Local Indigenous veteran ‘brought to tears’ after desecration of Aboriginal War Monument

The city's monuments were among the collateral damage of a weekend overtaken by protesters of a truck convoy whose main objective has been to demonstrate against Canada's COVID-19 public health mandates.

Local veteran Tim O'Loan who is member of Aboriginal Veterans Association and First Nations Veterans Council says he was sickened to hear that protesters desecrated the monuments, which included urinating on the monuments.

“I was going on to the Twitter feed and was shocked and horrified to hear about some of the things that were done to both the National War Monument and the Aboriginals Veterans' Monument,” O'Loan explained to The Sam Laprade Show on Monday, January 31.

“I was sickened and horrified that people had been urinating on both those sites and I just had enough and decided to go down and clean those places up.”

O'Loan explained this is something that should never happen and when he posted on social media that he was going down to see the monuments, many veterans reached out to him, expressing that the war monuments are a sacred space.

He said one of the things that were most concerning was those that were paying no mind to what was happening.

“What was particularly horrifying for me was other people just stood and watched — those who did nothing are complicit as well.”

He said demonstrators were sitting around and on the monuments when he went there yesterday.

O'Loan hopes that the memorial sites can be treated with respect. “We need to remind ourselves that these are sacred spaces that we should not desecrate,” he said. “Let's just bring back the level of humanity and empathy and respect that those spaces deserve.”