#543 Remembrance Day is 2 weeks after election day

Two Weeks

On October 26, Ottawa votes. Sixteen days later, on November 11, we'll stand at cenotaphs across Rideau-Rockcliffe and honour the people who went overseas for us.

Those two dates are closer together than we usually notice.

Canadians in the Second World War were told, on posters, in newsreels, and at bond drives, that this was a war for freedom and for the right of a people to govern themselves. Whatever each young soldier privately felt, and their reasons were as varied as they were, that was the promise the country made. Many of them were barely out of their teens. On D-Day alone, hundreds of Canadians were killed on Juno Beach.

Now consider what we do with that right. Only about 40% of eligible Ottawa voters turn out for municipal elections. Incumbents in this city win every time. And on council, urban issues are routinely decided 16-9 by suburban votes. Those aren't separate problems. Low turnout protects the status quo, and the status quo keeps turnout low.

That's why I've said the way we're structured deserves scrutiny. Asking whether a system delivers is not an attack on democracy. It's how democracy works. A council that decides things most residents never hear about, elected by fewer than half of them, is a fair thing to question, and I'd rather question it in public than pretend it's fine.

I won't tell you what the people on those beaches would think of our turnout. I can't know that, and nobody can speak for them. But I can tell you what the promise was, and I can ask whether we're keeping it.

Voting is a right, and not voting is a right too. I'm not here to scold anyone. I'm asking you to use it, because the decisions made at City Hall in the next four years will be about your street, your park, your bus, and your taxes, whether or not you take part.

Here's what I'd ask:

• Check where and when you can vote at ottawa.ca, including advance polls.
• Talk to a neighbour who doesn't usually vote and ask what would get them there.
• Look at the candidates' actual records and positions, not just the signs.
• Vote on October 26.

Then on November 11, when we stand in silence, we can do it having used the thing we're remembering.

Peter Karwacki, candidate, Ward 13 (Rideau-Rockcliffe)

Justice Delayed, Then Dissolved: The Case of Kurt Meyer - the kind of people we were fighting and the need for better politicians

On the night of June 7, 1944, and the days that followed, Canadian soldiers who had surrendered near Caen were taken to the Abbaye d'Ardenne, the headquarters of the 25th SS Panzergrenadier Regiment. About twenty were shot there, many with a bullet to the back of the head. Across the weeks after D-Day, roughly 156 Canadian prisoners are believed to have been murdered by men of the 12th SS Panzer Division Hitlerjugend.

The regiment's commander was Kurt "Panzermeyer" Meyer. Within days he was promoted to lead the division.

A trial that worked

It is worth saying plainly that the trial was not a sham. In December 1945, a Canadian military court at Aurich, Germany, heard testimony, including from Meyer's own men, and convicted him of inciting his troops to deny quarter and of responsibility for the killing of prisoners. He was sentenced to death.

Meyer always denied giving an order to shoot prisoners. The court did not need to find a signed order. A commander who sets the tone for his troops, sits at the headquarters where prisoners are executed, and punishes no one has accepted the killings, whatever he did or didn't say. That principle of command responsibility was already established, and the Yamashita case of 1945 pushed it further. A leader must own what is done in his name.

Where it came apart

The verdict held. The consequences did not.

Major-General Chris Vokes, who confirmed the sentence, commuted it to life imprisonment. By his own account he respected Meyer as an aggressive front-line fighter and felt that other German commanders had escaped punishment. Whatever the sincerity of that feeling, it left 156 dead Canadians with no such consideration.

Then the Cold War took over. West Germany was being rearmed and drawn into NATO, and Britain, the United States and West Germany all pressed for the release of convicted Germans. Meyer was moved to a German prison and, in September 1954, released after about nine years in custody. The Liberal government of Louis St-Laurent, with Brooke Claxton and then Ralph Campney at National Defence, went along. It was a political decision, made quietly, with little public debate and with the families of the murdered men largely uninformed.

Mollification over time

This is the pattern that matters. No single decision erased the crime. It was worn down in stages:

• The sentence softened: death became life, out of professional respect.
• The calendar softened it further: life became nine years, as alliance politics outweighed the case.
• The story softened afterward: Meyer sold beer for a brewery, joined the Waffen-SS veterans' lobby HIAG, and helped push the line that these were ordinary soldiers like any others.

Each step was defensible to the people taking it. Each was one more small retreat from the fact that prisoners had been murdered. The cumulative result was that a man convicted of what happened at the abbey died in 1961 as a free man in a comfortable job.

Why it still matters

Military justice only means something if consequences survive the news cycle, the alliance and the next strategic priority. When the powerful can quietly reverse the outcome once attention fades, the lesson for the next commander is that accountability is temporary.

The families of the men killed at the abbey were not consulted. They deserved to be.

Further reading: Howard Margolian, Conduct Unbecoming: The Story of the Murder of Canadian Prisoners of War in Normandy.