It’s truly an honour to rise to speak to this bill. We don’t often agree on everything here, but this is definitely something we can all agree on. I thank the member for Whitby for putting forth a noble bill, an honourable bill and a bill that’s the right thing to do.

We, thanks to this bill, will be observing two minutes of silence before Remembrance Day, and we will, in addition, be given opportunities to speak about it. Why do I think this is so important? Why do I think that this is necessary here? While generals determine the details of battle, for the most part it is politicians who send our sons and daughters to war—perhaps not in the provincial Parliaments, but certainly in the federal one—so it is we as politicians, perhaps above all, who should reflect on what that means and what has been lost.

We remember that once a year on November 11, but how much do we truly understand and think about it? How much time do we spend thinking about those who have paid with their lives for us to have our own? When you think about it, for the most part, we have been insulated from the horrors that exist in so many places because of those sacrifices that were made on our behalf.

Veterans who are out there, struggling to this day financially, physically, emotionally and mentally from what they experienced, from what they have seen: For the most part, do we honour them enough? This honours them more, and there’s so much more that we can do. This is definitely something we will all support.

I wanted to share a little bit of my personal reflections on it because, as was stated by another member, we are all touched by this in some way, shape or form—those here in the chamber who have served, those who have family members who have served or are serving. I’m sure each and every one of us has a family member.

As a relatively new, but not young, father, I often look at my sons, my five-year-old and two-year-old sons, and I try to put myself in their minds as they grow, as they evolve, as they get smarter and wiser, and hearing that this was to be debated here on the floor, I tried to remember my own thoughts and recollections about what Remembrance Day meant as a child.

I remember being ushered into the gym on Remembrance Day with all the other students. I remember observing a moment of silence, but unlike any other times we were brought to that gym and asked to be quiet, there was a different silence on Remembrance Day. There were higher expectations of us to be respectful and to be honourable. As a child, I didn’t fully understand it, but I could feel that weight. Our teachers would sometimes show us a video. We would hear the trumpet. I remember when we had that moment of silence, and even as a child, there was something in those notes that struck. I could not understand it at that time, but there was a depth of sorrow to it that, as a child, I could just start in the smallest fraction to grasp.

It touched all of us. My own grandfather on my father’s side died, my father told me, fighting on the Allied side in World War II, leaving my father’s mother a widow, leaving my father and his siblings as orphans. We don’t even know where or how it happened. My late father served. He died when I was a young man and he didn’t share his experiences or what he went through, so I’ll never know. My mother told me that a distant cousin, family of ours, had three sons who all died in the bombing of Pearl Harbour. As a child, I heard these stories and they had an impact, but only as I got older and older did it start to hit home a little more.

I speak about the freedom that we have because what we experienced as young people growing up—and sure, we faced challenges, but so much of the challenges we experience, we experience second-hand in our pop culture. As children, you’re almost groomed—as a little boy, all my toys fought each other. I didn’t know what it meant. As I got older, I was attracted to the action movies, but they always sensationalized and glorified things I didn’t understand. It wasn’t until my teenaged years, as I was instructed to read certain books and some films began to come out showing the real horrors of what people were facing, that I started to think a little more and grasp it.

Why do I bring this up here in the House? Because I don’t think we reflect on this enough. Perhaps some of us do; I can’t put words in the mouths of others. But as a society, there are moments when we think about our veterans, those who have made the ultimate sacrifice, those who never came back. They paid for us with their lives. We don’t do it enough.

Above all, as politicians in this House, we must understand it, because the decisions we make affect the lives of those veterans, of those soldiers we send off to war and the rest of their lives. We must make these decisions with knowledge, and we must do everything we can to make others in society and certainly here understand what that means. Lest we forget.

So, may God bless the veterans, their families, all those who have fought, died and paid the ultimate sacrifice so that I and my children can live in the relative safety that we have in this great nation.

I thank the member for Whitby for bringing this forward so we could debate it and respect our veterans. I thank the government for calling this bill to third reading and bringing this to pass. It is the right thing to do. It is necessary. God bless our veterans.