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Operation Veteran comes to Selwyn House
On a Remembrance Day week that marked the 100th anniversary of the Battle of Vimy Ridge, Dr. Paul Kavanagh, a Laval periodontist who founded an organization called Operation Veteran, brought an emotional appeal on behalf of Canadian veterans to Selwyn House Senior School students.
Operation Veteran was founded in 2009 in association with the Canadian War Museum, to honour and raise awareness of veterans and their sacrifices. In recent years, Dr. Kavanagh has introduced a number of new programs that advance the organization’s goal.
He told a moving story about an aged veteran visiting the Museum who was unable to pay for his lunch. Thanks to contributions from private donors and schools across Canada, any veteran visiting the Museum can now receive a complimentary meal in the cafeteria. Since the creation of Operation Veteran, more than 12,300 such meals have been served.
Dr. Kavanagh worked with the Museum to establish an initiative called Supply Line, where teachers across Canada can arrange to borrow a First World War Discovery Box, which contains authentic and reproduction items such as barbed wire and steel helmets, as well as lesson plans and background documents for teachers. The boxes are intended to promote active classroom learning and discussion, and give students in Grades 4 to 12 a tangible way to imagine what life was like for Canadians during the First World War.
Through high-school walkathons, Dr. Kavanagh has also raised $120,000 for his Women In War program, which honours the efforts of women on the home front. During the last half of World War I, half the food and one-quarter of the Allied munitions in Europe were supplied by Canadians, many of them women, he pointed out.
Dr. Kavanagh presented the school with a framed, museum-quality reproduction of “The Vimy Hymn,” a poem composed by a chaplain for a special mass held on the battlefield at the end of the famous battle.
On a more personal note, Dr. Kavanagh also presented Selwyn House Headmaster Hal Hannaford with a framed copy of the inscription from the grave of Alfred C. Hannaford, the headmaster’s great-uncle, who served with the Canadian Grenadier Guards and died on the battlefield in France on October 3, 1918.
