Statement made on 06 May 2010 by Senator Roméo Dallaire
Hon. Roméo Antonius Dallaire:
Honourable senators will not be surprised to hear that I enjoy parades. Yesterday, I watched with great pride the parades of our veterans in my country of birth, Holland. Thousands of Dutch people welcomed and encouraged our veterans, knowing that this may be the last time they have such a gathering.
My attention was particularly caught by the parade of close to 2,500 young Canadians dressed in red jackets provided to them by Veterans Affairs Canada, I believe. These Canadians walked the routes that both my father and father-in-law fought through in World War II, routes that brought them to the Groesbeek Canadian War Cemetery.
Both my father and father-in-law remember losing colleagues who are buried in Groesbeek. They were killed on the last push into Germany, when we lost so many soldiers in the Hochfeld. Each year, when contingents of Canadian soldiers and civilians participate in the Nijmegen marches, we stop to commemorate the sacrifices of Groesbeek.
This brings me to the second dimension of the war, and that is post-war reconstruction. In 1946, I arrived at Pier 21 in Canada on a Red Cross ship as a six-month-old in the arms of my mother. I was immediately put on a Red Cross train and brought to Quebec City where my father was serving. We arrived in 1946 because my father was one of about 40,000 troops that stayed overseas at the end of the war to repair all the equipment that the Canadian government would leave in Holland and Belgium — not tanks and guns, but trucks, bulldozers, jeeps, dump trucks and bridges — to help them rebuild their economies. That effort was generous, but of course it cost us less than it would have to bring them back.
However, my son, who recently served in Sierra Leone and saw a country trying to rebuild itself, wonders why and how we lost the concept that after a war, countries need support to rebuild and reconstitute themselves in order to become nation states that are not sources of conflict, and to respect good governance, the rule of law, human rights and gender equality. Why have we lost that generosity in this era when it is so drastically required?