This is National Volunteer Week, the time of year that we take to focus on the volunteers who make our communities run so smoothly, a representative number of whom are profiled in this week’s paper.
In just a few months’ time, in August, we’ll also be reminded that the First World War, the conflict that, more than any other single European war, changed the course of history (and, of course, led directly to the Second World War) began a century before.
The young men who joined the military in such great numbers following Great Britain’s declaration of war with Germany (with Canada automatically drawn in as part of the British Empire) were all volunteers.
For better or worse, Canada was able to meet its military commitments to the Allied war efforts until 1917 with volunteers, when the federal government enacted an act of conscription, requiring young men who were then “called up” to report for military service.
So for most of this bloodiest of wars, Canadian volunteers, exclusively, answered the call and were sent for training and then to war.
Canadians served in this way in remarkably high numbers and, as it happens, Vimy Ridge Day, an official day of significance in Canada’s history, is celebrated this year when it happens to fall on Wednesday, April 9, mid-way through National Volunteer Week. (Vimy Ridge Day as it happens, was successfully proposed to the House of Commons by former Algoma-Manitoulin-Kapuskasing MP Brent St. Denis and his private member’s bill received universal support).
The battle of Vimy Ridge, in 1917, was an eventful one for the Canadians who were sent into the breach to try to accomplish what English and other Allied troops had failed to do. They were successful that April day nearly a century ago. Those soldiers, virtually all of them very young men, were military volunteers from all across Canada.
Volunteering to go to war and volunteering in 2014 as part of a service club in one of our Island communities, volunteering to drive people to their medical appointments, volunteering with Meals on Wheels programs, with fisheries restocking programs though Manitoulin’s fish and game clubs, with youth programs such as the Manitoulin Special Olympics and Manitoulin Sea Cadets programs, with Manitoulin’s two branches of the Royal Canadian Legion, with churches, with the Island’s several seniors’ organizations and so on may seems at first glance quite different aspects of altruism. But each of these acts is motivated by the very same response to community that sent so many young men, willing to go to war a century ago this year.
The common thread between the military volunteers of 1914 and the community volunteers of 2014 is a simple one: people are naturally motivated to do their best for their community, whether that community is South Baymouth, Kagawong or Canada.
During the 1930s, Ontario farmers, who were hard-hit by the Great Depression, sent grain seed to their colleagues in Saskatchewan, the province hardest hit by the epic drought that characterized many of those Depression years in that western province.
Not too many years ago, during a forage shortage in Ontario, western farmers donated hay to hard-pressed farmers in this province, in some way returning the favour from 80 years before.
These were also voluntary acts that recognized others’ needs in a particular place and time and these, along with the modern local volunteer heros we recognize today and the brave young men who donned khaki all those years ago, not imagining the horror they’d be facing, are all very much part of the volunteer spectrum that has characterized Canada as long as there has been a Canada.
People are often pessimistic about the future of the volunteer spirit; whether this important torch will be successfully passed on to people presently in their 20s and 30s, busy working and raising families.
We predict that, in 10 and 20 years from now, this newspaper will be proudly detailing the volunteer experiences of an entire new group of people who recognize that it is their time to stand up and be counted as volunteers, not in the least in recognition of the opportunities provided for them by those who took on these voluntary roles when they were in their formative years.
