Den Tandt: With honour in short supply, look to our veterans this Remembrance Day

Flowers cover the National War Memorial in Ottawa, after the shooting death of Cpl. Nathan Cirillo. Photo: THE CANADIAN PRESS/Adrian Wyld

There is no honour on Twitter. High finance and the law are wastelands where it goes to die. Politics? Good lord. One reader suggested to me recently that it is reactionary, and possibly addled to even utter the term “honour” in Canada in 2014. It’s medieval and archaic, this person suggested.

But is honour really irrelevant? On the eve of Remembrance Day, surely, it’s worth considering the question.

Honour is AWOL, missing without leave, in the case of the famous Toronto radio host now accused of serially assaulting at least nine women. Jian Ghomeshi has denied wrongdoing and has not been charged with a crime. The allegations against him have not been tested in court. But setting aside the outcome of the police investigation, it is clear from multiple accounts that Ghomeshi ran CBC Radio’s flagship culture show, Q, as his private, undisputed fiefdom. Medieval, you might say.

It is also clear that Ghomeshi’s bosses at the network either knew he was trading on his fame to procure for himself a steady stream of much younger, economically vulnerable women, or that they should have known he was doing so and were wilfully blind.

Jian Ghomeshi at CBC’s Toronto studios.

Now CBC Radio has returned, barely missing a beat, to its long custom of pontificating endlessly about gender, inclusion and systemic inequality, even as Ghomeshi’s former executive producer, Arif Noorani, is “taking some time off.” I have not seen or heard of Noorani being doorstopped by CBC’s investigative program, The Fifth Estate, or by any other intrepid CBC reporter. Perhaps someone will correct me, if this has occurred. Honourable, on the part of CBC brass? Ah, no.

Honour was in short supply last week in Ottawa. Liberal leader Justin Trudeau turfed two MPs from his caucus over allegations of “serious personal misconduct.”

As far as I have been able to tell, Trudeau went to some lengths to avoid identifying the alleged victims, or indeed the way in which they had been victimized. New Democrats promptly leaked the fact that the allegations concerned sexual harassment of female NDP MPs – and then unloaded on the Liberal leader for making the matter public. The New Democrat deputy leader, Megan Leslie, suggested Saturday on CBC Radio’s The House that a better solution would have been to deal with it all in-house, in other words secretly. Astonishing, that; as though secrecy between people in the know is not at the rotten root of the Ghomeshi scandal, and indeed every major sexual abuse scandal in modern times.

So, amid this dross, where can one look for honour? You see where this is headed. It’s not a coincidence that Canadians have been, since the Afghan war (2002-2014) reflexively protective of this country’s soldiers. I have written before that the Canadian military is home to a distinct martial culture, of which we can and should be very proud.

A F-18 Hornet of the Canadian Air Force. (RAUL ARBOLEDA/AFP/Getty Images)

In Afghanistan it was embodied in the Canadian Forces’ “3-d” approach to conflict – defence, diplomacy and development. This was always more than sloganeering. Even the sergeants in the Canadian Forces – especially the sergeants, in my experience – sought to embody strength with compassion. This is not to portray them as delicate do-gooders, but simply to acknowledge that they were very aware they had a purpose over and above that of killing the enemy.

Long before Afghanistan, in Rwanda, or the Medak Pocket in Croatia, the CF ethos lived in a willingness to do the perilous and hard work well, even when the country was uninterested. In Haiti, in 2010, after the earthquake, I remember sitting quietly in the dark, listening to Canadian soldiers speak to one another of the horrors they’d seen that day. There were strength, competence and decency to make any Canadian’s heart swell with pride.

And of course this is not new: The dwindling numbers of old men standing at attention at cenotaphs each Remembrance Day, are testament to a culture of sacrifice that is as old as Canada. Farley Mowat’s memoir of the Italian Campaign in the Second World War, And No Birds Sang, gives voice to the long Canadian soldierly tradition of quietly doing one’s duty, despite the “gut-rotting worm of fear” and the certain knowledge that the planners on high have utterly botched it. The book is a masterpiece. Every Canadian should read it.

My point is simply this: Honour is actually very present, in 2014; indeed it sits at the beating heart of every important issue, nowhere more than in politics. Its absence leaves a shadow, which should never be mistaken for irrelevance. And its presence? It inspires us, very simply, like nothing else can.

On this Remembrance Day, look to the uniformed assembly at your local cenotaph, and in particular to the National War Memorial, to see a living embodiment of honour. They are not medieval, or archaic: They live in our midst, here and now. If only more of us were more like most of them.