Don Newman

November 11, 2021

For 22 years, November 11th was one of the most important days of the year for me. Every Remembrance Day from 1987 to 2008 I was privileged to be the national Remembrance Day broadcaster for CBC television. Watching the ceremony on TV this November 11 brought back a lot of memories and some reflection on how, after beginning to fade as a nationwide commemoration in the 1980s, it has blossomed forth again as the national ceremony of remembrance it should be.

My connection with the National Ceremony of Remembrance in Ottawa began in 1986. I was producing and hosting a show on the CBC News Network called This Week in Parliament. It brought the highlights of the week in and around the House of Commons in a half-hour package to a national audience on Saturday evenings. Occasionally, that was a problem. Some weeks during the schedule, Parliament did not sit. One of those weeks was the week in which Remembrance Day fell. When that happened, I had to fill the show with political news and interviews. In 1986, I decided that one interesting feature would be to go to the National Remembrance Day ceremony with the minister of Veterans Affairs.

The reason the idea was such a good one was because the minister was none other than George Hees, the larger-than-life politician who had served as a major in the Second World War, entered politics as a Conservative in 1950, served in the cabinet of John Diefenbaker in the 1950s and 60s and run to replace Diefenbaker as party leader in 1967.

Now, in 1986, he was back in the cabinet of Prime Minister Brian Mulroney. Most of his fellow veterans were delighted. They had a contemporary who had shared their wartime experiences and they greeted him on parade before the National War Memorial on Confederation Square with a bonhomie  that belied the solemnity of the ceremony.

Thanks to Hees, that piece and the show were a great success. Some of my colleagues in the Parliamentary bureau of the CBC were surprised that Remembrance Day could be such an interesting event. I enjoyed the reaction then but wasn’t thinking much about Remembrance Day a year later, when I received a call from Hans Pohl, one of the producers from CBC News Specials in Toronto. He told me the specials team was taking over the Remembrance Day production from the local CBC station in Ottawa and wanted to know if I would be interested in being on the program.

I said I would, not bothering to ask what my specific role on the broadcast would be. In those days I did a lot of work with the specials team. Usually, I was a commentator, sometimes an interviewer, although rarely the host, even though I did host my own program and had previously hosted another program on the network called Saturday Report.

We did not talk about the broadcast again until I showed up at 10 o’clock the morning of November 11^th to get ready for the telecast. When the program was produced by the Ottawa CBC, Remembrance Day had been hosted for several years by a CBC announcer named Brian Smith, and I wasn’t surprised to see Brian in the room when I arrived. I thought he was still going to be the host; I would add whatever colour you could at a ceremony of remembrance.

When I came into the room I said hello to Arnold Amber, the head of CBC News Specials. We started to talk and I guess he sensed I wasn’t fully in the picture. Abruptly, he told me that I was to be the host and would have to carry the show for an hour and a half. I protested that no on had mentioned that to me, but he persisted, saying it would be too difficult to go back to Smith after telling him he was boing replaced as host.

While I was nervous, I was also pleased. Being the host of Remembrance Day is an important job. The CBC wanted to upgrade the program and had chosen me to be part of the upgrade.

Luckily, I had been to the Cenotaph the year before with George Hees and had watched the ceremony. Enough came back that I got through the broadcast without embarrassing myself or the CBC. In fact, from that rather harrowing experience, I did it for 21 more years, until I retired from the corporation in 2009.

Over those years, our program changed although Remembrance Day remained a constant. For the CBC, the biggest change was the second year I did the broadcast, when I was joined by George Pearce, a retired Canadian Army major. George had volunteered to sit it the control room and help identify badges and music and anything else that we non-military broadcasters and producers didn’t know. Luckily, after meeting George the decision was made to put him on the air. He brought a serious – although companionable – dignity to the broadcast. Over the years his role expanded and as a team we worked well together. He stopped doing the broadcast when I retired.

The other major addition was a man named Mark Bulgutch. He became the head of specials and took a personal interest in the program. As world events changed, the program would change with them, adding live features from remote locations. One year, in the midst of the broadcast from the National War Memorial,  we presented a report from Bosnia and Canadian soldiers observing Remembrance Day there. Another year, we joined a ceremony from a Canadian warship patrolling off the coast of West Africa, searching for Somali pirates. And of course, we had coverage from Afghanistan.

In fact, it was the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington on September 11, 2001, and the war in Afghanistan two years later, that created the biggest change in the public perception of Remembrance Day. With the Canadian Forces deployment to Afghanistan, Canadians were in combat in a way that they had not been since the Korean War, half a century earlier. Suddenly, there was a whole new wave of Canadian veterans, and just as sadly, more Canadians killed in combat—158 men and women over the years of the mission. The Silver Cross Mothers, who represent all mothers who have lost children in Canada’s wars, were no longer elderly women whose memories of their children were not always complete. Instead, they were young, many of them barely middle aged, whose pain and grief were still raw.

The crowds in Ottawa at the War Memorial grew larger each year. So did the television audiences for our broadcast. It became a national experience of mourning, but also of pride. George and I could sense that from the crowds on Confederation Square each year as we did the broadcast.

That is still the way it is. Watching the CBC coverage today I was proud of the broadcast. And a little pleased that I had a few things to do with how it had evolved.

Contributing Writer and columnist Don Newman, an Officer of the Order of Canada and Lifetime Member of the Parliament Press Gallery, is Executive Vice President of Rubicon Strategy, based in Ottawa.