Armistice and Remembrance Day

The Manitoba capital first held a Decoration Day parade in 1886. The thirty-eighth such parade, like most others, featured militia units, local dignitaries, veterans organizations, and school cadet corps.

Although the Second World War had been in progress for over a year, the 1940 ceremony in the Nova Scotia capital was still focussed on the First World War.

The 1946 ceremony in Ottawa was the first under Canada's new governor-general, Viscount Alexander of Tunis, who had been a senior Allied commander during the Second World War.

Judging by the expressions of the onlookers, the visitor to a London, Ontario, Remembrance Day ceremony, probably in 1939, was not especially welcome.

In 1944, the service at Vancouver's Cenotaph was as much about the war then in progress as it was about the war of the previous generation.

Although this service was held after the Second World War, its content and symbols were redolent of the First.

The Remembrance Day service in Bathurst, New Brunswick, probably early in the Second World War.

This float, inspired by John McCrae’s poem ‘In Flanders Fields,’ was likely used in a Victory Bond parade late in the First World War.