On Remembrance Day -- Never Again

Greetings!

Thank you for those wonderful articles on Remembrance Day.

Quebec City remains an important hub for the Canadian military. The Department of Defence is the largest employer in the region. Together the military base and Quebec City make up the largest military research centre in Canada. And it is being expanded considerably. During elections, all the Conservative candidates boast about coming from the military.

The military secretly infiltrates all areas of civilian life; the regiments here are given the keys to the city. The Quebec officer who led the Canadian operation in Haiti during the earthquake has been appointed to a high position of responsibility in Quebec civil security.

The software used by school guidance counselors has been manipulated by the military. My youngest is in high school and between 75 and 80 per cent of the jobs presented to her were in the military, from simple soldier to artilleryman, officer, technician, engineer etc. She hated the fact that the army invaded her high school during career days. Though the military wants to come even more often, the school committee has passed a resolution to limit their visits to career days.

Quebec has a tradition of opposing the military. During the 1918 uprising of the working population of Quebec City against conscription, the army deployed in the city fired on them with ammunition that was banned for use in Europe (Geneva Convention), killing at least four people, including a student, a carpenter and a father of five. During the attack on the recruiting offices at Place d'Youville on Easter weekend, the demonstrators ransacked them and burned their paperwork.

And when they were attacked by horsemen from the armoury, armed with axe handles as batons and the infantrymen pointed bayonets at them, the crowd shouted: "They have guns, let's go get some too" and set off to loot the surrounding arsenals.

It was then that Armand Lavergne, who had influence over the "populace" as Henri Bourassa's right-hand man and a former reserve officer, convinced the crowd to return home to the lower town to allow time to meet with the authorities. He invited them to return later in the week at the end of their work day, giving time for the troops brought in to be deployed in the town and set up their machine gun nest.

Bloody repression followed along with a very large number of arrests in proportion to the size of the population. The Church propagated the notion that one should be ashamed of rebelling. The Church, as we know, had sworn an oath to the British crown. Trials followed but the mothers and widows received only disappointment as compensation.

All of this is relatively well documented.

In Ireland too in 1916 the event known as "Bloody Sunday" took place on Easter Sunday.

A Reader in Quebec City

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This article was published in

Tuesday, December 3, 2024

Article Link:
https://cpcml.ca/ITN2024/Articles/TI54615.HTM

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