The Highway of Heros

It is so wonderful to see the respect that is being shown. Cub scouts in uniforms, classes of children, veterans, police, fire, EMS, everyday people. They are pulling off to the side of the highway, getting out of their cars and paying respect, simply because that is what is done.

The route today is the 416 (Ottawa) to the 401 then at Brock Road, heading up to the 407 and then to the QEW and the Red Hill Parkway to King Street in Hamilton, where the funeral home is located.

They are not taking the entire 401 to the 427 and then the QEW due to it being a Friday and all the traffic that there is in the GTA area.

There was a simple ceremony to re-open the Grave of the Unknown Soldier, with PM Harper in attendance and two new guards being installed. This was a very spontaneous ceremony, (meaning not advertised) and the amount of people there was amazing.

Every single soldier that was killed since the beginning of the war in the Afgan region, has travelled down this highway from the Trenton Airforce base.

For those who are unfamiliar with 'The Highway of Heroes', the Highway of Heroes, which has frequently seen the repatriation of soldiers killed in Afghanistan, is the stretch of Ontario’s Highway 401 between Canadian Forces Base Trenton and Toronto.

On August 24, 2007, the MTO announced that the stretch of Highway 401 between Glen Miller Road in Trenton and the intersection of the Don Valley Parkway and Highway 404 in Toronto would bear the additional name Highway of Heroes (French: Autoroute des héros), in honour of Canadian soldiers who have died, though Highway 401 in its entirety remains designated as the Macdonald–Cartier Freeway. This length of the highway is often travelled by a convoy of vehicles carrying a fallen soldier's body, with his or her family, from CFB Trenton to the coroner's office at the Centre for Forensic Sciences in Toronto. Since 2002, when the first fallen Canadian soldiers were repatriated from Afghanistan, crowds have lined the overpasses to pay their respects as convoys pass.

The origin of the name can be traced to a June 23, 2007 article in the Toronto Sun by columnist Joe Warmington, in which he interviewed Northumberland photographer Pete Fisher. Fisher, along with Bob Jenkins, an emergency dispatcher, were responsible for organizing the first bridge salutes following the loss of four soldiers on April 18, 2002. Warmington described the gathering of crowds on overpasses to welcome fallen soldiers as a "highway of heroes phenomena". This led a Crahame Township volunteer firefighter to contact Fisher on July 10 about starting a petition, leading Fisher to publish an article which was posted to the Northumberland Today website. The online article eventually caught the attention of London resident Jay Forbes. Forbes began a petition, which received over 20,000 signatures before being brought to the Minister of Transportation on August 22. Following the announcement on August 24, the provincial government and MTO set out to design new signs. The signs were erected and unveiled on September 7, and include a smaller reassurance marker (shield), as well as a larger billboard version.

This is a very unique "Made in Canada" way of honouring our fallen soldiers.

Could you imagine the images that could have been shown if every single American soldier was honoured, from their deployment overseas?

I think that all of the bodies do 'come home' at Andrews Air Base.  I have read that the American government has a policy of making repatriation private, and not public.  It would have been very expensive to have this type of repatriation for every single soldier that was flown home.

Canada has a population of approx. 35 million people, most compare the pop of Canada to the pop of California. 

It is a very sobering procession.  I have attended a few repatriation processionals and each one is very difficult to watch.