The poppy is not an apolitical symbol

For many Canadians, the remembrance poppy is sacred. Any restriction on wearing it is bound to touch a nerve.

Last year, Nova Scotia’s judiciary did exactly that. To preserve an “unbiased and neutral space,” staff were told they needed permission before wearing one in court.

Premier Tim Houston called the rule “disgusting.” The poppy, he insisted, is “not a political statement.”

Former Alberta premier Jason Kenney went further, declaring that remembrance is “pre-political,” a duty binding Canadians across generations.

In fact, the judiciary had not called the poppy “political.” But so what if it had?

The symbol has always carried political meanings. It derives from Canadian physician John McCrae’s In Flanders Fields, written in 1915 while the First World War was still raging. Speaking on behalf of the war dead, the poem urged the living to continue fighting — “Take up our quarrel with the foe” — and warns “If ye break faith with us who die / We shall not sleep, though poppies grow / In Flanders fields.”

Its imagery was subsequently used to promote the war effort, including Canada’s Victory Bonds campaigns.

After 1918, the poppy became part of a tradition of remembrance. That tradition offers consolation to the bereaved and commemorates those who served. For most people today, wearing a poppy is simply a gesture of respect.

But the tradition also draws on the authority of the dead to make broader claims about war.

The National Memorial to the Fallen, unveiled last year in Kingston, Ont., illustrates this in stone. Its pillars commemorate Canadian wars from before Confederation to the present. Benches around the pillars invite visitors to sit and reflect.

But the inscriptions on the benches are hardly neutral. They tell us: “Freedom isn’t free”; “They sacrificed their lives for our freedom”; “For our today, they gave their tomorrow.” These are sweeping claims about the meanings of all of our wars.

This isn’t merely the interpretation of one monument. The Royal Canadian Legion, which oversees the annual poppy campaign, similarly describes wearing the poppy as a pledge to remember those who “sacrificed for our freedom.”

Freedom isn’t the only achievement attributed to military sacrifice. The language of remembrance sometimes presents war as the means by which peace is achieved. That may be true of particular wars. But when presented as a timeless truth, it leaves little room for considering how peace might be secured without war.

And even when war has secured freedom or peace, soldiers weren’t the only ones who paid for it. Civilians, too, suffer and die. Yet our national tradition of remembrance remains overwhelmingly concerned with military sacrifice.

Seeking a different approach to remembrance, some have turned to the white poppy. Introduced in Britain in the 1930s, it commemorates civilian as well as military victims of war and places greater emphasis on preventing future conflicts.

Efforts to promote the white poppy in Canada have been fiercely opposed by the Legion, which condemns the alternative symbol as disrespectful. In 2010, the Legion went so far as to threaten legal action against white poppy distributors.

People might not intend to make a political statement when they wear a red poppy. But the symbol carries political meanings nonetheless. Remembrance makes claims about war that go well beyond respect and mourning. Questioning those claims and seeking alternatives should not be treated as sacrilege.

Ian Cosh is a Toronto writer and anthropologist and the author of Ghosts of Ortona: Reckoning with the Traumas of Canadian World War II Veterans.