HAPPY CANADA DAY!
Heroes!
My favourite shots of Terry Fox are the ones showing the police backing him up. How proud the officers must have been to keep our boy safe on this country’s endless roadways.
Sometimes it feels like our broken and frequently absurd country is bereft of the kind of heroes who emerge during wartime. But on this Canada Day, let’s remember the people who showed us how great we really are. For me, it will always be Terry Fox, who made it to Toronto on July 11th, 1980, while I was still a cub reporter at radio station CFTR.
I’ll never forget that day and the crowds at Nathan Phillips Square for Terry, a humble British Columbian with a thick West Coast accent — like my whole family.
Why all the white shirts in the crowd? Many had purchased promotional t-shirts for the event. Not long after his triumph here, Terry’s Marathon of Hope came to an end due to a cancer recurrence.
Here is our lad on September 1, 1980, near Thunder Bay, announcing an end to the run as the cancer had spread to his lungs.
He was gone the following year.
Terry Fox showed us something good about ourselves. Eternally, as this beautiful kid died before he could ever let us down. Not that he would of.
And of course Tamara, Chris, Tom, Harold and the rest of the Convoy crew who modelled contemporary passive resistance in the face of tyranny for the whole world to see.
They are the best of us. Terry fought cancer. They fought the entrenched power elites and most of them paid dearly for it.
If you have time today, here is an interview I gave to an American podcast two years ago on the state of Canada and I think, humbly, my predictions came true.
Stay critical.
#truthovertribe
Happy Canada Day! To all the heros that fight the destruction of our country and our people, to all the heros that do small things every day, day in and day out, to maintain their families and communities way of life regardless of the rot that encroaches. Thanks Trish.
I like the idea of celebrating Canadians who have gone above and beyond, vs. Canada which has become a grotesque caricature of its former self. James Topp also walked across Canada, and he started at the Terry Fox memorial - another hero. Also, the doctors who spoke up and out, some who I credit with saving my family from the mRNA shots and despair, and who paid a dear price for doing so: Dr. Patrick Phillips, Dr, Mark Trozzi, Dr. Julie Ponesse, Dr. Byram Bridle, Dr. Francis Christian, and Dr. Chris Shoemaker to name a few of the heroes and heroines. Thank you.