The battalion no one wanted to see

At the start of the First World War, Black volunteers who wanted to enlist were turned away. On July 5, 1916, the army created a separate unit in Pictou, Nova Scotia: No. 2 Construction Battalion. Its headquarters later moved to Truro. More than 600 men served in it, from across Canada, the United States and the Caribbean.

In March 1917, the battalion left for Europe. It was not allowed to fight alongside white soldiers. Its members worked mainly in the Jura, in France, with the Canadian Forestry Corps: they felled and hauled timber and built railways. The battalion was disbanded in 1920, without recognition.

More than a century later, on July 9, 2022, in Truro, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau offered the government's official apology to the descendants. He acknowledged the anti-Black and systemic racism that denied these men dignity, in life as in death. A few weeks earlier, on June 1, 2022, the Armed Forces had awarded the unit the battle honour "France and Flanders, 1917-18."

Repair, here, begins with looking. Giving back their place in history to men who had been left in the shadows is telling their descendants: you are part of the "us," and always have been.