Jerry Amernic: As the greatest generation fades away, so does Canada’s historical literacy

Burdett Sisler, right, celebrates his birthday on April 13, 2025. Photo by HO-Alex Heidbuechel/The Canadian Press

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Canada recently said goodbye to Burdett Sisler, a man from Fort Erie, Ont., who was said to be Canada’s oldest living person. Two weeks shy of his 111th birthday when he died on April 2, he was also our oldest surviving veteran of the Second World War.

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Sisler never went abroad to fight, but served in Canada as an army telecommunications mechanic, deploying radar technology to shoot down German bombers. Radar, a new technology back then, was crucial to the war effort and top secret at the time.

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Nevertheless, Sisler had been rejected earlier by the Royal Canadian Air Force because of poor sight in one eye, but still he managed to contribute to the war effort and help bring about the defeat of Nazi Germany.

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Veterans Affairs Minister Jill McKnight observed Sisler’s death, saying, “Our country owes a lasting debt to him and to his generation, whose courage and resilience laid the foundation for the peaceful, democratic Canada we are privileged to call home today.”

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This comes 2½ years after the House of Commons gave a standing ovation to 98-year-old Yaroslav Hunka of North Bay, Ont. He was called “a Canadian hero” by the Speaker of the House since he fought against the Red Army in the Second World War, and given Russia’s invasion of Ukraine a year earlier, anyone who fought the Russians deserved an applause.

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But no one bothered to ask who the Russians were fighting in the Second World War. The last time I checked, it was Nazi Germany.

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Hunka had served in an ethnic Ukrainian unit under Nazi command, which means the Canadian Parliament gave a standing ovation to a Nazi and became an international laughingstock. Such ignorance of what transpired in the Second World War is endemic in the country today. Canadians, by and large, and younger Canadians especially, do not know their history.

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I discovered this when teaching college students. Indeed, using wartime analogies to make a point went nowhere because my students knew virtually nothing about the war. It started with Methusaleh, the biblical character and grandfather of Noah, who, according to the Book of Genesis, lived some 969 years.

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I once made a comment in class that so-and-so is as old as Methusaleh, but no student knew what I was talking about. It soon became apparent that these kids not only had little or no knowledge of biblical history, but history in general.

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Back in 2015, I made a video in which I interviewed university students in Toronto and asked them questions about the war. With few exceptions, they didn’t know who Franklin D. Roosevelt was or, for that matter, Winston Churchill. They had never heard of Josef Mengele or the Final Solution. They were unable to identify the Allies and had no idea what took place on D-Day.

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Since then, things have only got worse, because along with this affliction of historical ignorance has come historical revisionism in which major figures from our past were cancelled.