Legion halls close across country as membership dwindles
Tamsin McMahon
Nov 10, 2011
The annual Nov. 11 parade down to the cenotaph Friday will be the last Remembrance Day for the Royal Canadian Legion in Kimberley, B.C.
After years of declining enrollment and mounting costs, it shut its canteen last year. The hall was sold off in February. By September, unable to muster more than a few volunteers interested in organizing a picnic, members voted to surrender its charter.
The annual poppy fund will be put into a trust for local veterans. The wartime memorabilia that has lined the legion’s walls will be donated to a nearby heritage museum, closing the doors on an institution that had served the city’s military community since 1926.
“It’s just sad to see it get to this point,” said legion president Mike Yanosik, who for a time ran the organization out of his home to keep it alive.
“But it was just too much of a struggle to try and keep it operating. If there were more volunteers, or our members were prepared to make some commitments — and maybe if they were younger — we might have been able to keep it going. But it just got to the point where it was not cost effective and nobody wanted to do the work.”
The fate of the Kimberley branch is part of a larger crisis facing legions across Canada who are grappling with steadily declining membership as veterans of the Second World War and the Korean War die off, while younger veterans opt not to join.
At least 64 legions have closed their doors since 2006, while others have declared bankruptcy (Thunder Bay, Ont. Branch 113), collapsed under a mountain of debt (Kingston, Ont. branch 9), sold their halls (Saint John branch 53) or looked to lease portions of their buildings to stay afloat.
In January, a Vancouver legion plans to rent its social room to a hairdresser. Last year, the legion in Caledonia, Ont., handed its second floor to a dance company. The North Bay, Ont., legion tried to turn its building over to the city to house a provincial courthouse, but the offer was rejected.
Nationally, the legion command waded into the political area last month by calling on Prime Minister Stephen Harper to exempt Veterans Affairs from planned spending cuts.
It was a rare move for an apolitical organization that has tended to keep a low profile on policy issues. Officials said it was taking steps to reaffirm its original mission, conceived after the First World War, to advocate for veterans.
Across Canada, the organization has 326,000 members, down from the 600,000 it boasted during the 1960s. Of the 60,000 people who dropped from the list since 2006, more than half were veterans who had died.
Younger veterans say they prefer keeping in touch with fellow soldiers over Facebook and email to hanging out at legion halls.
“Out of 150 friends on Facebook, half of them are from the military,” said Marc D’Astous, a retired infantryman who served in Afghanistan and now runs an Outward Bound program for veterans in the Alberta Rockies with legion funding.
“We’re still connected. We’re just not meeting up at a building, that’s all.”
“The image most of us have of the legion is Nov. 11, and that it’s a bar and that it’s an organization for older veterans,” he added.
Korean war veteran Donald Doan sits in the Windsor legion, which is trying to raise $100,000 for maintenance costs.
Dax Melmer for National Post
“It’s a tough battle for the legion to reinvent its image and say we cared then and we care now.”
It has been a challenge to lure the next generation of veterans, particularly those who fought during Canada’s decade-long mission in Afghanistan, said Dennis Holmes, president of a Windsor, Ont., branch that is trying to raise $100,000 for renovations after members narrowly voted against selling the building in August. Its membership has plunged from 2,300 a decade ago to 700 today.
Mr. Holmes said the legion tried to participate in a Canada-wide welcome home dinner for soldiers returning from Afghanistan in August, but couldn’t track down enough service members to invite.
“I don’t think most of the younger guys realize that the legion is open to them,” he said. “We’re not the old folks drinking place as we used to be.”
At issue for many younger veterans is the legion’s shift from military members toward civilian members to help recruit new volunteers. The legion has offered associate membership to veterans’ relatives for years, and in 1998 allowed the general public to join.
Of the nearly 330,000 legion members, fewer than 90,000 have served in the military. Among the 22,000 new members, just 4,700 have military experience.
A crowd of cribbage players at the Royal Canadian Legion Branch 255 in Windsor.
Dax Melmer for National Post
At the Kimberley legion (average age: 73), just 39 of its remaining 93 members were ex-servicemen and only three were active members of the military. The shift from a veterans’ club to a community organization largely populated by seniors is alienating many young soldiers.
“The legion is full of civilians right now, I hate to say it,” said Shaun Arntsen, a retired Afghanistan veteran, now working in the oil and gas industry near Canmore, Alta.
He went to a local legion after returning from Afghanistan, hoping to find support among his colleagues, even aging veterans of the Second World War.
“I walked into the legion and not a single person there had served in the military and here I am thinking, why do we have this place? For cheap booze, a meat draw and canasta tickets? You guys have got to get up to speed. Get a Facebook page. Get a social networking site.”
That’s essentially what the legion hopes to do, said Brad White, the legion’s dominion secretary. It is working to set up a “virtual branch,” open only to military members, that would act as a social networking site for ex-soldiers to connect with their units. It hopes to have it running by next summer.
The legion is encouraging branches to sell off their old buildings and downsize to something more sustainable, Mr. White said. It’s also started a committee to plan for the organization’s future, recognizing younger veterans want things like outdoor activities and mobile apps, not dance halls and watering holes.
“The old, sitting around a bar, I think that’s been gone for a long time now,” he said.
National Post
Email: tmcmahon@nationalpost.com
