Winnie Czulinski –
When Fred Alvarado filmed the annual Cabbagetown Remembrance ceremony in 2024, the Regent Park TV/Focus Media community journalist and producer was also filming diversity, both in local presenters and participants, and with some history dues late-paid.
Along with a trumpet sounding Reveille and the Last Post, readings, and veteran salutes, tribute was paid to the First Nations peoples of the territories the ceremony took place on. Only since 1995 have Indigenous veterans been allowed to lay a Remembrance-Day wreath.
And as then-Ward 13 councillor Chris Moise described, the tale of Canadian soldier Jeremiah Jones (1858-1950) a hero at the Canadian Vimy Ridge victory in World War I, represents the plight of Black veterans. Only in 2010, after decades of advocacy, was Jones awarded the Canadian Forces Medallion for Distinguished Service.
Filmmaker Alvarado, who took journalism at the Francisco Morazán National Pedagogical University in Honduras and has covered urban issues mainstream media ignores, comes from a country where journalists risk injury, death, disappearance and defamation.
“I escaped (Honduras) because of intimidation and safety concerns, that led me to rebuild my life here in Canada,” says Alvarado, who won a PEN Canada “Writing Without Fear” award for his story on the failure of the U.S. war on drugs in his homeland. “Ceremonies like this give me a personal understanding of how insecurity can affect a person’s life.
“It makes me more aware of the human consequences of violence and the importance of being able to live and work without fear. Remembering the past conflicts should encourage us to take present-day tensions seriously.”
Besides the annual Cabbagetown Remembrance ceremony on November 11 at St. James’ Cemetery on Parliament Street, there is the Queen’s Own Rifles, of Moss Park Armoury, parade at St. Paul’s Church, Bloor Street East on November 8, Indigenous Veterans Day. And at Hugh’s Room on Broadview Avenue on November 9 and 10, the Heroes on the Air theatrical musical show commemorates the 100th anniversary of the Royal Canadian Air Force.
Good Shepherd Ministries on Queen Street East remembers war year-round. Its Homeless Veterans Program (featured in the bridge in December 2024) helps soldiers from recent wars such as in Afghanistan with housing, health, therapy, and employment via the organization Helmets to Hardhats.
“Remembrance is more than a reflection of the past – it’s a call to action in the present,” says the ministries’ website. “Programs that support our veterans is a way we can honour through meaningful action.”
Increasingly, Toronto has become the home of people from many countries of conflict. Growing up in Ukraine, Mariya Khomutova inherited memories of the Second World War “through monuments, family stories, and Soviet narratives of heroism. We were taught how to remember long before we learned to question what we were remembering.”
Khomutova, an actor, met Métis-Canadian filmmaker Matthew MacKenzie in Kyiv, Ukraine, during a theatre workshop. They fell in love long-distance and in person, a romance challenged by the pandemic, and Russia’s war in Ukraine. The couple ultimately settled in Cabbagetown with their son Ivan, and have performed their play, First Métis Man of Odesa, across Canada since 2023. Tours to St. John’s are planned for March 2027 and to the Thousand Islands Playhouse in Gananoque in August.
MacKenzie and Khomutova, whose story was featured in the bridge in February 2024, published a book of the poignant, humorous play script with Playwrights Canada Press that also acknowledges Ukrainian artists lost in the conflict.
“Russia’s war against Ukraine makes remembrance painfully immediate,” says Khomutova. “Some of my theatre colleagues became soldiers. Some are no longer alive.
“Will future generations remember them as heroes? As symbols? Will anyone remember who they were before the war?”
First Métis Man of Odesa, Khomutova says, is “a love story that preserves a Ukraine of humour, tenderness, art, and ordinary human contradictions – everything that is being defended.”
Performing in Andrew Kushnir’s The Division – about that Canadian playwright/actor’s grandfather serving with the Nazis’ Ukrainian Waffen-SS in WWII – at Crow’s Theatre made her reflect “on how nations construct wartime mythologies. Behind every monument stands a human being whose experience was far more complicated than the story told about them.
“Perhaps theatre cannot prevent war. But it can preserve the humanity that history sometimes simplifies. Remembrance is not only about honouring those who died. It is about remembering how they lived.”
