Ms. Jean Friesen (Wolseley): May I have leave to make a nonpolitical statement, Madam Speaker.
Madam Speaker: Does the honourable member for Wolseley have leave? [agreed]
Ms. Friesen: I would like to ask all members of this House to join us in remembering the 80th anniversary of the Battle of Vimy Ridge. At 5:30 a.m., 80 years ago, the 20,000 young men of the first wave began their assault on the great hill of Vimy which rises steeply out of the flat plains of northern France. The battle lasted for three days and nights. It cost the lives of 3,598 Canadians and was only one of many such slaughters of the First World War whose names are written on monuments across our province--in Dauphin, in Gladstone, on Broadway, Neepawa and in St. Andrews. But the name of Vimy resounds throughout Canada's history. It was the first time that Canadians had fought together as a new nation, and the taking and holding of that position was bought dearly. Vimy has been to Canadians as Gallipoli is to Australians and as Beaumont Hamel is to the people of Newfoundland.
In my own community, an older generation renamed our park for Vimy. Annual memorials are conducted. In Manitoba on those occasions we do remember the regiments from western Canada composed of aboriginal people, Japanese Canadians from British Columbia and the thousands of Canadians who, in many cases, were recently arrived from Britain or other parts of Europe. We remember, Madam Speaker, the Princess Patricia's, the 78th Battalion of the Winnipeg Grenadiers, Winnipeg's 44th Battalion, the 27th Battalion known as the City of Winnipeg and the 8th Battalion, the Little Black Devils.
Many of those young men never returned, but all of them saw the faces of battle that morning 80 years ago. Private William Peckover, a 20-year-old Manitoba school teacher remembered his City of Winnipeg Battalion moving forward in the full light of that clouded April morning:
We learned full well, he wrote in his diary, the nature of the great modern battlefield. This was war where the wounded, friend and foe alike, lay everywhere about in the cold, wet mud, silent and helpless in their agony or crying out for help to the stretcher bearers who fanned out behind the attacking waves. Just ahead of us, he wrote, roared the barrage and all the fury of the fight, the death rattle of the machine guns bursting overhead, shrapnel and counterfire from the enemy guns, all of the fiendish implements of death that man had devised. In contrast, the conquered area through which we passed seemed strangely quiet. Here death reigned, only the agony of pain.
Madam Speaker, at the going down of the sun and in the morning, we do remember them.
* (1430)
Hon. Linda McIntosh (Minister of Education and Training): May I have leave to make a nonpolitical statement, Madam Speaker?
Madam Speaker: Does the honourable Minister of Education have leave to make a nonpolitical statement? [agreed]
Mrs. McIntosh: I would like to speak as well on the Battle of Vimy Ridge and the things that happened at that time and the debt of gratitude we owe to a whole host of people, many of whom are gone, some of whom still remain. One of those men was my grandfather, Allen George Hopper, who fought in the Battle of Vimy Ridge, was subject of an attack by a hand grenade, had his lung blown out, one arm left hanging, was hauled into the trenches, maggots were put on the wound to prevent gangrene from spreading through his body, leaving his arm subsequently somewhat intact, crooked but dangling for the rest of his life, breathing problems, and a number of other things that occurred for the rest of his life and died probably about 20 years earlier than he would have because of the debilitating results of having been in that war.
Coming from a military family as I do, with grandparents and parents who have always stood ready to give their lives for Canada, to sacrifice their lives for Canada, who spent their whole careers prepared to die for this country and the freedom that we have in this Chamber to govern or to be critical of government, I feel a very special bond to the people like my grandfather.
When I was 10, I went with my grandfather to Vimy. We crawled down into the trenches. We went through into the trenches, went to many of the caverns under the fields where my grandfather had been for weeks and weeks and weeks, showed me the place where they cut off his boots because his feet had become so swollen with water he had trench foot, as many of the soldiers there did, and walked up to the monument and went to many of the places where some of the things that the member for Wolseley (Ms. Friesen) was reading about in that young man's diary were. I relived with him vicariously what he had been through and learned from him that there are some things that are worth dying for, and there are some things that are worth standing up for and that freedom in Canada should never be treated frivolously or in a way that does not honour our ability to govern or to be critical of government.
So, in my constituency, we have a street called Vimy. We have an arena called Vimy. I think I never drive down those streets without thinking of my grandfather and the people like him and the people who came after him in subsequent wars that kept our nation the great nation that it is. So I just want to say on this day, I hope that we will always remember and not forget the price that was paid for the freedom that we have and not treat our freedom lightly.
Mr. Edward Helwer (Gimli): I move, seconded by the member for Turtle Mountain (Mr. Tweed), that the composition of the Standing Committee on Public Utilities and Natural Resources for 10 a.m., Thursday, April 10, be amended as follows: the member for Pembina (Mr. Dyck) for the member for La Verendrye (Mr. Sveinson); the member for Minnedosa (Mr. Gilleshammer) for the member for Riel (Mr. Newman); the member for Turtle Mountain (Mr. Tweed) for the member for St. Vital (Mrs. Render).
Motion agreed to.
Mr. George Hickes (Point Douglas): I move, seconded by the member for Broadway (Mr. Santos), that the composition of the Standing Committee on Public Utilities and Natural Resources be amended as follows: Transcona (Mr. Reid) for Thompson (Mr. Ashton); Elmwood (Mr. Maloway) for St. James (Ms. Mihychuk); Burrows (Mr. Martindale) for Crescentwood (Mr. Sale), for Thursday, April 10, 1997, at 10 a.m.
Motion agreed to.