WEYBURN - The Veteran Banner commemoration program is hoping to expand this fall. Craig Bird, president and curator of the Southeast Military Museum, spoke with City Council about the program in chambers on May 9.
Last year, Bird presented City Council with a letter outlining the banner initiative that was started in southeast Saskatchewan last year.
The goal of the program was to hang veteran banners on major arterial roads in Weyburn. The banners will have images of Canadian Forces members from the Weyburn area who perished during service to Canada, and also photos of those who served, survived and came back to the area.
The banners measure 30 by 36 inches, are double-sided, and have different themes. Last year, there were banners put up in the area of the Weyburn Royal Canadian Legion on Third Street that featured veterans from the First and Second World Wars. “We had seven communities on board last year. Estevan, Midale, Lampman, Stoughton, Carlyle, Redvers and Weyburn being the seventh,” said Bird.
“We had tremendous outreach from the public in regards to this, I think it’s important to honour our veterans, all the ones that perished during wartime, but as well as the people that continue to serve.”
Bird would like to see the program expand from the four banners that were displayed last year, to having at least eight displayed in Weyburn this year. He noted that Estevan had 22 banners displayed in their city, and felt that Weyburn could match that number.
“You have a lot of people in your community that served during the peacetime with the Canadian forces, and nobody knows who they are,” noted Bird. “A bunch of people that have come back to the communities, served on City Council ran businesses here in Weyburn, farmed, built these communities up to where they are today, and they get very little recognition, if at all, plus all our Second World War veterans are pretty much gone. There may be a scattered one or two around here, and we’re getting to the point where that generation is losing that information because it was their grandparents or great grandparents that had served. That information is being stored away.”
“So the goal of our museum was basically, to keep those memories alive to archive that information so that it doesn’t get lost.”
Bird explained that there were three levels of banner program sponsorship: individual or family donor level for $200, which purchases just the banner itself; the corporate level, which purchases the banner mounting hardware for the community (and that hardware stays in the community); and commemoration level for $500, which includes the purchase of both a banner and the hardware, and this level includes a tax receipt.
He requested for the City of Weyburn to purchase 10 mounting hardware, with the goal that the hardware could be used for other initiatives in the city.
The banners act as a visual reminder and commemorate those who served and sacrificed for Canada – from the First and Second World Wars to Afghanistan. The program will return in the summer of 2022 with banners being hung at the end of August and remaining until after Remembrance Day.
