OTTAWA —
Canadians will return to cenotaphs and monuments throughout a lot of the nation on Thursday morning to recollect and pay their respects to those that fought and died in service of Canada.
This 12 months’s Remembrance Day ceremonies will stand in stark distinction to final 12 months, when organizers discouraged folks from attending in individual due to the second wave of COVID-19.
Royal Canadian Legion spokeswoman Nujma Bond is anticipating a return to some semblance of normalcy, together with on the Nationwide Conflict Memorial in Ottawa, the place individuals are being welcomed to attend.
Some restrictions and adjustments will nonetheless stay in place as COVID-19 continues to pose a menace, Bond stated, with masks and bodily distancing necessities in place for anybody planning to attend ceremonies.
The Legion has additionally once more cancelled the standard veterans’ parade in Ottawa, which has previously seen aged veterans from the Second World Conflict and Korea march alongside counterparts from more moderen conflicts and operations.
“However there will probably be an space for veterans who want to attend the ceremony to face and sit close to the Nationwide Conflict Memorial,” Bond stated.
Some Legion branches throughout the nation may even be once more forgoing in-person occasions due to the pandemic and as an alternative asking folks to look at their native ceremony on TV or on-line, she added, which is an choice for the nationwide ceremony as nicely.
There had been questions forward of this 12 months’s occasion round whether or not the federal government would preserve flags at half-mast, as that they had been since Could in reminiscence of Indigenous kids who died attending residential faculties.
However the authorities opted on Sunday to boost the flags again as much as their full peak earlier than decreasing them once more on Monday in honour of Indigenous Veterans Day, and they are going to be lowered once more on Thursday.
Other than the masks and bodily distancing necessities and the choice to not have a veterans’ parade, Bond stated this 12 months’s nationwide ceremony will embrace most of the components that Canadians have come to know over the a long time.
That features a studying of the Act of Remembrance in English, French and an Indigenous language, which Bond stated this 12 months would be the Metis language of Michif.
This report by The Canadian Press was first printed Nov. 11, 2021.
