One of the reasons I write...

...is to inform Canadians about their most dedicated and trusted servants: the men and women of the Canadian Forces.

And one of the reasons I despair, and fear I'm screaming into the void, is stories like this one, which show just how little we Canadians value our history, especially the martial sort:

Canadians are not only forgetting their history, they don't give their own country enough credit for the role it has played on the international stage, an Ipsos Reid poll suggests.

The survey, conducted for the Dominion Institute and published to coincide with the theatrical release of the movie Passchendaele, quizzed Canadians on their knowledge of that First World War battle and the war in general.

It found that only 37 per cent had even heard of the Battle of Passchendaele -- also called the Third Battle of Ypres; that only 16 per cent of respondents could identify Canada's enemies in that war as Austria and Germany; and that nearly 40 per cent think the U.S. entered the war before Canada.

"Not only do a large percentage of our people have a bad knowledge of our history, it's getting worse, particularly among young people," said Marc Chalifoux, executive director of the Dominion Institute, a charitable organization that promotes Canadian history as a way of building a more active citizenry.

This is how Jack Layton and his cronies get away with droning on about peacekeeping as if it were the raison d'etre of the CF; this is how the CF continues to be chronically undervalued during times of peace, leading to the 'feast or famine' cycles that drain so much from such an important organization; this is how we lose sight of the fact that we've drawn together to accomplish great things in the past, and can again in the future; this is how we underestimate our ability to affect things in the world outside our borders today, by forgetting how we've punched well above our weight in days gone by.

Canada is more than lines on a map. And if we're to reach the fantastic potential that has characterized this nation from its earliest beginnings, we the people who make up Canada need to have a better sense of what this country has been, in order to better plot a course for where we're going.