James Albers is a Calgary-based management consultant specializing in leadership development.There was a time when the red poppy, pinned to a lapel, meant something sacred — a quiet pledge of gratitude to those who bled for a freedom most now take for granted. That we have come to the point of banning poppies from a courtroom is not, alas, a surprise to anyone watching the steady corrosion of this nation’s moral spine. We are rightly outraged. But outrage is not enough. The men and women who fought and died for this country deserve more than sentimental indignation once a year. They deserve a Canada that still resembles the one they fought for.If we are to honour our veterans, then let us do so in substance, not symbol. While those who served wrestle with trauma, PTSD, and suicide at alarming rates, they are told by their own government that “the money is gone.” Yet the same government sends millions to “green causes” abroad and lectures the world on compassion. When our veterans seek care, some are offered not help, but MAiD. Think of that — a government that will help you die faster but not live better. That is not honour; that is betrayal, bureaucratically administered.And what of the freedoms they fought to defend? Every decade seems to find new ways to erode them. Speech, once the birthright of a free citizen, is now constrained, a regulated commodity, monitored by tribunals and sanitized for sensitivity. Gun owners — law-abiding, responsible citizens — are turned into criminals overnight by decree, not debate. Our right to self-defence is undermined even as crime grows more brazen under “catch and release” justice. Repeat offenders stroll the streets while citizens lock their doors earlier and pray the police arrive in time. Lawlessness rises while law enforcement is hamstrung. The criminals know the game; the honest pay the price..And still the incompetence grows. We have politicians who sell sovereignty for profit — Prime Ministers whose conflicts of interest are so numerous they’ve had to redefine the term to keep themselves out of it. Housing ministers with three homes prescribing “modular solutions” to Canadians who can’t afford one. Our riches kept in the ground and economies throttled in the name of “science” that has long since left the issue behind. We are told this is progress, but it feels more like managed decline. A nation that once prided itself on self-reliance now finds itself at the mercy of a government too corrupt to be trusted and too inept to be feared.Add to this the activist courts that treat property rights as a colonial inconvenience — redistributing land by judicial fiat with little thought for those who built and paid for it. Add the immigration chaos that strains every system we have — healthcare, housing, education, law enforcement — with no plan, no criteria, and no expectation of integration. We are importing not just people, but problems, including groups who do not wish to join the Canadian project but to alter it in their own image. And all this while our veterans — the very people who secured the nation’s borders with their blood — are left to wonder if the country they fought for still exists at all.This is the true dishonour. Not the banned poppy — though that is shame enough — but the deliberate abandonment of the values it represents. The men who stormed Vimy Ridge or trudged the mud of Normandy fought for a free, sovereign, self-respecting Canada. Those that we honoured on the “Highway of Heros” did not fight for a country that would trade freedom for comfort, courage for compliance, or patriotism for guilt.So yes, wear the poppy. Wear it proudly. But do not imagine that wearing it is enough. To truly honour our fallen, we must restore what they died to preserve — liberty, law, and the dignity of citizenship. We must demand a government worthy of their sacrifice, one that defends its people rather than apologizes for them.The poppy should not just remind us of what they gave — it should shame us into asking what we have done with it.That, and nothing less, is how a grateful nation remembers.James Albers is a Calgary-based management consultant specializing in leadership development.
