ella Wilson, a Grade 12 student in Ottawa, as she prepares to perform The Last Post on her trumpet for her school’s Remembrance Day ceremony — a responsibility she feels very deeply, and also enjoys.
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