Dear Editor
I write regarding a letter, "Renaming holiday would honour 55,000 Canadians" (Regional OptimistMay 7) about the renaming of Victoria Day, one reason being that Quebec has done so.
The province of Quebec has always had its own agenda.
I write chiefly because of the last two sentences in the letter. “Remember Dieppe? We owe the English nothing.”
It seems to be rather odd to use one sad event of a nasty war for one’s own agenda. One could just as easily write the following: “Remember Hitler? We owe the Germans nothing.”
Remember that thing called democracy. It gives us the right to free speech (sometimes too free) and therefore the freedom to write letters to newspapers, in the English language, under that idea of democracy that came from England.
Should we, under the guise of honouring one group of soldiers, insult another group of people?
We remember all soldiers of all nations on Nov. 11, or at least we should try to do so.
If memory serves me correctly, during one of the visits of Queen Elizabeth II to Saskatchewan a group of Doukobour women turned out to welcome her, claiming their ancestors felt they could come safely to Canada because Queen Victoria had wished them well.
We can’t rewrite history, nor can we pick out what we want and ignore the rest.
Christine Pike
Waseca
