As part of Flashback February, the Gazette and Base31 hosted an evening at what used to be the No.31 Bombing and Gunnery School. The event was to remember the war years, when it was in its prime. These are amply documented in a series of Gazette bound volumes, an archive covering 1939-45.

I was surprised at how many residents — 60 or 70 — braved a cold night in a winter that refuses to end. February is supposed to be the darkest, quietest, lowest month of the “off season,” but with so many deciding not to travel, and with such attractions as Flashback February, I wonder if the month might be considered “County season.”  

“I winter, I thrive” might become a proud catchphrase.

We sat in the original Lecture Hall, and relived dozens of reports from the Gazette as well as from a Camp Picton original publication called Hill Topics, a mimeographed newsletter put out by the airmen themselves. 

The stories covered all matters of importance in those fraught times. They opened with news of “the Missing Mayor.” — Mayor McKibben was traveling in Scotland in September 1939, and “disappeared” — lost contact — while trying to find a ship that could take him home. The outbreak of WWII rendered this suddenly difficult; ships were being blown to smithereens by the Germans while crossing the Atlantic. 

Other stories documented first the funding for, and then the building of, Camp Picton, and the annual sales of Victory Bonds — the County excelled at raising money then as it does now. Column after column summoned local young women to dances with the denizens of the Royal Air Force Training School. These pilots in training penned “Picton restaurant reviews” in their spare time, warning about cracked tea mugs, steep prices, or, in one instance, too many cats lurking in the corners. The Gazettes of the later war years feature letters from a young Farley Mowat, stationed in Italy, writing home to his parents. Already he was a brilliant, acerbic, vivid writer. 

It was thrilling, if not a bit surreal, to be sitting in the exact structure as built in 1940 to hear the reports as if in real time. I believe Camp Picton is the only one still intact of the eighty-three schools built across Canada as part of British Commonwealth Air Training Plan.

That Air Training Program was considered “Canada’s Greatest Enterprise,” but who remembers it now? The men came from all parts of the Empire, but the Royal Canadian Air Force was in charge of the training, and four out of five recruits were Canadians. As Chubby Powers, Minister of National Defence for Air, said in a speech to Parliament. “The Dominion of Canada is the mainstay and right arm of Great Britain. The British Commonwealth Air Training Program is our country’s outstanding effort to help Britain hold out at home and later strike back so hard that the war is certain to be won.” Fifty thousand young Canadians enlisted in the RCAF. 

Today that story seems to be long forgotten.

If history does not repeat itself, it certainly rhymes. Talk of Canada’s “greatest enterprise” echoes loudly today as we struggle to find a role and a contribution in a world going off kilter. In the new Defence Industrial Strategy, our government has made a commitment to increase defense spending to 2 percent of GDP by next year and then grow it to 5 percent. Will our “great contribution” now be a nuclear-powered fleet of ice-breakers to help open the north? Or perhaps another training school for pilots of cold-temperature drones to be employed in Arctic surveillance?

From a values point of view, though, Prime Minister Carney has already made a giant contribution. In his much-heralded Davos speech, the PM articulated a framework for a new world order. His vision of a rebalanced world gives us a way to understand how Canada can play a great role as a leading middle power. “With a rupture in the world order, [and] the end of a nice story … [we] have the capacity to build a new order.” 

Canada, Carney argues, “was among the first to hear the wake-up call,” and shift to “values-based realism,” to be both “principled and pragmatic.” To pursue “variable geometry”– “different coalitions for different issues based on common values and interests.”  

“Canada has what the world wants,” Carney said. 

“A pluralistic society that works.… a public square that is loud, diverse and free. We have the capacity to stop pretending, to name reality, to build our strength at home, and to act together.”

Canada has become both a model of a functioning liberal democracy and a proxy for other countries trying to adjust to the new world order. 

We are a poster country: a steadfast partner who believes in a values-based world, and, occasionally, high sticks the Americans.

If the balancing act of a middle power turns out to be our “great contribution,” perhaps within that structure, a small well-functioning township like our Prince Edward may become a microcosm of that best performing model. We have the constituent elements and strengths – effective local governance, strong community institutions, multiple media outlets, engaged citizenry, commitment to values of welcome and diversity. Not just tolerance, but generosity.

Is change best understood by staying in the same place? Canada’s stability, our reliability as partners, our tolerance may turn out to be Canada’s greatest contribution — our Superpower — in these deeply troubled times. 

Steady on. Hold the course.