Freedom endures only if memory does.

That truth lives on every Canadian campus, in the stone towers and bronze plaques, in the November ceremonies and in the lessons that remind us of what it cost to build this country.

More than a century ago, countless students left their classrooms for battlefields overseas. At the University of Toronto, 628 names are engraved on Soldiers’ Tower — members of the university who died while on active service in the First World War, with 557 more remembered there from the Second World War. In Ottawa, the University of Ottawa’s Honour Roll records that more than 1,000 graduates served in the war and more than 50 never came home. Each name marks a future surrendered so that others might have one.

They believed in the promise of Canada, that a nation built

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