Remembrance Day ceremony in Halifax held to honour those who served

About a thousand people stood solemnly in the rain at a cenotaph in downtown Halifax on Monday morning to honour and remember those who have served. 

CBC livestreamed the Remembrance Day ceremony at Grand Parade.  

Mi'kmaw Elder Marlene Companion performed a smudging ceremony, a first for the event.

The national anthem was followed by a bugler playing the Last Post before a moment of silence at 11 a.m. Hosted by the Nova Scotia and Nunavut Command of the Royal Canadian Legion, people representing military groups, government and local organizations laid wreaths, as did members of the public.

Jean Noel laid a wreath in memory of her brother, Master Cpl. Kirk Bradley Noel, this year's Memorial Cross recipient. He served in the navy before becoming a search and rescue technician. 

Noel was killed in 2006 during a training exercise when a Cormorant helicopter crashed off Canso, N.S.

Brian Carter, a retired RCMP officer, never misses a Remembrance Day ceremony. As a child, his father took him each year, but he said it wasn't until he served overseas himself that he fully understood the importance of the day. 

Now he reflects on his four uncles who served in the Second World War and people he served with on international missions, including nearly eight months in Haiti. 

"Remembrance Days are all important because we're still at war around the world. It never goes away and we need to understand that we have to try and stop that," Carter said. 

"We have to remember because those of us who served dislike war more than anyone else, because we're the ones that are there."

It was Eduardo Schlosser's first Remembrance Day ceremony in Canada, having moved to Nova Scotia from Brazil earlier this year. He served in the Brazilian army and said it's important to learn about a country's history and the contributions Canadians have made. 

"I respect this history and what they did for the country," he said. "I know that it's hard to be in the army, to defend a country. So I think it's very important to be here, even if it's not good weather — to remember all of them." 

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This year's ceremony marked a return to downtown Halifax after the 2023 event was moved to Sullivans Pond in Dartmouth while Grand Parade was a designated encampment site amid the city's housing crisis. The municipality closed the site to tents last winter. 

The Royal Canadian Legion maintains a list of ceremonies across the province. There were nine in the Halifax Regional Municipality, eight in Cape Breton and more than a dozen in communities across the mainland. 

It's been 80 years since D-Day, which marked the beginning of the end of the Second World War. It has also been 10 years since the end of the mission in Afghanistan, 60 years of peacekeeping operations in Cyprus, and the 100th anniversary of the Royal Canadian Air Force.