The Royal Canadian Legion Branch 286 in Etobicoke is hosting a brand new museum that focuses on the lesser known contributors to Canada’s war effort.
Opening on Nov. 11 at the Irwin Avenue building in the Albion Road-Elmhurst Drive area, the small museum will display more than 700 artifacts from as early as the War of 1812 to deployments in Afghanistan. It will feature several unique displays that include dog tags from the first female doctor in the Canadian Army.
The museum is the passion project of its curator and manager, Francesco Bori.
“The mission is to make sure that everyone who contributed to any of the conflicts gets the exposure and the acknowledgment and the respect that they need,” Bori said.
“We see some of these contributions missing in museums,” he said. “That is where I think our niche is. And luckily we found several stories and subjects that we can actually tackle that way.”
Bori highlighted the significance of Karen Hermiston, Canada’s first and only female war photographer during the Second World War. He said the importance of war photographers cannot be overstated as the images they captured define how history is shared today.
The museum also features a wall dedicated to Indigenous, Black and LGBTQ+ veterans.
A special diorama handcrafted by volunteers will also be shown at the museum.
“In this diorama we try to tell two different parts of World War Two, roughly from the beginning of the war, Dunkirk and towards the end of the Second World War,” Bori said.
“We just felt that both stories are very important for different reasons, and obviously we haven’t got space to place two different separate dioramas,” he said.
Handcrafting is at the centre of the museum.
Bori said all of the work was done out of pocket, without a budget. Volunteer work built the displays from scratch. The miniatures used in the displays were also homemade.
“The miniatures were created and mostly handmade by former members of the Legion in the past 20 or 30 years in excellent pristine condition,” he said. “They themselves tell stories from the air, from the land and from the sea.”
Bori began assembling what would become the LEM in 2021. He started with a vision for reorganizing the mountain of artifacts and displays in the legion building. With the approval of the legion president, Ron Gregory, a vacant room in the legion building was set aside to house the display.
“I inherited a chaotic partial collection. Some of our displays already existed,” he said. “So in order to tell some of these stories, I had to dig up stuff, you know, independently.”
The goal of the museum is to educate the local community and all visitors about the contributions of lesser known actors in the Canadian theatres of war. Canadian history has neglected to acknowledge the contributions of women, Indigenous peoples and the LGBTQ+ community.
He said all the credit goes to his dedicated team of volunteers who worked in their free time to assemble the display for the community.
“I undertook this Leviathan project as a labor of love,” he said. “I’ve obviously incurred some expenses myself, but we are literally a bunch, including myself, of volunteers doing this because we want to tell a nice story.”
The Legion Experience Museum opens its doors on Remembrance Day.