In Flanders fields the poppies blow Between the crosses, row on row

Many years ago, as a young teacher, I taught Grade 3. As Remembrance Day approached, I taught my students In Flanders Fields, written during the First World War by the Canadian physician and soldier Lieutenant-Colonel John McCrae.

My students were only eight years old, and I remember the gravity with which they approached the task of memorizing each word. We spoke about the poppies among the crosses, about the soldiers who had died, and about why, so many years later, we still remember them.

At eight, they could not have grasped what only age and experience can teach. But they understood something essential: that people had died in war, and that their sacrifice deserved our honour.

As I have grown older, I have come to believe that remembrance asks more of us. It is not merely an act of looking back. It is the discipline of carrying what we remember into our understanding of the world we inhabit, and into our vision of the world we hope to build.

When McCrae wrote his poem in 1915, he was surrounded by the devastation of the war, and he had just lost a close friend. The poem gives voice to grief, but also to obligation: the dead addressing the living, and asking something of them.

More than a century later, war and conflict continue to cause immense suffering. For some members of our community, these are not distant events of history. They are bound up with family memory, with places they once called home, and with people they love.

And so, when we gather on Remembrance Day, we honour those who served, those who gave their lives and those whose lives were forever altered by war. We also acknowledge the immeasurable human cost of conflict, including the suffering of innocent civilians.

But I believe remembrance carries a responsibility as well.

It is a responsibility to learn from history; to interrogate the forces that draw individuals and nations into conflict; to recognize how readily hatred, intolerance and dehumanization take root; and to understand that peace is never a permanent inheritance, but something that must be continually earned.

Dr. Leanne Foster ­­