“………we shall defend our Island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender.”
On 4th June 1940 I was seven years old. I cannot say definitively that I actually heard Prime Minister Winston Churchill give the very long speech, part of which is quoted above, but I know my parents, as were most people in England, listening and I do recall hearing the quoted part, although it may have been a replay.
The Germans had chased our and the French armies to the coast of France and, between 26 May and 4 June, 1940, 338,000 troops were rescued by the Royal Navy with the support of the Royal Air Force and hundreds of volunteer fishers in their boats, despite the Luftwaffe and continuous German artillery fire. Many of these ships and boats made more than one visit to the coast to rescue the besieged soldiers.
The quote from Churchill’s speech to the House of Commons, cited above, was a week after he had thought as few as 20,000 to 30,000 soldiers could be rescued, so it was a defiant speech saying to the Hitler, see here, we defeated your strategy and we will continue to be resilient and a nation of which to be proud and which will never surrender!
As I listen and have listened and watched on TV many times over the past month or so, Trump has blustered on about Canada becoming the 51st State of the USA. He has succeeded in one thing: he has united our entire forty-one million population in a way which politicians in Canada have been trying unsuccessfully for decades to do. From Vancouver Island on the West Coast, to the Arctic in the Northern coast, to Cape Spear Lighthouse on the East Coast.
It appears, in my opinion, that Trump’s goal is to acquire our vital and plentiful minerals and energy and he intends to do so by endeavouring to sabotage the entire economy of Canada. I have news for him: as the Brits in two world wars proved, trying to subjugate a nation by illegal or devious ways only gets the backs up of the population.
Trump has many times called Canada a difficult nation to deal with. Really! Everything has been going smoothly, oh, with a few hiccups, with trade between the three nations, USA, Mexico and Canada, in the one trade agreement, by whichever name you wish to call it. It matters not to him that Canada has always been ready to step up whenever the USA has recommended or asked for help, be it peacekeeping or fighting California fires, be it over 20 thousand passengers being housed for days after flights were diverted to Canada on that fatal 11th day of September, 2001, be it the saving and eventual escape of the Canadian Six from Iran in January 1980, and on and on.
So, with the threat of tariffs and the consequential difficulties that will follow, where people will lose their jobs, price of virtually everything will go up, where trade relations between Canada and the USA (and, later, likely the EU) will become, not just disrupted and difficult, but non-existent, it is no surprise that our nation is, for now, completely united. I say, for now, but from experience through WWII and how the people in Britain stayed united against the Nazi propaganda and vitriolic bombing attacks against the population, and, I believe that while Trump is ‘punishing us for our being difficult to deal with’, our people will still stay united over our country never surrendering.
As of the middle of 2024, when asked of what are Canadians most proud, Canadians were mostly proud of Indigenous Culture (63%), bilingualism (58%) and the state of democracy in Canada (55%). That may surprise some, but we are becoming less proud of the economy and multiculturalism. However, when asked why Canadians felt proud of their country, the answer was ‘natural beauty and the environment’ (70%). These answers may be different when the effect of tariffs takes hold, but I believe that most Canadians will still think of their country as being beautiful and the best in the world in which to live.
Hitler could not make Britain surrender!
It would take more than a Trump to make Canadians surrender!
We will never surrender!
From time to time... 