Remembrance Day in a country that has forgotten almost everything
On this day of reflection, it's hard to shake the feeling that Canada is drifting further and further from the country we once knew.
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Tonight on The Ezra Levant Show, Ezra reflects on November 11th — a date we pause to remember. Or at least, we used to. Increasingly, Remembrance Day feels like a commemoration observed by a country that has forgotten nearly everything that once held it together. Our history, our alliances, our culture and even our moral vocabulary. Concepts like fascism and democracy are now shapeshifting political footballs, bent out of recognition by activists who claim to defend freedoms while behaving like their opposites.
The erosion hasn’t come from just one side. For years, we've condemned the left for its excesses. But now we watch parts of the new troll-right mimicking the same moral inversion. Seeing Tucker Carlson praise Hitler while condemning Churchill, turning the moral clarity of World War II on its head, is stunning. Hearing Candace Owens refuse to say the Allies were right to fight even after Pearl Harbor is simply astonishing. If those were once our allies in cultural battles, they aren’t anymore.
Perhaps that’s why, despite everything, Ezra finds himself returning each year to Rudyard Kipling. His poem Tommy Atkins hits harder with every reading. It’s a reminder of a truth we’ve lost: society loves its soldiers when the bands play but shuns them in peacetime. The poem’s final line, “Tommy ain’t a bloomin’ fool, you bet that Tommy sees,” cuts right to the heart. Kipling understood gratitude, hypocrisy and sacrifice in a way our modern political class simply does not.
And that brings us to the latest absurdity from Canada’s military leadership ... an idea so bizarre it reads like satire.
According to reporting from the Ottawa Citizen, the Department of National Defence plans to rely on federal bureaucrats — yes, the same public service that is still largely working from home — to boost the ranks by 300,000. They would receive one week of firearms, truck-driving and drone-flying training each year and then… that’s it. No uniforms. No real commitment. Just enough participation to pad the stats.
The bureaucracy is, on average, 60% female with a median age of 45. Fitness levels? Let’s just say the Canadian Armed Forces already have higher obesity rates than the general Canadian population and the plan is to lower fitness standards even further for this new “supplementary reserve.” If you’re imagining an army of paper-pushers being fast-tracked into military roles, well, that’s exactly what the directive describes.
This isn’t mobilization. It’s accounting.
Compare that to the United States, where the new Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth, is reshaping military culture around strength, discipline and readiness. His recruitment ads ooze patriotism and purpose. Meanwhile, in Canada, senior officers are installing tampon dispensers in men’s barracks and promoting policies that seem designed to repel traditional recruits.
Which raises the obvious question: who exactly is this new plan supposed to attract?
Certainly not the young men and women who want to serve their country. They’re not lining up to join a force stocked with bureaucrats fulfilling a week of mandatory camping. But the plan will achieve one thing: it allows Mark Carney and the Liberal establishment to tell the Americans we’ve suddenly “expanded” our reserves, without actually investing in a fighting force. It’s the same trick Carney used with border enforcement: rename the bureaucrats, count their salaries and pretend you’ve met the target.
And the Chinese and Russians must be laughing.
Our top military leadership cries on camera while U.S. officials do pull-ups with troops. Their military projects strength; ours projects sentimentality. The contrast couldn’t be sharper, nor more embarrassing.
On Remembrance Day of all days, we should be honouring the spirit of Tommy Atkins: ordinary men who carried extraordinary burdens. Instead, we’re inflating reserve numbers with public servants who won’t even get uniforms.
A country that forgets its past eventually forgets its obligations. And a country that forgets its obligations eventually loses the very freedoms it once fought to protect.
Maybe the bands still play on November 11th. But if we keep going this way, fewer and fewer people will understand why.
GUEST: Caryma Sa'd joins the show to discuss the heckler who yelled during the land acknowledgement of Toronto’s Remembrance Day ceremony.
COMMENTS
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Anthony Salotti commented 2025-11-12 06:18:16 -0500There’s a lot of our boys who are rolling over in their graves right now overseas . -
Lillian Kelly commented 2025-11-11 23:47:27 -0500People who are there at the ceremony for Rememberance Day are not going to disturb the peace or disrupt the ceremony out of reverence for the veterans in my opinion.
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Bernhard Jatzeck commented 2025-11-11 21:21:45 -0500“Almost” everything?
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Geoff Meek commented 2025-11-11 20:55:10 -0500That clip of Tucker Carson Did Not show him praising Hilter and Stalin. Wrong clip?
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Bruce Atchison commented 2025-11-11 20:42:57 -0500The way things are going, we’ll be celebrating Islamic holidays and they’ll be compulsory. And I salute that one man with the guts to object to the lies in the racist land acknowledgement. Our freedom was bought by the blood of mostly white and indigenous military personnel. But that’s an inconvenient truth leftists can’t handle.
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Paul Scofield commented 2025-11-11 20:40:08 -0500Well, hard to choose between the two dogs of Land Acknowledgements or Canadian civil servants toting arms one week a year to prop up the defense of Confederation. For 50-some percent of us south of the border, the first would merely invite some comment similar to “F that.” Ezra’s laughter at the though of the second best sums up what others hereabouts would say, as well.
All of that said, a solemn Remembrance Day to Canada. The idea of the wearing of the Poppy is great. When I was a kid growing up it used to be called Armistice Day.
