On the 80th anniversary of D-Day The Globe and Mail ran his photo on the front page. He was in full military dress—a poppy on his lapel and a string of medals and ribbons across his chest —as he walked among the graves of the Canadian War Cemetery in Normandy, not far from Juno Beach where the Canadians landed. The website of The National Post had a video of him relating his exploits from that day and for 100 years old he was as sharp as the proverbial tack. I’m talking about Richard Rohmer.

He was flying above the beaches during history’s greatest military adventure and I distinctly remember him telling me about it 40 years ago. I was doing a magazine profile on this man who wrote novels that were desecrated by the reviewers.

“There is so much cardboard in a Rohmer novel you could ship a koala bear back to Australia in it,” said Larry Zolf, journalist and erstwhile book reviewer who got sued by Rohmer for a newspaper review of Balls!, his fifth novel. The suit was dropped after the paper printed a statement saying there had been no intent to pass comment on the author.

Canada always remained front and centre in his fiction, but he also wrote non-fiction books about war. Rohmer has published more than 30 books, the most recent in 2013. It was a novel about Sir John A. Macdonald and the Fathers of Confederation arriving in London, England in 1866 for discussions to create this new country in North America. Rohmer was 89 when it came out. Right now he has a new manuscript making the rounds with publishers. Yes, at 100 years of age. On top of those literary pursuits he has enjoyed parallel careers as a lawyer, political advisor, what have you.

Indeed, Rohmer has succeeded at much in life, sort of like Forrest Gump that way because he’s a character whose path always seems to cross with famous people. During the recent D-Day ceremonies he spoke with U.S. President Joe Biden at Omaha Beach, and back at Juno Beach Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, French President Emmanuel Macron, and Prince William lined up to see him.

The first U.S. president he ever met was Dwight Eisenhower, but that was in Ike’s twilight years. As for royalty, the former Prince Charles—now King Charles—is a long-time friend. Notwithstanding a very long list of interactions with the rich, famous, and powerful, Rohmer remains best defined by D-Day, along with the Battle of Normandy and the liberation of Holland. He was in all of it.

On June 6, 1944, the young reconnaissance pilot saw the entire invasion from the air. When I was doing that magazine piece he described it to me in meticulous detail. Then he took out his medals and mentioned the time he came face-to-face with U.S. General George S. Patton. Patton, who stood an imposing 6’2”, was inspecting the Canadian pilots. He got to the diminutive Rohmer—all 5’8” of him—and stopped.

“Boy,” asked the man known to all as Old Blood and Guts. “How old are you?”

“I’m twenty, sir,” Rohmer replied as Patton’s eyes explored the aircraft beside him.

“Do you fly that goddamn airplane?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Son of a bitch,” Patton said.

Six weeks after D-Day reconnaissance pilot Rohmer spotted a German staff car rushing off with five men inside. He radioed its position and a Canadian Spitfire shot up the car. It veered off the road and crashed, killing the driver and wounding the others. One of the wounded was Field Marshall Erwin Rommel. Germany’s top general. Rommel survived, but his war was over and three months later he popped a cyanide tablet and committed suicide. In November 1944, Rohmer flew the last of his 135 missions.

We once had lunch in a swanky Toronto restaurant and he, being like Forrest Gump, who else walks in but billionaire businessman Frank Stronach, who built international auto parts company Magna. Stronach—he’s been in the news for other matters as of late—passed our table and Rohmer the lawyer didn’t miss a beat. He stood up, introduced himself, grabbed Stronach’s hand, and pressed a business card into his palm.

“If you ever need a lawyer,” he said.

Stronach might need one now but Rohmer didn’t practice that kind of law. For him it was municipal law and land development; a notable client was E. P. Taylor, the Canadian industrialist of his day. The legal work paid the bills for all the time spent writing novels, which along with flying airplanes, was his passion.

In 1942, on his 18th birthday, Rohmer enlisted in the Royal Canadian Air Force and up to that point had thought himself a failure. A year earlier he had flunked school and forged his father’s signature on his report card, which got him kicked out of the house. The senior Rohmer was a pro football player, a running back with the Hamilton Tigers which won the 1929 Grey Cup. If that wasn’t enough, three uncles were lacrosse players and a younger brother played pro hockey. Alas, Rohmer was not of that mold.

But he made his mark and more in the armed forces. He retired as a wing commander in 1953 and has been involved in D-Day events for decades. In 1975 he was promoted to brigadier-general and in 2015 honourary lieutenant-general. Today he goes by Major-General (retired) Richard Rohmer.

This past June 5, just before leaving for Normandy as part of the Canadian delegation, he was interviewed by The Peterborough Examiner and asked about D-Day. Said Rohmer: “It’s hard for anybody who’s alive now to understand how deep that change could have been if we had failed. The people who were the enemy were very hard at work trying to conquer the rest of the world. We made sure they didn’t.”

That same newspaper once called him “one of Canada’s most colourful figures of the past half-century.” And rightly so. After all, there is Rohmer the best-selling novelist and author of non-fiction, the lawyer, personal advisor to such people as former Ontario premier John Robarts, not to mention officer of the Order of Canada, former chancellor of the University of Windsor, and a list of honours that piled up over the years and just goes on and on.

No surprise but he once had a one-on-one meeting with Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau during which he laid out his plans for developing the Canadian North. Rohmer even organized a conference about it with such attendees as former prime minister Lester Pearson, former Manitoba premier Duff Roblin, and long-time Conservative strategist Dalton Camp. Everyone seemed interested.

Except Trudeau.

It isn’t widely known, but in 1980 Rohmer published a book of poetry under a pseudonym. This was eight years after he chaired the Royal Commission on Book Publishing. Inside the jacket, with haughty pride, it said: “published without the assistance of the Canada Council.” That in a nutshell sums up Rohmer because the man always did things his way. Much like Frank Sinatra in that regard. Hmm. Did those two guys ever meet?

I wonder.

In the fall of 2022 I had the privilege to travel to Chișinău, Moldova to help document the work of a group of churches supporting Ukrainian refugees that flooded their country after Russia’s invasion. Moldova was already one of the poorest countries in Europe and at one point early in the war nearly one in six people in the country was a refugee.

It was beautiful to see charity in action, even as Moldovans feared they were next on Putin’s hit list. But I also got a picture of the longer-term economic malaise facing much of the country.

Throughout the trip, I often saw nice new cars—Mercedes, Jaguars, BMWs, and the like—sitting outside of homes or apartments that were on the edge of collapse.

When I asked my host why this was the case, he said: “No one invests in anything they can’t take with them.” The threat of political instability is woven deep into the national consciousness.

That same Moldovan host told me that his elderly relative has been assigned five nationalities despite living in the same house his entire life—the political situation of Eastern Europe is so fraught that the name on the front of his passport had to change every couple of decades since he was born.

Moldova’s economic malaise is based in part on a spiritual malaise, a deep-seated hopelessness and a lack of trust in government and political processes. There are deep wounds from a traumatic history that need to be overcome before Moldova will be more productive, less corrupt, and healthier as a whole.

I believe Canada, admittedly to a lesser degree, is beginning to suffer from a similarly crippling crisis of confidence.

At the base of the many challenges we face is a growing disbelief that Canada, as a nation, is a valuable project. If nearly seven in 10 young Canadians believe Canada is broken, why would they even attempt to build lives here? It seems obvious that Canada will not build enough homes to get out of the housing crisis if few people feel that Canada is a particularly worthwhile or stable place to live.

In the past few years Canadians have endured:

• Our federal government unjustifiably using emergency measures to suppress political dissent, marking a decline in the rule of law.
• Credible reports of treasonous behaviour by members of Parliament as our democracy is undermined by foreign actors.
• Seeming endless ethical scandals from senior members of government (like Minister Sajjan’s recently revealed failures in Afghanistan).
• Disgrace and chastisement on the world stage for our pretension to lecture other countries on progressive social issues without substantially contributing to global security.
• Once venerated Canadians like Sir John A. Macdonald and Henry Dundas are in the historical doghouse with thin justification and a total forgetfulness of their contributions to this country.
• And an economy severely damaged by contradictory and counterproductive environmental measures that stifle natural resource development—our most productive sector.

Canadians are feeling betrayed—and for good reason. But justified cynicism is still unhelpful. If we are going to reinvigorate Canada, we’ve got to find a way past defeatism. I think we need to start with two things: (1) We need to stop lying about our history, and (2) we need to restore civic education.

Stop lying about our history

Given the negative narratives surrounding Sir John A. Macdonald, I bet many Canadians would be shocked by the inclusiveness and tolerance characteristic of his speeches. “I never asked the question, and never will ask, what a man’s religion, race, or ancestry may be,” Macdonald famously said. Or as Peter MacKay wrote, “Macdonald was a man ahead of his time on subjects of diversity, equality and justice for all.”

Contrary to his tarnished reputation, Macdonald’s desire to look past national origin and differences of religion in public life was built into the DNA of Canada and has been a part of what made this a great nation. Macdonald had very real faults, but a balanced assessment of Macdonald’s political vision leaves much to be admired and emulated.

Today, Canada’s first prime minister is known almost exclusively for his faults and his failures with Indigenous Peoples. Postcolonial activists have successfully reframed and revised our history in the national imagination. For example, 60 percent of Canadians still believe the media’s precipitated narrative that there was a “mass grave” found on the residential school grounds in Kamloops, B.C.—despite the fact that even the chief who initially announced finding human remains with radar technology backed away from the claim.

If we believe the revisionist version of our history, that Canada is a racist and genocidal state, we won’t invest in our country. If we become familiar with a truer, fuller Canadian history we might find something worth preserving and a national identity worth living into.

Restore civic education

As Aaron Wudrick, David Livingstone, and David Tabachnick recently laid out in an article for The Hub, liberal education has long been in decline in Canada with the inevitable result that Canadian democracy finds itself in ill-health. The author’s cite a study from Abacus data which outlines that “about four in 10 Canadian adults don’t recall learning anything in school about current events, how governments work, or their roles as citizens, and only one in 10 were taught how to discuss controversial issues.”

But more than just better outcomes in teaching students the difference between the House of Commons and the Senate or the different branches of government (as important as that is), public education in Canada needs a spiritual awakening and a redefining of its purposes away from merely pragmatic career training towards a broader vision of shaping responsible citizens.

Wudrick et al. explain that “the humanities and social sciences, which are the traditional homes for this education, have drifted from their core mandates, jeopardizing liberal democracy rather than exploring its deep philosophical roots, celebrating its strengths, and shoring up its deficiencies.” Public education desperately needs to rediscover the humanities and social sciences without the distortions of critical theory.

Then, through great historical and literary works like George Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London, Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago, or Vaclav Havel’s The Power of the Powerless students could be given glimpses of genuine authoritarianism and injustice. They could be introduced to the solemn reality that justice and democracy are desperately fragile and in need of many defenders. And they could even become grateful for what they have in Canada against the backdrop of a broken world with a mostly sad history.

In 1979, in the midst of an energy crisis that was dividing the United States, President Jimmy Carter gave his famous “malaise” speech. He said this of what truly faced the U.S.:

“It is a crisis of confidence. It is a crisis that strikes at the very heart and soul and spirit of our national will. We can see this crisis in the growing doubt about the meaning of our own lives and in the loss of a unity of purpose for our nation.”

So the U.S. stood in the late ’70s in the midst of a confidence crisis. So stands Moldova after a century (or more) of political instability. And so stands Canada.

To move forward we must first commit to rediscovering and retelling a truer version of our national history, and then we must recognize that the responsibility to uphold what is good about Canada is distributed to all of us that call this great country home.