We must honour our veterans with actions, not just words

The kind words about gratitude, and sacrifice, and honouring those who died to defend our nation and our freedom.

And those words are important, and they are good.

However, it seems increasingly empty for the words to be repeated while no action is taken beyond that.

We keep saying how much we love our veterans, yet veterans aren’t getting the help they need, are told by the PM they’re “asking for more than we can afford to give,” and still have high rates of homelessness and suicide—often being denied help, or being forced to wait far too long for help.

Both the Liberals and Conservatives have repeatedly broken faith with Canada’s veterans, seemingly glad to use veterans for photo ops during election time, and then ‘moving on’ when the campaign is over.

Additionally, we thank our veterans and honour those who died to protect and preserve Canada and our freedoms, yet we insult their memory by letting our country be so poorly defended.

The military is withering away, our air force is short of pilots and the pilots we do have are flying garbage planes, our military innovation is basically non-existent, and our biggest arms sales aren’t to our own military, they’re to Saudi Arabia.

It’s a national disgrace.

If we truly love our country, we need to show that love by protecting it. After all, if you love something then you want it to be kept safe.

So how can we explain the fact that Canada is undefended?

No missile defence.

A laughably weak presence in the North.

No real air force.

No navy.

Barely any tanks.

No innovation in areas like hypersonic missiles or armed drones.

Some might say, “oh, the world is beyond that now,” but that is simply absurd.

The world is more dangerous than ever, with military spending going up around the globe, and areas like Canada’s north are potential future battlegrounds for resource acquisition and conflict.

But instead of addressing any of those areas, Canada is sleepwalking while our potential adversaries are awake.

And in a huge irony, many of the people who hate the United States the most are the same people who want to keep our Canadian military weak, thus forcing us to be 100% reliant on the US for our national defence.

The fact is that Canada must move beyond words on Remembrance Day, and start actually giving our veterans the help they need—and have earned, and start building up our armed forces. If that takes billions of dollars, then so be it, that’s the price we need to pay to turn the nice Remembrance Day words into something tangible.