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And not only for their sake of the soldiers and their descendants, he suggested, but for the sake of the country itself. “One of the key aspects of history is the spiritual dimension,” he said in an interview. “How you treat your dead is very reflective of the spiritual state of your society. We should be honouring our dead because they are so much a part of our history.”

Christie, a longtime chronicler of Canada’s warriors, regards his project as a continuation of a two-decade effort to make Canadians more aware of — and proud of — their warrior traditions.

Indeed, he regards the notion of Canada as a nation of peacekeepers as an ideological fabrication traceable to the “deliberate” efforts of the country’s elites in the 1920s and 1930s — particularly Liberal Party leader and prime minister William Lyon Mackenzie King — to obscure Canada’s military accomplishments during the First World War.

“Canadians don’t know their history (of the Great War) and there’s a reason they don’t,” he says. “It was intentionally erased by the Liberal government of Mackenzie King … to protect his vote in Quebec, and to hide the fact that he didn’t serve in the Great War.

“To be seen honouring the soldiers and the war would have cost him votes in Quebec, which he depended on a great deal for his political success,” says Christie, arguing that in the post-war years King “deliberately downgraded the accomplishments and historical memory” of Canadian Corps commanders Arthur Currie and Julian Byng, and even avoided attending the unveiling of the Vimy Memorial in 1936 even while he supported building it, to serve his partisan ambitions.