Her Excellency the Right Honourable Michaëlle Jean
Speech on the Occasion of a Remembrance Ceremony at the Bény-sur-Mer Canadian War Cemetery
France, Sunday, October 30, 2005
We are gathered here on soil hallowed by those who paid the supreme sacrifice, offering their lives so that others might regain freedom. My heart aches when I think that under these stones lie the remains of Canadian soldiers, all so very young, many still in their teenage years. Their spirits live on in the memory of the women and men liberated by them, and in our own memory — we who honour them today.
Among those soldiers were members of First Nations, Inuit and Métis communities who played a vital part in combatting the tyranny that had ravaged Europe. The liberated have not forgotten. Nor have their descendants, who recall that, for their parents and grandparents the word “Canadian” often was synonymous with “liberation.”
It was on June 6th, 1944, that the invasion of Normandy began, the start of a bloody campaign. A campaign that has left scars still visible today around us, and that claimed the lives of close to 20,000 Canadians. More than 2,000 of them lie here all around us.
For you, for all of us, for the world and for coming generations, it is a duty to remember. This is the purpose of this journey and of the moving spiritual ceremonies conducted by our Aboriginal Elders: to call home the spirits of those who never made the journey back.
I truly believe that healing comes when we are able to acknowledge and transcend our grief and our losses, and when we commit to making the forces of creation triumph over the forces of destruction. This Spiritual Journey that together we are making is a rare opportunity to speak out loud and clear, recalling for the people of Canada and the entire world the heroic deeds of our Aboriginal veterans. I will always stand by you.
I am deeply touched to pay tribute to these fallen warriors in your company. May we never forget the sacrifices they made for freedom and justice. And may the youngest among you forever keep alive the memory of those painful but far-off days, when women and men left everything behind — family and friends — to cross the wide ocean and help other women and men unknown to them emerge from tyranny.
They were young. They served, they gave their lives.
We pledge amid of the winds of time to carry their torch and never forget.
May we give thanks to them today.
