On a sunny summer day this past July, Ottawa’s quiet suburb of Kanata was momentarily roused as a huge pack of motorcyclists rumbled through it, leather-clad and looking for action.
It was a crushing victory for the hometown boys at the Dominion Command Darts Championship held at the F.E. Butler Branch in Chester, N.S., May 4-5. The veteran team from Centennial Branch in Dartmouth, N.S., were raucous, overpowering and unflinching in their charge to take the 2013 national championship. And in singles there was a similarly masterful display for Ontario’s John Verwey, who closed out his championship match with three of the best darts this reporter has ever witnessed.
Around the nation’s capital, the new Chief of Defence Staff, General Tom Lawson, is considered a bit of an enigma.
He’s a fighter pilot who has learned to conceal the traditional fighter pilot swagger. He’s an officer who rose to the top of the military without ever being deployed to Afghanistan. He’s a man who came out of seemingly nowhere—he was a lieutenant-colonel when the Afghan war started—to take the helm of Canada’s armed forces.
On June 6 on the coast of France there will be fireworks and music as a large gathering of Canadians mark the 10th anniversary of the creation of the Juno Beach Centre.
The world is full of problems and we can’t solve all of them, but despite the mess, we have to try.
In southern Afghanistan in 2009, a close-knit unit of Canadian soldiers gathered in the sandy courtyard of their small base to get a briefing before their first combat patrol.
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An informative primer on Canada’s crucial role in the Normandy landing, June 6, 1944.
