"Let's make some noise for peace." Walter Dorn speaks at Oct. 31 Peace Train rally in Ottawa

Before walking to Parliament Hill from the peacekeeping monument on Oct. 31, Peace Trainers hear Walter Dorn speak about the monument and the history of Canadian peacekeeping. 

Dorn, who is a professor of defence studies at Royal Military College and Canadian Forces College, said the monument as created in 1988 to honour Canadian peacekeepers and peacekeeping in general—men and women who out humanity before national interest 

The three figures on the monument include a soldier with binoculars, which represents monitoring a cease-fire. Another soldier has a gun; that figure is protecting civilians in a fire zone. 

The last soldier has a radio to be in communication between parties in conflict who are not in communication with each other, to keep them from shooting at each other. 

Leading up to the figures on top of the monument is a path filled with broken concrete that represents the destruction of war. “It looks like a war zone,” Dorn said, adding it gives a sense of the conditions that peacekeepers operated in. 

 

On the base of the monument are the words of former Prime Minister Lester Pearson, who came up with the idea for a United Nations peacekeeping force 70 years ago, in 1956 during the Suez Crisis. 

“We need action to not only to end the fighting, but to make the peace,” he is quoted as saying. 

Pearson’s idea and words came to shape what it means to be Canadian, Dorn said, noting that until 1995 Canada contributed about 3,000 peacekeepers a year to various missions. Today, however, there are only 17 and that will be reduced to four or five by next year due to government cuts to peacekeeping. 

For a country the size of Canada, that’s inadequate, Dorn said. “We have an important role to try to bring it back” he told Peace Train participants, adding “let’s make some noise for peace.”